18 March 2024
The court in The Hague recently ruled in a case in which a woman wanted to use artificial reproduction after her husband's death. The problem, however, was that the Dutch clinic intended to destroy the embryos because her husband had not given written consent for postmortem use, a requirement of the Dutch Embryo Act. That this had not happened, however, was due to the fertility clinic that had failed to inform the couple of this possibility. In this article, Corrette Ploem and Merel Spaander delve into the Dutch rules governing postmortem reproduction, reflect on them and suggest how they could possibly be improved.