FREE SEMINAR: Past, passing, or to come: Rights, interests and posthumous parenthood

In 2017, the New Zealand High Court authorised the retrieval of sperm from a dead man. This followed a request from his partner, but was done in the absence of express consent from the deceased himself. The sperm is currently being stored, but at present, New Zealand law does not allow it to be used. Meanwhile, new guidelines on posthumous reproduction are expected to be published by the Advisory Committee (ACART) in the near future.
 
The prospect of posthumous reproduction raises a number of legal and ethical issues, ranging from bodily integrity to inheritance rights. In this talk, though, I will focus on the rights, interests and status of two classes of beings that are closely affected by these sorts of decisions: those who are deceased, and those potential future children whose very existence is contingent on the content of such decisions. 
 
In addition to being a long-standing focus of philosophical attention, the question of whether rights or interests can meaningfully be attributed to the deceased has become a matter of renewed focus in New Zealand, where the matter of posthumous reputational damage has been considered in our Supreme Court from the perspective of Mori tikanga (customary law). 
 
Do the dead retain interests or rights? Can future children be harmed by the very fact of being born? And how should the law respond when confronted with what philosopher David Heyd has called “intractable normative problems”?

Professor Colin Gavaghan is the Director of the New Zealand Law Foundation Centre for Law and Policy in Emerging Technologies.

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