Families of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza are retreiving sperm from their bodies

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

Hundreds of young Israeli soldiers were killed in the Gaza war these last few years. Their families were asked to make a quick and unusual decision. Should they retrieve their sons' sperm from their bodies for future offspring? Many have said yes. NPR's Daniel Estrin has this report from Israel.

ERAN ALTMAN: So this is where the sperm is stored, OK?

DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:

That's Dr. Eran Altman, head of the sperm bank at Rabin Medical Center, where sperm is stored at minus-378 degrees Fahrenheit.

How many sperm samples do you have in these four vats?

ALTMAN: Ten thousand.

ESTRIN: Ten thousand?

ALTMAN: More. You see?

ESTRIN: Oh, you're opening it up.

ALTMAN: Yes, so...

ESTRIN: This is the liquid nitrogen coming out, this...

ALTMAN: Yeah, so it's...

ESTRIN: ...This fog.

Among all the sperm samples in this sperm bank from all kinds of donors is the sperm of young Israeli soldiers killed during the recent war. And here is a stunning fact. About a quarter of the soldiers killed in Gaza and elsewhere - a quarter - had sperm retrieved from their bodies after their death. In total, around 250 soldiers and security officers - Dr. Altman did many of the surgical procedures himself.

ALTMAN: The army became very efficient in bringing us the corpse, very efficient. We got it after several hours of the time of death, several hours.

ESTRIN: So this really became a priority.

ALTMAN: Right. Yeah.

ESTRIN: It's called posthumous sperm retrieval. After a man dies, his sperm lives for up to 72 hours. In Israel, many families have retrieved that sperm to be able to birth children with it. This practice was rare in Israel until the October 7 attacks and the war that followed. It's now a major phenomenon in Israel, and it's raised a whole host of ethical questions.

ALTMAN: It raises questions that you don't tackle until you have to tackle, right? And we started doing it before we had time to think what is right to do.

ESTRIN: Should a dead man be allowed to become a father? The question doesn't come up a lot in the U.S. because the practice is not very common in American hospitals.

MEGAN ALLYSE: Well, one of the reasons it's not often done is because there's no policy.

ESTRIN: Megan Allyse teaches bioethics at Case Western Reserve University.

ALLYSE: We actually historically have seen many more requests for posthumous sperm retrieval than were able to be honored because if there's no policy about how to retrieve the sperm, how to store it securely, all of those things, then what happens is it won't get retrieved.

ESTRIN: In Israel, it's very different. Israel has a very high birth rate, colored in part by the memory of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, the desire for Jewish continuity and for ensuring a Jewish majority in the battle for land with Palestinians. Culturally, Israelis are very pro-children, which is playing out in a very unusual way today.

SHARON EIZENKOT: Ani Sharon Eizenkot.

ESTRIN: Sharon Eizenkot got the knock on the door early on in the war that her 19-year-old son, Maor, was killed in Gaza.

EIZENKOT: (Through interpreter) The same officer who reads me the terrible news comes with another piece of paper, and he explains to me that sperm can be retrieved from Maor. And there's a 72-hour window of opportunity, so I need to make a quick decision. He hands me the paper. I understand what it means, and I sign because it was very clear to me that Maor wanted children.

ESTRIN: He was young and single, like most of the Israeli soldiers whose sperm was retrieved after they were killed. The decision falls on the parents. Since the war broke out, Israel changed the rules to make it easier. Now you don't need a court order to retrieve the sperm upon death. But to use that sperm to create offspring, Eizenkot needed to go to court to testify.

EIZENKOT: (Speaking Hebrew).

ESTRIN: She told the judge what her son used to say at dinners, that one day he wanted to have three children. Her son's army friend took the witness stand too and testified about a conversation he had had with Maor shortly before he was killed.

EIZENKOT: (Speaking Hebrew)

ESTRIN: Maor said he wasn't afraid to die. He was afraid he wouldn't have children, and he intended to give a sperm donation when he was back home from the front. With all these testimonies, the judge ruled in the family's favor. Now Eizenkot is looking for a woman who wants to become a single mother using Maor's sperm. She says it's the right thing to do.

EIZENKOT: (Through interpreter) We as a country, take away their right to life, just like that, by sending them to fight. So who are we to also deny them continuity?

ESTRIN: I spoke to another mother in Israel, Bella Savitsky, whose son Jonathan was killed on October 7 trying to save other soldiers from a Hamas attack on their base.

BELLA SAVITSKY: When they told me that Jonathan is dead, it was like - I cannot explain what happened, but the first thought was, he cannot disappear. He was too wonderful. How can I prevent his disappearance from the Earth? In this second, I thought about the technology which can leave him with me and give me some purpose, you know, to raise his children, to get grandchildren from him.

ESTRIN: But too many days had passed by the time her son's body was identified amid all the bodies from the attack, and it was too late to retrieve his sperm. But she took it as her mission to try to help others. She's an epidemiologist, and she helped conduct a study among 600 Israeli men of army service age. Almost half were opposed. The top reason she found was that they wouldn't want their children to grow up without their biological father. But soldiers did say they'd want to be asked for their consent while they were alive, like being an organ donor. The Israeli military does not ask soldiers if they'd want to be a sperm donor, and the military declined to say if they're considering changing that policy. So what should be done with the sperm that's already been preserved from this war? I asked Savitsky.

SAVITSKY: For the future, we must create the process which will take their desires into account. But I'm saying about what is already done. Two-hundred and fifty sperm retrievals are already taken. I think they should be used because nobody knew what men wants, and the parents are full of hope to use it. And OK, I did not succeed. OK, I failed. But I really hope for other parents that they will hold their grandchild, you know?

(SOUNDBITE OF BABY CRYING)

ESTRIN: This scene from a TV documentary captures the moment the very first baby was born in Israel from the sperm of a soldier killed in the Gaza war. The mother is the widow. They had discussed having children before he was killed. Two more widows of killed soldiers are now pregnant through the same process. Several families have received court orders allowing them to use their son's sperm for offspring. That leaves more than 200 families with sperm frozen in the sperm bank to decide whether their dead sons should bring about new life.

Daniel Estrin, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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