Our Editor-in-Chief Mitchell Scott has penned one of the most incredible stories we’ve ever heard. It was just published on Patagonia’s website. Here’s the link.

“Ten minutes after the accident, holding Ian’s lifeless hand, Steph looked at Stephen, who was just a few months away from starting medical school, and asked, ‘Do you think that we can recover his sperm?”I was totally floored and didn’t know what to say,’ remembers Stephen. ‘We needed to get out of there, but her comment left an enormous impression on me. It encapsulated everything that it meant to her at that moment: Losing Ian meant losing a future that they had envisioned for themselves.’ And for Steph, at the time unable to grasp ever being with someone else, this meant the potential loss of motherhood.

Postmortem sperm retrieval, or PSR, is quite new and not without controversy. It is the act of removing sperm from a deceased man often with the intent to use it for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a process where a woman’s eggs are fertilized with sperm outside the body in a lab and then placed in the uterus. This process of posthumous conception has been banned in countries like France, Germany and Canada. In the UK, it requires pre-written consent from the deceased. In the US, there is no specific federal regulation surrounding PSR.”

The above words are from the absolutely fascinating tale of Winthrop, Washington resident Steph Bennett and her son Robbie, who was conceived in vitro with semen taken from his father’s body after he perished in an avalanche on March 4, 2018. Our editor-in-chief Mitchell Scott wrote the article and it was just published on Patagonia’s website. Normally we don’t tend to post material we write for other magazines or sites on MCG, but in this case we simply had. Take it from us that this is very much worth 20 minutes of your time to read:

https://www.patagonia.com/stories/child-of-the-setting-sun

For another fascinating story about an avalanche and survival, read our story “Buried 4 Metres Down – An Avalanche On Mt. Temple” by Dave Robertson.