Eggs’ father an Australian

Press, 22 June 1984, Page 6

Eggs’ father an Australian

NZPA-Reuter Melbourne An Australian donor had fertilised two test-tube ova from a Los Angeles woman killed in an air crash, Victorian officials said in Melbourne yesterday. The revelation fuels legal and ethical debate over what to do with the embryos as a result of the death last year of Elsa Rios, and her husband, Mario, in Chile.

Mrs Rios had supplied the eggs but they had not been fertilised by her husband, said Jim Keenan, the Victorian Attorney-General. They had been fertilised in a test-tube by sperm from an Australian donor, whose identity would be kept secret, he said.

Laura Horwitch, the Rios family lawyer in Los Angeles, said that Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Medical Centre had told her that the sperm had been donated. The information had been passed on by Professor Carl Wood, head of the centre’s test-tube baby programme. Professor Wood said he could not comment publicly because of medical ethics. Mr and Mrs Rios died without leaving provision in their wills for the two-day-old embryos, which are frozen in liquid nitrogen at the Melbourne clinic.

Legal questions being posed are: can the embryos have an interest in their ?USI million estate? Can

they be given to an infertile woman? Or should they be allowed to die?

The embryos will stay frozen until legislation covering legal loopholes in the test-tube baby programme is passed by the South Australia state Parliament at the end of the year.

Offers had poured in from around the world from women seeking to be the surrogate mothers for the “orphaned” embryos, medical sources said. The Catholic Church in Australia and the Right to Life organisation, which lobbies against abortion, have urged that one of the offers should be taken up. South Australian Govern-

ment legal authorities say that the embryos have no legal status, and if implanted in another woman would become her children with no claim on the Rios’s estate.

Ms Horwitch has asked a Los Angeles Superior Court to determine the legal status of the embryos in relation to the Rios estate, a novel question for legal authorities.

But the embryos’ fate may already have been touched on by Professor Wood, who has said that the chances of their surviving the thawing process was small because the freezing procedure used in 1981 was not as good as present-day methods.