How science has altered the parable of ‘Project Baby’

Advances in medical science and the guardian angel of justice would have ensured Victoria Chege had a child and the lineage of her departed partner, George Kamau, was perpetuated.

But time can be cruel. A fortnight ago, a Manhattan judge in the US gave Ms Chege, a Kenyan, the go ahead to harvest sperms from her late husband’s body. But it was 30 hours late. A dead man’s sperm must be harvested within 36 hours after death.

The widow’s petition said that the Sperm and Embryo Bank of New Jersey, which is the organisation set to perform the extraction, told Chege it would need a court order in order to carry out the procedure.

Welcome to the future as science and bioethics redefine motherhood and fatherhood.

Had the court granted Ms Chege’s wishes within 36 hours after her husband’s suicide, the sperm would have been planted in the womb of Mr Kamau’s mistress and family friend Etaghua Asefa, in whose apartment the deceased took his life, meaning Ms Asefa would have been the surrogate mother. It’s not clear why a surrogate was needed.

It doesn’t matter

Call it unorthodox, call it realism, call it anything. It won’t matter to Ms Chege, who said she was only seeking to fulfill her partner’s desire to have an offspring.

Chege’s application was filed under a certificate of urgency. “The sperm (of the) deceased George Kamau must be harvested and frozen as soon as possible from the time of his death or it will be useless,” was her prayer to the court.

She said she needed to hold onto the sperm “so that Etaghua Asefa, family friend and appointed surrogate, may someday give birth to the child he wanted but was prevented from conceiving”. Press reports didn’t specify by whom.

Although Victoria’s case is not unique since there are numerous incidences of relatives harvesting semen from their dead kin, some people would cringe at such scenarios.

“It’s understandable that Ms Chege should want to have Kamau’s child, but it’s creepy, gross and insane to get pregnant with a dead man’s sperm,” wrote a blogger.

“Creepy, gross and insane?” We are not sure, but science has ushered in an era a different ambulance chaser. This time round it’s not the usual lawyer, but the next-of-kin rushing to accident scenes or keeping vigil by their relative’s deathbed to ensure that sperms are harvested, correctly labelled and kept by a trustworthy facility.

In the past 40 years, intensive research and development in reproductive science have revolutionised the concept of conception in the most unprecedented of ways.

The ability to extract an egg and a sperm from both parents and fuse them in a laboratory before implanting them in the womb is known as in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). Progeny thus conceived is commonly referred to as test-tube babies.

Since Louis Brown, the first test tube baby, was born in the UK in 1978, more than a million babies have been conceived through the now popular IVF.

Kenya’s first two test-tube babies were born in 2006 under the supervision of Dr Joshua Noreh. Although their mothers paid Sh300,000 for the service, the doctor was overwhelmed by requests from couples experiencing fertility problems. But not everyone was amused by this development.

Some people questioned the morality of IVF procedures. Pro-life journalist Dorothy Kweyu wrote that Christians were uncomfortable with IVF “given that sperms used in test tube technology are produced by masturbation”.

Not only that, but Ms Kweyu says IVF, which she sees as a desperate need for a child at all costs, as going against the “for better or worse” matrimonial vow. The vows based on love, she says, bind husband and wife, while children are a gift of God that may or may not come with every marriage, and expecting every woman to give birth exposes women to needless abuse.

But retired Rev Timothy Njoya sees no problem here “because alternative conception methods are just like replacing the horse with the train”. He says “men no longer care about their wives in their selfish quest to fulfil their chauvinistic and egoistic desires to propagate their seed”. Therefore, he concludes, “it’s better to use the inanimate test tube rather than using your wife as a baby making tool against her consent.”

But despite the controversy the issue generated, the advent of IVF babies has cast parenting into unfamiliar waters. After the baby has been conceived in a test tube, its parents hire the services of another woman’s womb, called a surrogate mother, to carry the pregnancy to maturity.

Women too busy to spare time for the physically and emotionally taxing nine months of pregnancy can just rent a willing womb, from where they collect the baby upon expiry of the nine months, all without experiencing the agonies of labour and child birth.

