His wife, an Episcopal priest, was summoned to the hospital in the middle of services. She agreed to have her husband's organs and tissue harvested for donation. She remembers asking the emergency room doctor whether there was any chance to retrieve her husband's sperm.

"We'd been trying to have a baby," she told the doctor. He said that he'd never heard of such a thing, but was sympathetic and willing to try.

"I had friends cold-calling on their cell phones, looking for sperm banks willing to come on a Sunday to retrieve Hal's sperm," she remembers. "I had no way of knowing what would happen. I just didn't want this chance taken away from me."

A faithful meeting

The Rev. Margaret "Margo" Peckham Clark, now 37, grew up near Binghamton. She felt early on that she was called to become a priest, but instead went to New York Law School.

A year after graduation, Peckham found herself clerking for a judge in Bismarck, N.D. The year was 1996. Friends there kept telling her about a young man named Winifred Harold Clark, a teacher and youth group leader for the Episcopal church who worked as a missionary on an Indian reservation 80 miles down the road. People were also whispering in Hal's ear, saying that there was a woman he needed to meet.

But that introduction didn't happen. Peckham decided to become a priest after all. The North Dakota Episcopal church sponsored her to join a seminary in New York. In 1998, she returned to North Dakota for a diocesan convention. Clark was at the same meeting. He introduced himself with a pick-up line that worked well at such a meeting. "I'd like to go to the seminary one day, also," he told her. "Can we talk about it over dinner?"

Two months later, on a trip to New York, the two fell in love. They wed 11 months later, on Dec. 19, 1999. "We both knew that we were meant to be together," she said. They settled in Manhattan, and her husband started his seminary work toward the priesthood in 2001. They talked about starting a family.

When he died so unexpectedly a year later, she had no idea whether she was pregnant. Several weeks after she buried her husband, she found out she was not. She made an appointment with a Manhattan endocrinologist, Dr. Martin Keltz, to discuss using the frozen sperm.

Keltz had never helped a woman conceive a child with sperm harvested at death, but he was compelled by the story.

"I am honoring life in the midst of death," she told Keltz. "Having a child together was our fondest hope."

Beating the odds

Six months later, her eggs were retrieved and united with her husband's sperm. An embryo was implanted into her uterus. The pregnancy didn't take. Two more attempts were made. Keltz said he'd be willing to try one more time, but that the odds were against her.

Clark kept her faith, and the fourth attempt was the charm. She is now the rector at Trinity Episcopal Church in Roslyn. Her parish has become the village that is helping to raise her child, she said. "Harry has more outfits than any gentleman his age," his mother said.

"My husband is dead, but we are joined together in a way that is beyond words. Part of me died and part of Hal survived."

It's not clear how many times sperm has been retrieved posthumously for future conception. Doctors are aware of two known births resulting from such after-death unions, one in California and one in Britain.

Dr. Peter Schlegel, acting chairman of urology at New York Weill Cornell Medical Center, said sperm must be retrieved within 24 hours of death. Once frozen, it can last decades, but chances of achieving a successful pregnancy remain low - which is true of in vitro fertilization in general. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has ethical guidelines for doctors on handling requests for post-mortem sperm retrieval. Among other things, they involve exploring the well-being of the mother and whether the partner had expressed a desire for children before death.

Clark says her faith guided her through this experience.

"This is a miracle. I see God all over it. I see medicine all over it."

END