[2] Posthumous birth has special implications in law, potentially affecting the child's citizenship and legal rights, inheritance, and order of succession.
Most states recognize a posthumous child born within a set time frame, normally 280 to 300 days after the death of the decedent father.
[4][5] Another emerging legal issue in the United States is the control of genetic material after the death of the donor.
[7] In the field of assisted reproduction, snowflake children, i.e. those "adopted" as frozen embryos by people unrelated to them, can result in the birth of a child after the death of one or both of their genetic parents.
[citation needed] In monarchies and noble titles that follow male-preference cognatic primogeniture, the situation is similar where the dead monarch or peer was not childless but left a daughter as the next-in-line, as well as a pregnant widow.
[3] When a woman is inseminated with her deceased husband's sperm, laws that establish that a sperm donor is not the legal father of the child born as a result of artificial insemination have had the effect of excluding the deceased husband from fatherhood and making the child legally fatherless.