LOS ANGELES -- In the first known birth of its kind in the United States, a woman in California has had a baby using sperm that was extracted from her dead husband as he lay in the morgue.

Gaby Vernoff, who is in her 20s, gave birth to the girl on March 17 at an undisclosed Los Angeles hospital. She was impregnated in July with sperm that been taken from her husband, Bruce, 30 hours after he had died suddenly of an allergic reaction.Acting at the widow's request, fertility specialist Dr. Cappy Rothman led a team that went to the coroner's office, made an incision in Vernoff's scrotum and extracted the sperm from the epididymis, the long coiled tubes behind each testicle where sperm cells mature. The sperm was kept frozen for 15 months before Gaby Vernoff became pregnant.

"I just did it because the family was in so much stress and so much grief," said Rothman, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Century City Hospital.

Vernoff, who lived in Los Angeles and was in his early 30s, was said to be happily married. The couple had no children.

Rothman has performed or supervised postmortem sperm extractions about a dozen times since 1978, when he took sperm from a man killed by a car.

Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said he knows of at least 45 cases nationwide in which someone had requested that sperm be taken from a dead man. But he and Rothman said this is the first publicly acknowledged case in the United States in which a birth resulted.

Dr. Alan DeCherney, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said there is at least one international precedent: A woman in France gave birth after a conception with postmortem sperm two years ago.

It's not unusual for a man to have his sperm frozen if he knows he is ill or dying. A British woman became pregnant using sperm that had been taken from her comatose, terminally ill husband. But taking sperm from a dead man is rarer still.

Rothman said how long sperm can live in a dead man depends on the temperature of the body -- perhaps 12 hours in a warm climate, longer in a cool setting. Rothman said Vernoff was in the refrigerated morgue, and the 30-hour interval is the longest known period for removing sperm.

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Keith Lewis, a spokesman for Gaby Vernoff and her family, said Friday that they won't answer questions because they want to savor "this extremely recent, private moment," and he refused to give details of the birth.

"They are celebrating the beauty of this life that has been given to them," he said.

The case has raised questions among medical ethicists, who wonder whether such decisions are motivated by grief.

"Is it appropriate to consciously bring a child into this world with a dead father?" asked Alexander M. Capron, professor of law and medicine and co-director of the Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics at the University of Southern California.

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