To ensure the surrogate mother surrenders the baby to the hiring couple, elaborate legal documents are signed before the embryo is inserted in the rental uterus.

But what does the child, who belatedly learns of how he was conceived, think of the mother and father who entrusted his safety to a test tube and another woman’s womb?

Surrogate motherhood is already a booming business in India, where it has given a new meaning to tourism.

With a huge population of readily available wombs for hire, wealthy couples from all over the world troop into to India, where clinics charge an average of $10,000 (Sh800,000) for a complete package that includes fertilisation, the surrogate’s fee and the delivery of the baby at a hospital.

Including the costs of flights, medical procedures and hotels, this amount is said to be roughly the fees charged by UK hospitals.

In the United States, the same services could attract up to $100,000 (Sh8 million).

The launching of a surrogate motherhood programme at Nairobi Hospital makes Kenya the second country in Africa, after South Africa, to offer formal surrogacy services in the continent.

To qualify for consideration as a surrogate mother, candidates have to pass rigorous medical tests and be under 35 years of age.

“Although a commission was formed by the Ministry of Health to establish regulatory laws on assisted reproduction, it never completed its work,” explains Dr Gichuhi Wanyoike of Nairobi Hospital. “Hence, at the moment, there are no legal frameworks governing surrogacy or sperm banks.”

Sperm harvested and frozen in tubes stored in tanks of liquid nitrogen at minus 196 Celsius can be viable for up to 50 years.

However, according to the Sperm Bank of California, up to 80 per cent of the collected sperms die within 48 hours of being frozen, with the remaining portion being able to survive for decades.

This means after-death reproduction will be the order of the day in the not-too-far-away future, where men will continue fathering babies long after they are dead and buried. It’s smart science, but there is the small matter of bio-ethics.

To sustain genetically transmissible traits such as intelligence and physical appearances through generations, scientists might resort to selective harvesting and storage of sperm and ovaries from social achievers for future reproduction.

It is happening in the United States, where ovaries from women in Ivy League universities go for as much as $50,000 (Sh4 million), while the seed from their male counterparts fetches $1,200 (Sh1 million).

With such kinds of programmes in place, the population trends might take an unorthodox twist as governments selectively phase out the intellectually and physically unproductive sections of the population.

A hint of this technology’s potential was in play last year in North Carolina, when Chris Bibliss fathered a healthy baby girl using sperm samples collected from his body 22 years ago through a process called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), in which a single sperm is injected directly into an egg.

Just like in a blood bank, most sperm donors have no control over who utilises their seed to propagate life during their lifetime or long after they are dead. This has not only raised the moral question of whether it is right or wrong, but it has also kicked a debate over who owns a donor’s sperms. Traditionally, the last question was a simple one since the individual had the final say on which female to make babies with, but with the burgeoning reproductive technology, the answer is no longer simple.

Apart from threatening to disrupt one of the core functions of the institution of marriage, moralists have argue that using sperms from unknown donors is the new form of promiscuity.

There are also legal implications when, say, a son conceived several decades after the death of his father lays a claim on his estate.

“As long as you can trace and prove parentage, time cannot affect inheritance claims,” explains Ezekiel Oira, a property lawyer.

“But in Kenya,” he says, “we are yet to create laws to cater for such a situation. If it arises, we would have to use examples from other legal jurisdictions around the world”.

Controversy aside, sperm banking technology has its brighter side. The process has made it possible for soldiers to ensure that their family lineage is continued in case they die in action.

US soldiers leaving for Iraq and Afghanistan are leaving their seed in sperm banks just in case they never make it back home alive — or in case they become sterile during combat. But female soldiers do not have the same option as men. While freezing sperm is an easy process that costs a few hundred dollars, the chances of success in ovary freezing procedures are extremely slim.

However, there are many unanswered questions on this subject. Who should, for instance, have the access to the sperms, the number of children to be legally created from the deposits and how long the seed should remain in storage?

“Although scientific advancement is always a gift from God man should always be careful and wary of those discoveries that might lead him away from the will of God,” says Rev John Gobanga, the overseer at Infinite Fellowship Ministries, Nairobi.