Sep 07
16
History is Made as Dead Soldier’s Sperm is Used
Well, this is a story you won’t hear every day, or at least not for a while after this! I read the other day that in a groundbreaking and unusual case, an Israeli soldier who was shot in combat and died, and was twenty years old, was harvested for samples of his sperm just hours after his death, at the request of his family. Sound a little weird? It gets even a little weirder.
The sperm has gone through the court systems as the dead soldier’s family fights to have a woman impregnated with the sperm after the soldier died. And, the real kicker is that the family does not even know the woman whom they wish their son’s sperm to impregnate. The family did, however, choose the woman who will potentially be impregnated by their son’s sperm after his untimely death. The grief stricken family says that while they know this move cannot bring back their dead child, they feel that this is what he would have wanted – offspring, since he always wanted to raise his own family.
However, I’m not so sure how this is carrying out that wish, seeing as though he will not be here to raise the child, but I do know that people do things sometimes that sound strange, but really would have been the wishes of the deceased, or at least ok with them. The case did go through the courts, after the hospital that kept the son’s sperm sample refused to give it to the family, saying that only a spouse can request it, and their son was unmarried.
After winning “rights” to the sperm and their sons genetics essentially, and the right to decide what to do with it, the family went about picking the woman that will carry the child if the artificial insemination is successful. I’m wondering how much sperm was harvested from the young man, and why their seems to be such confidence that this will impregnate a woman, since artificial insemination is often very difficult to get to take, hence the reason that couples waste thousands of dollars on trying to conceive this way. It should be interesting how this story plays out. I wonder if the parents will have visitation rights with the child if the impregnation is successful?
