Men in Britain should be able to donate their sperm after death, according to ethicists who argue that posthumous contributions would help infertile couples and relieve the pressure on living donors.

The shortage of sperm donors in the UK has led to at least 7,000 samples being imported each year, primarily from Denmark and the US, to keep up with the demand from fertility clinics.

Under the new proposal published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, men would be allowed to give consent for their sperm to be extracted when they die and then used to help couples have families.

“We know there is a shortage of sperm donors in the UK and this is one way to address the problem,” said Joshua Parker, a doctor and ethicist at Wythenshawe hospital in Manchester, who makes the case with Nathan Hodson, a doctor at the University of Leicester.

“We think it would be ethical to allow men to voluntarily donate their sperm to be used by strangers after they have died,” Parker said.

In their article, the doctors describe how they believe dead donations are not only “technically feasible”, but “ethically permissible”. On the technical side, there are two procedures that may prove unappealing in life. One requires the insertion of a rectal probe that electrocutes the prostate to stimulate ejaculation. The other calls for the scrotum to be cut open to gain direct access to the cells.

A small number of cases suggest that sperm retrieved from men days after death can be used to establish viable pregnancies and healthy children. In 2018, it emerged that a wealthy British couple had harvested sperm from their son, three days after his death in a motorbike accident, to create a male heir. The family had the sperm frozen and exported to the US where it was used to create a male embryo that was carried to term by a surrogate mother.

Parker and Hodson argue that while infertility is not life-threatening, men who wish to should be allowed to donate their sperm on death to alleviate others’ suffering. Donations from dead men would not only reduce the shortfall, they say, but increase the diversity of sperm available, which can be a problem for some couples seeking sperm of a particular ethnicity.

In Britain, sperm donors are typically aged 18 to 41 and visit the clinic several times over a number of months, abstaining from ejaculating for days before each deposit is made. By donating when they are dead, men could reap the benefits while avoiding such hardships, the authors argue.

But the ethical case is not straightforward, the doctors concede. Sperm donation is not anonymous in Britain, regardless of where the sperm comes from. This allows donor-conceived children to contact their donor fathers once they reach the age of 18, though not all do so.

“We don’t know what the psychological impact would be on children born this way,” Parker said. “Some people who want donor sperm may see the fact that the donor has died as a good thing if they are concerned about the child having a future relationship with them,” he added.

Allan Pacey, professor of andrology at Sheffield University, said that while the proposal was well argued, he “strongly disagreed” with it. “Given the distance we have travelled in terms of recruiting donors who are willing to be identified to donor-conceived people, it feels like a backward step to then recruit donors who are dead and therefore they will never have the opportunity to meet.

“The practicalities of posthumous sperm extraction and its use does not concern me, as these are fairly routine techniques. But I do feel very uncomfortable with the idea. I’d much rather that we invested our energy in trying to recruit younger, healthy, willing donors who stand a good chance of being alive when the donor-conceived person starts to become curious about them, and would have the opportunity to make contact with them without the aid of a spiritualist.”

“This raises a huge number of questions and there’s a lot more discussion to have about safeguards and regulations,” Parker added. “This is just our first shot.”

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority requires sperm donors to undergo medical screening and a three-month quarantine to ensure the samples are free of infections such as HIV – measures that can only be done while donors are alive.