About the spermatozoa running aground in a boy’s sheets in the course of an erotic trial run, Beckett sighed: “Some people have all the luck.” It struck him as an ideal ending, this not-beginning. No man is safer, in Beckett’s world, than a fruitlessly wriggling sperm in the sheets.
In the Dutch Medical Journal, I recently read an article about a comparable band of sperm, this time not straggling between the sheets after a false start, but snugly lodged within two much safer locations: in, respectively, a dead and a comatose man.
Enterprising girl, you’d say, who can get anywhere near sperm thus situated, but then you underestimate our passion for procreation.
The first case involved a man who had died suddenly after his wedding night. Seven hours after his death, the widow asked the doctors to extract some sperm from the epidydimis with a syringe. The couple were known to want children.
The second case concerned a man who was irreversibly comatose. In this case too, the widow-to-be asked for sperm to be extracted. The method suggested here was not the syringe but electro-ejaculation. I know that, sexually, many roads lead to Rome (some say all roads), but this particular route of electro-ejaculation was to me a hitherto unexplored avenue. It involves the anal insertion of a sort of dildo which can emit a short burst of electric current. In this way you can steal right up behind the prostatic region and then push the button. The relevant nerves in the region are set tingling, and the current usually elicits an erection plus ejaculation. Erotically, it’s beer without alcohol, or beer without beer, really. One of the authors assured me it also works in panthers, tigers, and elephants—under anesthesia, of course.
This second couple, too, was known to want children.
First, to alleviate your technical worries, it can be done. The authors de-scribe a case in which sperm obtained from a comatose man in England was transported across the Channel to Belgium, there to be used for the artficial insemination of his wife, who in this way became the mother of two children.
Why race across the Channel with sperm?
Because in England you need the written permission of the sperm donor —even in cases of coma or death—and in Belgium you don’t. There was no freezing involved, so this lady must have obtained sperm from her comatose husband on several occasions, presumably by way of electro-ejaculation. Even though the method is not a momentous operation in medical terms, it must still be rather difficult to carry it out under stealth. It cannot very well be performed during visiting hours, on the off-chance that no one will pop in for a while.
And yet, she was not stopped. She wasn’t even apprehended after the event, to be charged with…well, yes, with what?
I am aware that ethics is a regional matter, but it mustn’t become too local, for then the Good loses its particular glow. There must be some geographical dissemination; otherwise it is not really Good. No, I am not after a Platonic Eternal Good, but you will agree with me that the situation around the obtaining and/or administering of postmortem sperm shows that we just do not know what is good here and what is not. It is forbidden in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, and Australia. In Belgium and the United States it is allowed, even in the absence of written permission. In England it is only allowed when there is permission in writing. In the Netherlands there are no rules because, like lesbianism under Queen Victoria, it has not been thought feasible.
The authors describe without comment the smuggling of the sperm to Belgium, adding with some relish that two children were born out of these expeditions. Ethically (whatever that word means here) it does not seem to bother them.
But, unwittingly serving in a long tradition of withstanding change by saying “no” first and doing the thinking later, they refused to act on the two requests which were put directly to them—the two cases cited in their article. The manner in which they went about refusing offers a neat example of how “the Good” is fabricated. This process of fabrication is Collective, Arbitrary, and Compulsory.
Collective: Instead of listening to the wish of the widow (or near-widow), they turned to the internet, an endocrinologist, a public prosecutor, and the ethics board of their own hospital. It may be safely assumed, about those who were consulted, that in their thinking on this issue they reside on a different planet from the one inhabited by the sperm-demander. The simple possibility “Let’s do what she wants” is discarded after lots of talking.
Arbitrary: The request is rejected on the grounds of arguments which are all of them refutable, but which under the pressure of the collective turn into unassailable truths. Here they are: The dead (or comatose) man had not put anything in writing. (But both were known to want children.) A woman should not be allowed to make such a decision during the phase of acute sorrow. (Since when is the mental mood of a woman a reason for or against conception?) A doctor should not assist in the conception of a child that will have no biological father. (But no problems if Dad is an alcoholic?) The father should be tested first for ailments and deficiencies likely to jeopardize the life of the child. (Since when are fathers tested before conceiving?) And finally: A doctor should not violate the integrity of the human body without direct need.
This last argument is especially funny, or cynical, when you consider the considerable violation that has to be perpetrated on a comatose body to keep it going-and with what need? Given the suggested way of thinking, a gross violation indeed, and as such a serious misdemeanor. But this is only to emphasize the arbitrariness of these considerations.
Finally the Compulsion: There is no appeal. It is announced to the widow and she is sent off without any sperm.
We merrily salute the woman dashing across the Channel with the electrogenic sperm.
Bert Keizer works as a doctor at a chronic care facility in Amsterdam and writes frequently about medical and philosophical issues. He is the author of Dancing with Mister D as well as a book about Wittgenstein.
