David replies:

Hi Tamika,

I'm not a fertility specialist but I am able to read the papers you're referring to. And here's the deal:

1) It doesn't look like it's possible to accidentally get pregnant from dried sperm.
2) You *can* use dried sperm to fertilize an egg, but not an egg inside the body. You'd need pretty sophisticated lab equipment.

Whether that makes the dried sperm dead or alive is kind of tricky. I'm going to say that the sperm cell itself is dead in the sense it's organized cellular activity has stopped for good. *But* in another sense, even though the cell is dead if the DNA packet is undamaged (and DNA is chemically very durable) then it's possible to recover it from the dead cell and insert it into an egg that's ready to be fertilized.

But again that's not going to happen by accident.

Good question,

David