Family given permission to extract eggs from ovaries of dead daughter in world first

An Israeli court is believed to have made international legal history by allowing a family to extract eggs from the ovaries of their dead daughter.

The issue of consent is vital in the case of Miss Ayash 

The family of Chen Aida Ayash, a 17-year-old schoolgirl who died after being hit by a car last week, was granted a petition to have her eggs harvested and frozen, Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported.

The ruling raises the possibility that, for the first time, a mother could give birth after her death, a development that raises legal and ethical questions that are likely to trouble conservatives in Israel and elsewhere in the world.

Few countries have legislation covering posthumous egg harvesting, although the extraction of sperm from the corpses men who have given consent prior to death has become fairly common. There have been dozens of such cases in the United States alone.

Last year, judges and doctors in the US turned down a petition filed by another family to extract eggs from the ovary of a brain dead air hostess on the grounds that she had expressed no desire to have children before she was struck down with a heart attack.

The issue of consent is vital in the case of Miss Ayash as well.

Obama, Netanyahu face turning point

WASHINGTON — As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel heads to the White House on Friday for the seventh meeting since President Obama took office, the two men are facing a turning point in a relationship that has never been warm.

By all accounts, they do not trust each other. President Obama has told aides and allies that he does not believe that Mr. Netanyahu will ever be willing to make the kind of big concessions that will lead to a peace deal.

For his part, Mr. Netanyahu has complained that Mr. Obama has pushed Israel too far — a point driven home during a furious phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday morning, just hours before Mr. Obama’s speech, during which the prime minister reacted angrily to the president’s plan to endorse Israel’s pre-1967 borders for a future Palestinian state.

Mr. Obama did not back down. But the last-minute furor highlights the discord as they head into what one Israeli official described as a “train wreck” coming their way: a United Nations General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September.

Mr. Netanyahu, his close associates say, desperately wants Mr. Obama to use the diplomatic muscle of the United States to protect Israel from the vote, not only by vetoing it in the Security Council, but also by leaning hard on America’s European allies to get them to reject it as well.


Mr. Obama has indicated that he will certainly do the first. But it remains unclear how far Mr. Obama can go to persuade Britain, France and other American allies to join the United States in rejecting the move, particularly as long as Mr. Netanyahu continues to resist endorsing the pre-1967 lines.

From the day they first met, at the King David Hotel on July 23, 2008, when Mr. Obama, then the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, visited Israel, the two men have struck, at most, an intellectual bond. Mr. Netanyahu, as the leader of Israel’s conservative Likud Party, was far more comfortable with the Republican Party in the United States than with Mr. Obama, the son of a Muslim man from Kenya whose introduction to the Arab-Israeli conflict was initially framed by discussions with pro-Palestinian academics.

“Their relationship is correct at best,” said Judith Kipper, director of Middle East programs at the Institute of World Affairs. Mr. Netanyahu “likes the status quo, and he particularly identifies with conservative Republicans.”

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a friend of Mr. Netanyahu’s, recalled that after the first meeting, Mr. Netanyahu walked out of the hotel and told him that he had been impressed with Mr. Obama’s intellect, and that the American presidency “was his to lose.”