Have you thought of your demise and the remains you leave behind?
What will happen to your bits, will there be a bind?
Will you be pull apart and your bits shared around?
Will bits be stored for science, or buried in the ground?
Will you be cremated, and scattered or interred?
Have you written it down – or are your thoughts deferred?
How would you feel if upon your death, your sperm was extracted?
And a new life later, well past your death, was enacted?
Upon whom with these decisions, is your absolute reliance?
And can they be trusted to act with true compliance?
A health care directive contains many decisions, for various what ifs. Including explicit instructions regarding what will happen with your remains, beyond burial vs cremation, is very helpful. There are ethical considerations, and if you do not express your decisions, others will be left to decide.
Organ harvesting (or recovery, if you prefer) to donate to another human, use in medical training, or for research purposes, can be unequivocally expressed. Likewise, you may like to include your feelings about extracting genetic material, including sperm or eggs to be used (or not) for life creating purposes.
There is also a need to consider what you want for any embryo you may have contributed to. What will you do with those you don’t use…are they to be destroyed, donated to another family or to science…or something else?
What if you die with stored embryos? Would you want your co-creator to use them? Either in their own body if female or using a surrogate?
At this point, with shared genetic combo, is the question really about what would the resulting person want?
Leave no doubt about your decisions, whatever they may be.
Poem inspired by this article: extracting sperm from dead men