Can You Be a Sperm Donor If You’re Dead?

• It has been possible for a few decades to obtain a man’s sperm after his death and use it to fertilize an egg.
• Today, requests for post-mortem sperm retrieval (PMSR) are growing, yet the United States has no guidelines governing the retrieval of sperm from deceased men, said Dr. Larry Lipshultz, a urologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.
• The procedure, can be done in one of a few ways: removing the sperm with a needle, stimulating the corpse into ejaculation, or removing a larger section of the reproductive system, and either taking the sperm from there or preserving the entire piece of tissue for later use.
• Research shows that the extraction and freezing of a man's sperm sample should be done within 24-36 hours of death. However, some case studies have shown that sperm can survive beyond this under the right conditions.
• But the institutions trying to draft a protocol for these situations face a number of ethical concerns.