An Israeli woman has become the mother of a baby boy two years after dying of cancer, her husband told an Israeli newspaper Monday, an unprecedented case in the Middle Eastern country, DPA reported.
"When I saw him, I thanked God for helping me to make Keren's dream come true," 42-year-old Nisim Ayash told Israel's biggest-selling daily, Yediot Ahronot.
His wife, Keren Ayash, died in November 2009 at the age of 35 as the result of a brain tumour. She and her husband had been trying to have a baby for years using fertility treatments.
When Keren was first diagnosed with cancer the couple had some of their embryos frozen. When it became clear she would die from her illness, she made her husband promise he would find a surrogate mother.
"I promised her I would," Ayash said.
But he faced a number of legal hurdles, since Israeli law only permits couples - not single people - to find surrogates and the hospital where the embryos were being kept would not release them.
Ayash turned to an Israeli organization, New Family, which campaigns for what it calls the universal right to a family.
"He asked me to help him become a father," Irit Rosenblum, the organization's founder, told the German Press Agency dpa on Monday.
She approached Israel's state attorney, the country's highest legal authority, who eventually authorized the hospital to hand over the embryos to the father.
Rosenblum argued that he was making the request to use a surrogate mother not as a single man but as a member of a "former couple."
"I succeeded in convincing the state, he had the right to be a father. After all, 50 per cent of the genetic material is his," said Rosenblum.
But Ayash still had to look for a surrogate mother abroad.
In the mean time, he found a new partner, already the mother of two girls, who supported him and agreed to help raise his and his late wife's child.
The boy was born last week in the United States, where Ayash attended the birth. The American surrogate was paid 100,000 dollars.
"It was painful for me that it wasn't Keren who was lying there on the bed and holding the son she had waited for so long," Ayash said.
The infant was scheduled to have his circumcision ceremony in New York on Monday, during which Ayash planned to give him the name he and his late wife had agreed on.
"I will tell him of his heroic mother and of the dream I fulfilled for her after she died," Ayash said.