When Dominique Luzuriaga Rivera gave birth to her husband’s baby in June this year, it was both unremarkable and extraordinary.
NYPD Officer Jason Rivera was only 22 when he and his partner, Wilbert Mora, were fatally shot while responding to a domestic violence call in upper Manhattan in January 2022.
Rivera was pronounced dead in Harlem Hospital, where Luzuriaga Rivera, his childhood sweetheart and wife of only a few months, arranged to have his sperm collected from his body.
Announcing the birth of their child — a son she named Wesley — Luzuriaga Rivera, 23, said, “A baby fills a place in your heart you never knew was empty.”
Wesley is the second posthumously conceived baby to be born in recent years to the widow of an NYPD officer killed in the line of duty.
In July 2017, 35-year-old Sanny Liu, wife of Detective First Grade WenJian Liu, gave birth to their daughter, Angelina, nearly two years after his death at age 32, following post-mortem sperm retrieval and in-vitro fertilization.
Within a generation, posthumous conception has gone from being criticized and condemned by ethical, medical, and religious organizations to just another way of making families.
In 1980, Dr. Cappy Rothman, a Los Angeles-based andrologist specializing in male infertility, successfully harvested viable sperm for the first time from the body of 32-year-old Robin Cranston at the request of his father, then-Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.).
“It had never been done in humans before,” Dr. Rothman tells The Post. “And the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) was not supportive.”
Robin Cranston’s sperm was frozen but ultimately never used to create a baby.
But nearly two decades later, Brandalynn Vernoff was born in California, the first live birth following posthumous conception.
Rothman had retrieved sperm from her father, Bruce Vernoff, at the request of his wife, Gaby, 30 hours after her husband’s death from an adverse drug reaction in 1995.
Rothman says an experienced physician today might perform post-mortem sperm retrieval five times a year.
“It’s not as offensive as it was,” he says, reflecting on the uproar from medical ethicists he encountered following Brandalynn’s birth.
Of the 180 cases of post-mortem sperm retrieval Rothman has been involved with, the vast majority didn’t lead to a birth.
“The purpose of doing it is to help people through the grieving period; just knowing the sperm could be preserved makes them feel better.”
While there may now be formal ASRM guidelines — the group recommends that sperm is only collected from deceased men when requests are initiated by the surviving life partner and not a parent — the conception of a child following posthumous sperm retrieval remains a legal grey area.
“There are no federal regulations on this to speak of,” says Jill Teitel, a New York City attorney in assisted reproductive technologies (ART) law. “[The] medical profession . . . dictate[s] the landscape of ART in general.”
And this hands-off approach means that the potential of fertility medicine remains limited mostly by technology rather than law.
New York State requires a court order before sperm may be extracted from a deceased man.
What’s more, parents or partners asking for the procedure must demonstrate that the deceased wanted to have a child before he died.
Still, reproductive technologies such as ART present both fresh opportunities and difficult new legal challenges for parents, doctors, and lawyers.
“We have to be really sensitive about everyone involved,” Teitel says. “Who are the stakeholders in all of this? Where are their voices? There are no voices for that child.”
Children born following posthumous conception are likely to be cared for well because their parents are so invested in creating them, she adds.
“Should we ban it? No, I don’t think so. Should we have some clear legal pathways? Yes.”
Soldiers often freeze their sperm before they go into battle: American troops visited cryo-banks prior to deployment in the second Gulf War, and the Russian health ministry is funding sperm freezing for Russian soldiers sent into Ukraine.
Israel — where ART has been practiced for decades — is going further: the Israeli parliament is considering a so-called bill that would give bereaved parents a legal right to extract the sperm of sons killed during compulsory military service and use it to create grandchildren.
“Once you have the technology, you are pushing the envelope again and again,” says Professor Gil Siegal, director of the Center for Law, Ethics, and Policy at Ono Academic College in Israel. “What will be the limits?”
Israel has more IVF cycles per citizen than anywhere else in the world, and assisted reproduction is so widely accepted that a partner using the sperm of their dead spouse to conceive a child “is no longer great news,” Siegal says.
But it is much more legally and ethically complex when parents — rather than spouses — seek to use the sperm of their dead son to create a grandchild.
Dozens of Israeli children have been born in this way.
Siegal points out that bereaved parents who facilitate the conception and birth of a grandchild may expect greater influence on that child’s upbringing than grandparents usually have.
“Do the grandparents now have a stronger hold on visiting rights, educational rights, and health rights?” he asks. “What will this jump of generations do to our social structures, our families, social welfare?”
As well as harvesting the sperm post-mortem, the parents must find an egg donor and a surrogate willing to carry their grandchild.
Most men killed on the battlefield are not long out of high school; how can their parents know for sure that they want to become fathers?
A soldier’s father is likely to still be fertile at the time of his young son’s death; why not have another child of his own, rather than a grandchild conceived posthumously?
The most important question, of course, is whether this is right for the child.
“The child’s best interest was used for many years to negate the possibility of children being born to all sorts of families. We’ve thrown out the idea that same-sex families are not good, that single mothers are not fit. What’s wrong with having a family where it’s the grandparents and a child?” Siegal asks.
As for the criticism that a baby conceived posthumously is being created to help adults deal with their grief rather than to be a person in their own right, Siegal argues that human beings have been having babies for this reason for millennia.
“Think how many children are named after their deceased father, their deceased brother? We do this all the time. Families that lose one child will have another child. Will we stop those parents from doing it because the new child will be a living memorial? No.”
It’s an argument Diane Blood long ago became used to hearing.
In 1997, Blood won a landmark case against the British government allowing her the right to use sperm extracted from her late husband, Stephen, after he died of meningitis two years earlier.
“It wasn’t driven by grief. For me, it was about being able to get on with the rest of my life and have the family that I’d wanted,” she tells me from her home in Worksop, England.
Already 28, Blood says time was running out for her to have a family.
She could have had a one-night stand or used a sperm donor, but a baby conceived posthumously could still be close to paternal grandparents and cousins.
“Of the likely scenarios that there could be, it isn’t that bad,” she says. “It always struck me as really odd that I could have had the sperm of an anonymous donor – even one that was dead – but not my own husband.”
Four years after her husband’s death, Blood gave birth to a son: Liam, now 24.
Liam was soon joined by a brother Joel, now 21.
Liam is well-placed to answer the question of whether posthumous conception is in the best interests of the child.
“I would always say so,” he tells me. “There’s no difference between growing up without a father and being born through posthumous IVF and any other situation where you’ve got a single parent or same-sex parents.”
He compares his birth to that of the more than 100 babies who were in the womb when they lost their fathers in the 9/11 attacks.
“Because they were conceived naturally, there were no real questions asked, even though they were stillborn without a father.”
Having endured so much scrutiny and a difficult legal fight in the 1990s in order to conceive her husband’s children, Blood is pleased that the news of Luzuriaga Rivera’s new baby has been met with nothing but positive commentary.
“Times have moved on,” she says. “It’s become more accepted that it’s a human right to be able to find a family without interference from the state. I think that’s a good thing.”
“What happened for us to get to this point was anything other than normal,” Liam adds. “It was quite an extraordinary set of circumstances and an incredible fight. But now we’ve changed the normal.”
Jenny Kleeman is a British journalist, broadcaster, and author of the forthcoming book “The Price of Life” (2024).
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