Widower in battle to have dead wife’s baby with surrogate

A WIDOWER has launched a High Court battle after being forbidden his surrogate child because his dead wife gave no written permission to use their embryo.

Ted Jennings, 38, an investment manager from Highbury, north London, used his sperm to create multiple embryos with Fern-marie Choya during several rounds of IVF treatments between 2013 and 2018.

Ms Choya died from complications during pregnancy in 2019.

Mr Jennings has now asked a judge to rule that it would be lawful for him to place the last embryo, which was created in 2018 and has been stored, “with a surrogate mother”.

But lawyers for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said the application should be dismissed because Ms Choya had not provided written consent.

Mr Jennings’s case comes in the wake of similar tragic hearings involving grieving partners before the High Court. Posthumous conception law is a sensitive area. As a general rule, it can only occur when there is written, signed consent to post-death storage.

Exceptions to this rule are treated on a case-by-case basis by judges.

Jenni Richards QC, who led Mr Jennings’s legal team, told Mrs Justice Theis that Mr Jennings and Ms Choya, who both moved to Britain from Trinidad, had married in 2009.

She said they had struggled to conceive naturally and underwent three cycles of IVF treatment in 2013 and 2014 without success. Mrs Justice Theis said she aimed to deliver a written ruling in the near future.