Twin boys were born earlier this month at the Central Obstetrics Hospital in Hanoi thanks to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) using frozen sperm from the father who has been dead for 3 years, the first case ever in Vietnam.

Their mother, Hoang Thi Kim Dung, 30, gave birth to the two boys, Ho Sy Hoang Hai and Ho Sy Hoang Duc, who respectively weighed 2.4 kg and 2.9 kg, on December 9 after using the sperm from her husband, Ho Sy Ngoc, who died when he was 27 years old in a traffic accident three years ago.

The fruit of technology and love

Dr. Le Vuong Van Ve, director of the Hanoi Andrology and Infertility Hospital - who performed IVF, recalled that he received a phone call three years ago from the mother Dung who requested him to store the sperm of her husband.

Ve and his colleagues then immediately rushed to the morgue storing the body of Ngoc at a hospital in Thanh Tri District around 6 hours after his death. Under supervision of police and the hospital’s officials, they performed an operation there to open the dead man’s scrotum to take out a testicle.

After returning to his hospital, Ve separated the testicle into 14 tissue samples to test for viable sperms so that they could be extracted and put into a frozen state.

According to Dung, she and her husband had been in love since 2002, and they married in 2009 but only six months later, she had to go to France for study. In September 2009 she gave birth to her first baby girl.

When the accident happened to her father, Ho Hoang Hai Binh was 6 months old.

Ngoc said during her overseas study period, she heard about the possibility of keeping the sperm of deceased people in frozen storage, so when her husband died, she suddenly thought of this.

After asking some friends for advice, she got the phone number of Ve, and phoned him to ask for help.

“When I went to the hospital to carry out the operation, the husband had died about six hours earlier. Technically, this is not a difficult case, because the sperm can live for several hours after the death of a man. But what really concerned me was the wife's decision. I’ve seen many cases like this when many changed their minds.”

After undergoing IVF, Dung had her health and her pregnancy tracked at the Hanoi Andrology and Infertility Hospital in the first three months, then at the Central Obstetrics Hospital where she gave birth to the twins.

Unprecedented case According to Ve, regarding the technical side, the case is not so difficult. However, for Vietnam, this is the first time that there are children born through sperm taken from their dead father.

“The success rate is only 30%, and it may be due to luck that the IVF succeeded right at the first time,” he told newswire VnExpress.

According to an expert on genetics, this is really an achievement of the local medical sector.

Dr. Hoang Thi Diem Tuyet, vice president cum dean of infertility treatment at Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City also confirmed that this is the first case in Vietnam, though such cases are quite popular in the world.

“In reality, the possibility of being able to retrieve live sperms from a clinically dead person is not high as sperm viability is not high, so early intervention for a high rate of sperm viability is required.”

“This is a rare case as the operator was able to extract a lot of live sperms from a man who died over 6 hours earlier. We have recorded a case in HCMC in which all the sperms died out though the man just died a few hours earlier.”