Days after an Israeli court made a landmark ruling allowing the family of a deceased 17-year-old girl to harvest and freeze the eggs from her ovaries, the family has apparently bowed to domestic pressure to drop efforts to push ahead with the procedure. The court's ruling was unprecedented in Israel, and possibly globally, but immediately sparked a backlash from religiously conservative communities in Israel, a source familiar with the case said yesterday, prompting the family not to take the case any further. The family of Chen Aida Ayish, who was gravely injured in a car crash 10 days ago, had appealed to the court to extract her eggs after doctors declared her brain dead, Israeli media had reported. Ha'aretz quoted a medical source as saying the family had requested that the eggs be fertilised with donated sperm, as embryos stand a better chance of surviving the freezing procedure than unfertilised eggs, but the court denied permission for fertilisation at this stage. The Ayash family has made no public comment. It's great that people have a chance to decide," said Irit Rosenblum, a lawyer who founded New Family, an organisation advancing family rights. Earlier this year, another Israeli family embarked on a legal battle to be allowed to use their dead son's sperm to produce a grandchild, although they had no surrogate standing by. There has been at least one case in Israel where the husband of a woman who died from cancer won legal permission to use the embryos of his late wife, created during efforts to conceive through IVF.
– An Israeli court has set what is believed to be a worldwide precedent by giving a family permission to harvest and freeze the eggs of their dead daughter. The 17-year-old girl was declared brain dead a week after she was hit by a car, and the parents had already agreed to donate her organs. The court rejected the family's request to have the eggs fertilized with donated sperm before they were frozen, reports the Guardian. The key issue in the case was consent, and the girl's family had to prove that she wanted children, according to a lawyer for an Israeli family rights organization. In 2007, the parents of a dead Israeli soldier won a legal battle to be allowed to use his sperm to create a child with a surrogate mother. The girl's case has sparked a major controversy in Israel, and the teen's parents, under pressure from religious conservatives, have decided not to proceed any further with the process, sources tell the Independent.