A UK High Court judge has ruled that the husband of a woman who died while pregnant can use an embryo created during fertility treatment to have a child using a surrogate.

Ted Jennings, 38, and his late wife, Fern-Marie Choya, who died aged 40 in 2019 after her womb ruptured while she was 18 weeks pregnant with twin girls, had undergone several IVF cycles.

Jennings wants to use the couple’s remaining embryo — created using his sperm and his wife’s eggs in 2018 — in treatment “with a surrogate mother”.

He asked a High Court judge for a declaration that it would be lawful for him to do so, because Choya had not given consent in writing.

In a ruling last week, Mrs Justice Theis said she was “satisfied” that Choya had consented to use of the embryo, which is stored at a private fertility clinic in London, in the event of her death. The judge concluded that Choya had not been given sufficient opportunity to give consent in writing because a form completed during the IVF process was “far from clear”.

The judge said that the interference with Jennings’s “right to respect to become a parent” were she not to grant the declaration he sought “would be significant, final and lifelong”.