Two sets of parents who sued each other for the right to inherit four frozen embryos left by their children before they died last year in a tragic car accident in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, have been given joint custody.

The ruling on Wednesday by the Wuxi Intermediate People's Court overturned a lower court's rejection of a claim to the embryos by the parents of the deceased son.

The couple, Shen Jie and Liu Xi, were unable to have children because of infertility and had previously donated Liu's embryos at a hospital in the provincial capital of Nanjing in the hopes of having children. Liu was scheduled for embryo implantation surgery five days after the fatal crash.