Who owns your sperm after you die?

I’m Glen Cohen. Welcome to TalksOnLaw. I’m a professor at Harvard Law School and my specialty is the law and ethics relating to medicine. Now we’re going to talk about frozen sperm and what happens to sperm after you die. So you might freeze sperm because you’re getting a medical treatment or because you’re reaching the end of your fertility period as a man, you’re undergoing a cancer treatment, for example, and you’re worried about losing your fertility, your sperm won’t be good anymore. But let’s say you unfortunately pass away. Can someone use your frozen sperm? Does the law allow someone to do this? Well actually, the practices vary from hospital to hospital and state by state. Typically, before a hospital will allow a sperm retrieval, they’re going to require some express or maybe very implicit form of consent – some indication from you that you wanted your partner to be able to use your sperm after you’re dead. There have also been cases about trusts. So imagine you've died, but you have some banked sperm, and someone wants to use it to produce new heirs. Can they do that? Well this has not been encountered by many courts, but the courts that have done so have been very skeptical about the idea. So again, they typically look back to the person who created the trust, their intent, and if that intent did not seem to include posthumously conceived children, they will not allow the inheritance by the posthumously conceived child. I'm Glenn Cohen. I hope you've enjoyed TalksOnLaw.