Calay News
Post-mortem insemination is a technique in which semen is extracted from a deceased man to fertilize the egg of a living woman. Angela Ferreira, after the death of her husband in 2019, led a movement to legalize this technique in Portugal and finally succeeded. Now, she has announced on her Instagram profile that she is pregnant thanks to post-mortem insemination with her husband’s sperm.
Ferreira fought for this technique in Portugal after her husband expressed in writing his desire for his wife to have a child with his genetic material. Although this technique was not legal in Portugal, Ferreira’s story was shared in a documentary series that mobilized more than 100,000 people to sign a petition and eventually legalized post-mortem insemination in the country.
The new regulation allows a woman to be inseminated with the genetic material of her deceased partner “in cases of expressly consented parental projects” and within six months to three years after death. If the process culminates in the birth of a baby, the latter is considered the child of the deceased at the legal level. Portugal has thus become one of the few European countries that allows this technique, since it is prohibited in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and France, although it is legal in England, the Netherlands, and Greece.
It should be noted that the world of inseminations is very complex and curious, as has recently been discovered in the Netherlands, where a gynecologist used his own sperm to inseminate a score of women without their consent and has had a total of 41 children. In Spain, there has also been a struggle to legalize post-mortem insemination, as in the case of a woman who wanted to inseminate herself with the sperm of her deceased husband.
