The Calcutta High Court on Friday, that only the widow has the right over a dead man’s sperm, rejecting  a father’s appeal that he be given his only son’s sperm preserved in a Delhi sperm bank, reported the Times of India.

Moving to the high court in March 2020, the father claimed that his daughter-in-law refused to allow him to get her husband’s sperm. He feared that if the sperm was destroyed or unused, during the two-year period of agreement with the hospital sperm bank, “they are going to lose their clan.”

Justice Sabyasachi Bhattacharyya said, “The petitioner does not have any fundamental right to such permission, merely by dint of his father-son relationship with the deceased.”

According to the order, since the man was married when he died, the sperm preserved at the Delhi hospital “belonged to the deceased” and that “the only other person, apart from the deceased, having any right to it is his wife.”

It said the “father-son relationship of the petitioner and the deceased does not entail any such right of the petitioner to the progeny of his son.” Adding that the right “espoused by the petitioner for himself is illusory and nonexistent.”

According the father, his son, who was a Delhi University doctorate, suffered from thalassemia. He married a Delhi resident in October 2015 following medical opinion and moved to Midnapore in West Bengal a few months later to work in a college there. He passed away suddenly in 2018.

Following his death, the parents asked the sperm bank to not destroy their son’s sperms during the agreement period. However, the bank wrote back, saying that only the wife has the right to decide any further usage of the sperms.

The father moved to court after their pleas to the wife for a no-objection certificate were not acknowledged.