Mother loses court battle to use dead daughter's frozen eggs

A mother has lost a UK High Court battle in her bid to use her dead daughter’s frozen eggs to give birth to her own grandchild.

A judge was told the cancer victim daughter, who can only be referred to as “A” for legal reasons, was desperate to have children and asked her mother to “carry my babies”.

The unnamed 59-year-old mother and her husband, 58, who were referred to as “Mr and Mrs M”, challenged an independent regulator’s refusal to allow them to take the eggs of their “much-loved and only child” to a US fertility treatment clinic to be used with donor sperm.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) said the eggs could not be released from storage in London because A did not give her full written consent before she died at the age of 28 in June 2011.

Mr Justice Ouseley, sitting in London, was told A would have been ``devastated'' if she had known her eggs could not be used.

But the judge ruled the HFEA had been entitled to find the daughter had not given “the required consent”.

He declared there had been no breach of the family’s human rights.

He said: “I must dismiss this claim, though I do so conscious of the additional distress which this will bring to the claimants, whose aim has been to honour their daughter’s dying wish for something of her to live on after her untimely death.”