The Takamatsu High Court on Friday overturned a district court ruling and recognized a boy who was born through in vitro fertilization using a dead man's frozen sperm as the child of the deceased.
The lawsuit, which seeks posthumous legal recognition of the paternity of the child, was filed by a woman in western Japan who has only been identified as being in her 40s. The boy is now 3 years old.
The woman gave birth to the boy in May 2001, having used sperm taken from her husband and frozen in 1998 before he began undergoing chemotherapy for leukemia. He died of the disease in September 1999.
She brought the frozen sperm, which had been kept at a hospital, to another hospital in the summer of 2000, but did not inform that facility that her husband had passed away when she underwent the in vitro process, the court said.