Days after an Israeli court made a landmark ruling allowing the family of a deceased 17-year-old girl to harvest and freeze the eggs from her ovaries, the family has apparently bowed to domestic pressure to drop efforts to push ahead with the procedure. 
 
 The family of Chen Aida Ayish, who was gravely injured in a car crash 10 days ago, had appealed to the court to extract her eggs after doctors declared her brain dead, Israeli media had reported. The court's ruling was unprecedented in Israel, and possibly globally, but immediately sparked a backlash from religiously conservative communities in Israel, a source familiar with the case said yesterday, prompting the family not to take the case any further. 
 
 Ms Ayish, 17, fell into a coma after she was hit by a car 10 days ago. Doctors at the Kfar Saba hospital pronounced her brain dead last Wednesday, and her parents decided to donate her organs, and probe the possibility of harvesting her eggs. 
 
 The family had initially asked medical staff to fertilise the eggs with donated sperm, giving the eggs a better chance of survival, but the court refused, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. Despite the Ayish family's change of heart, the case will be viewed as an important legal advance for families seeking continuity from their deceased partners and children. 
 
 "It's revolutionary ... It's great that people have a chance to decide," said Irit Rosenblum, a lawyer who founded New Family, an organisation advancing family rights. 
 
 In line with rulings in Britain and elsewhere, the courts have allowed the use of sperm from deceased males but the permission has not applied to women, where the harvesting of eggs involves a more complicated procedure. There has been at least one case in Israel where the husband of a woman who died from cancer won legal permission to use the embryos of his late wife, created during efforts to conceive through IVF. He now has a child. 
 
 Cases where families have sought to use the sperm of dead males are more common, though. Earlier this year, the parents of an Israeli man killed in an accident sought legal permission to use his frozen sperm. The case was unusual, because according to a 2003 ruling by Israel's attorney general, only a wife or girlfriend could use the sperm of a dead man. ||||| An Israeli family has been given legal permission to extract and freeze eggs from the ovaries of their 17-year-old daughter, who died in a road accident. 
 
 The ruling by the magistrates court in the town of Kfar Sava sets a legal precedent in Israel and, according to a lawyer with 10 years experience in similar cases, is possibly the first of its kind in the world. 
 
 According to the Ha'aretz news organisation, the family of Chen Aida Ayash agreed for her organs to be donated following her death a week after she was hit by a car. She was declared brain dead on Wednesday. 
 
 They also petitioned the court in Kfar Sava, where they live, for permission for her eggs to be harvested and frozen. 
 
 Ha'aretz quoted a medical source as saying the family had requested that the eggs be fertilised with donated sperm, as embryos stand a better chance of surviving the freezing procedure than unfertilised eggs, but the court denied permission for fertilisation at this stage. 
 
 Maayan Maor, a spokesperson for the Meir medical centre, Kfar Sava, confirmed that the procedure had taken place. 
 
 "This is a unique case, since this is the first time an Israeli court has approved the extraction and freezing of ovarian eggs from a dead woman," she told the Guardian. 
 
 "We don't know the reason why Chen's parents wanted it done. We just received the court order and did the procedure." 
 
 The Ayash family has made no public comment. 
 
 According to Irit Rosenblum, a lawyer who founded New Family, an Israeli organisation that promotes family rights, the key issue is consent. "We don't know if [Ayash] was concerned about continuation," she said adding that even though the girl was only 17, she may have expressed a desire to bear children. "If [the family] can prove the fact that she wanted children, I see no reason why not to allow this." 
 
 There have been many precedents of sperm being extracted after death to allow a dead man's widow or partner to conceive his child. Courts have insisted that petitioners must be able to show the man wanted to become a father. 
 
 In 2007, the Israeli parents of a deceased soldier won a legal battle to be allowed to use his sperm, which was extracted post mortem, to create a child with an identified surrogate mother. Earlier this year, another Israeli family embarked on a legal battle to be allowed to use their dead son's sperm to produce a grandchild, although they had no surrogate standing by. 
 
 Rosenblum argued that a condition of creating a child from Ayash's eggs must be that "the resulting child be brought up by his or her biological father". She said it was better for a child to know its "biological legacy" than to be created by anonymous donor sperm or eggs. 
 
 Rosenblum cited a recent case in which a couple created embryos through IVF treatment, but the woman later discovered she had cancer. Two years after her death, the man wanted to fulfil his pledge to create a child, but Israeli law meant he had to use a surrogate mother in the US. "It was the first case in the world of a child being born long after the death of its biological mother," Rosenblum said.
– An Israeli court has set what is believed to be a worldwide precedent by giving a family permission to harvest and freeze the eggs of their dead daughter. The 17-year-old girl was declared brain dead a week after she was hit by a car, and the parents had already agreed to donate her organs. The court rejected the family's request to have the eggs fertilized with donated sperm before they were frozen, reports the Guardian. The key issue in the case was consent, and the girl's family had to prove that she wanted children, according to a lawyer for an Israeli family rights organization. In 2007, the parents of a dead Israeli soldier won a legal battle to be allowed to use his sperm to create a child with a surrogate mother. The girl's case has sparked a major controversy in Israel, and the teen's parents, under pressure from religious conservatives, have decided not to proceed any further with the process, sources tell the Independent.