UK man brings high court case to have dead wife’s baby with surrogate

In the first case involving posthumous surrogacy, Ted Jennings is arguing that the IVF clinic should have asked his wife to consent to her embryos being used if she died. Photograph: Brian Farmer/PA

A man whose wife died while pregnant with twins after fertility treatment is fighting for the right to use their last remaining frozen embryo to try to have a baby with a surrogate, in a groundbreaking legal case.

Ted Jennings, 38, from London, says he is certain that is what his wife, Fern-Marie Choya, would have wanted. But the fertility regulator says this would be unlawful because Choya did not consent to posthumous surrogacy before her sudden death in 2019, while pregnant with twin girls.