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have already been sprinkled]. He answers that [the Sages agree that]
whatever will take place by itself without the need for human inter-
vention is considered already done. Therefore, when it is clear to us
that the brain membranes will perforate spontaneously, [the animal
is a terefah] it is as though it has already happened. This is not the
case with blood waiting to be sprinkled, where human action is still
required. There, we rule like the Sages who say that whatever is ready
to be done is not as if it were already done.

According to this in our case too, we can say that the Noda B’yehu-
dah retracted only in the case of a woman who is already inseminated
with sperm, where fertilization will take place by itself; she is already
viewed as pregnant and we consider it that “he has a child.” However,
when a man leaves sperm in a test tube it is not logical to say that on
the basis of insemination that will be performed in the future it is as
if he left a son in the world, for the process of fertilization and the
later birth have not yet begun and human intervention is still nec-
essary, therefore the woman requires chalitzah because at the time of
her husband’s death he left no child in the world. [This is true even
according to the poskim who rule that a child born from artificial in-
semination is considered his father’s child – he was nevertheless only
born after his father’s death and at the time of death, the requirement
of either chalitzah or yibum took effect.]

Furthermore, the reason the Noda B’yehudah retracted his reason-
ing was because he didn’t find any posek who said this i.e. that if fer-
tilization takes place after the husband’s death she requires chalitzah.
However, the silence of the poskim regarding a case where a woman
became pregnant in a bathtub after her husband had emitted his se-
men into the bathtub and died is clearly owing to the extreme rarity of
its happening4, so even though they don’t discuss it, it clearly cannot
be considered “a novel stringency” to insist she requires chalitzah in
such a case.

4. Even though “bathtub conception” in principle is considered common, as we
have written earlier in siman 250, in practice it is not a common enough occur-
rence for the poskim to discuss.

Posthumous Artificial Inseminatio 2 53