Parents of Dead Soldier Given Right to Inseminate Woman with His Sperm

This dead soldier is going to be a daddy - 2 years past the date of his death thanks to artificial insemination. The kicker is, he wasn't married, and the recepient will be chosen by his parents.

Link

In a precedent-setting decision, an Israeli court has ruled that a dead soldier's family can have his sperm impregnated into the body of a woman he never met.

Keivan Cohen, 20, was shot dead in 2002 by a Palestinian sniper in the Gaza Strip. He was single and left no will. But at the urging of his parents, a sample of his sperm was taken two hours after his death and has been stored in a hospital since.

When the family tried to gain access to the sperm, however, the hospital refused, on the ground that only a spouse could make such a request. Arguing that their son yearned to raise a family, his parents challenged that decision in court. And on Jan. 15, after a four-year legal battle, a Tel Aviv court granted the family's wish and ruled that the sperm could be injected into a woman selected by Cohen's family.

Holy crap, what a strange night in the news. :shk:

I think it's both awesome and terrifying, the potential for this precedent.

On the one hand, parents/guardians of folks who die before getting a chance to have children, will be able to perpetuate their legacy. This, in and of itself, could be a very bad thing, or a very good thing, depending on the circumstances, and how you look at it. Kinda throws a monkey wrench in natural selection, if death doesn't prevent breeding.



On the other hand, this is setting precedent for legal guardians to collect, store, and potentially use sperm from dead soldiers. What about the cases where the government is the legal guardian of the soldier? If they have no other family, can the government take sperm from their corpse, inseminate some random woman, and raise the baby (perhaps groomed for the military)?

I can see this being such a godsend for some, but of course the potential for the misuse of technology usually scales according to its power to do good. Seeing as this technology is powerful enough to do a lot of good, I suspect it has the potential to create huge problems.

What if the language were refined to restrict such practices to parents or immediate blood relatives and spouses - then the technology could only be used by individuals trying to perpetuate their lineage, and not by any organization simply interested in harvesting soldiers/babies/organs.

Don't laugh, babies are worth a lot of money!

Anyway, I'm not against the technology simply because it could be misused, I'm simply wary of embracing it withtout safeguards in place to prevent abuse.

Even with the potential for gross misuse, I'm really digging the potential for this tech. Why stop at soldiers, why not construction workers, cops, cab drivers, convenience store employees, firemen, any profession with a high mortality rate?

What would a system like that do, in terms of altering the behaviors of people? Would soldiers fight with fewer qualms if they knew they were going to father children after death? Would more people commit suicide?

Bizarre news night, is all I have to say. It really gets the old coconut steaming.

Say what you will about the age in which we live, it's nothing if not interesting.

Interesting is right.

You've done a great job of portraying this case and the technology from varying perspectives.

What stuns me is parents requesting doctors collect sperm from their dead son !

Grief does strange things to people. Afterwards, they can barely themselves believe what they said and did.

But in the midst of grief, would it occur to the average parents (prior to this news item) to request that doctors collect their dead child's sperm (or eggs) ?

The word 'macabre' keeps popping into my mind.

The case sets a disturbing legal precedent.

HOW did the parents manage to convince the judge that they had a right to effect post-death procreative capabilities 'on behalf' of their son ?

.... 'He'd always wanted to be a father, your honour ' ? Legally, isn't that 'heresay' ? Isn't heresay disallowed in court ?

Personally, I feel that what the parents have been able to achieve is an abomination. Maybe that's just an emotional response and maybe I'll feel otherwise after reflection.

It reminds me of the Italian couple, then in their late middle-age, who prevailed upon doctors to inseminate the mother at approx. 56 years of age, in order she could have a son to replace their 20 or 30-something son who'd been killed a year or so previous. They said quite frankly that they wished to have another son to replace the one they'd lost.

Can't help wondering how that son will feel later in life when he learns that he was a replacement. On top of having been raised by parents who were close to 60 when he was born.

Similarly, how will the as yet unborn Israeli child feel when he/she learns themselves to be the product of sperm scraped from a dead body which was then stored pending legal decisions and selection of a womb by his/her grandparents, in order they could 'replace' their dead son, without that dead son's knowledge or consent ?

That still unborn Israeli child will NEVER at any age, be able to imagine him/herself to be the product of mutual love and romance -- a child born of love and desire. They will NEVER be able to say to themselves: ' They loved each other once. I was wanted. I was born of their love and desire and hopes for the future.'

All he/she will have will be the knowledge that its grandparents were maniacally resolved to cling to their dead son -- were utterly unprepared to deal with loss --- were ruthlessly determined to cling to A MATERIAL remnant of their dead son, even if it required someone else (the child) to have to live a life COMPLETELY devoid of its biological father and borne to a mother and a turkey baster, in order to satisfy the grandparents' needs OF THE MOMENT.

That child will be an object. His rights and welfare have been shown to be very low in everyone's list.

Well of course. That 'child' is as yet just a few dribbles of semen in a vial. It can't speak. It couldn't speak when it (and its potential) were being scraped from a corpse. It couldn't say: " Hey. No thanks. I don't feel like being turned into a human for the satisfaction of others. I don't feel like being born to a life without parents. I don't want a life that from the OUTSET will be determined by two people who're so WILLFUL that they REFUSED to accept natural loss and death -- who in fact should never have been allowed to orchestrate this playing-god scenario. "

Frankly, if I were that child, I think I'd have a fatal accident very early in life.