At the end of a corridor on the second floor of Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center, there is a small room filled with six huge stainless-steel tanks. When a gloved hand lifts one of the lids, liquid nitrogen condenses, swirls and billows over the tank’s frost-encrusted rim, as if it were a magic cauldron.
“At any given second, we know that the temperature is right. It’s backed up, and monitored all the time,” the laboratory director, Dr Shimi Barda, tells me. “You can’t put a price on what we have here.”
What they have is the largest sperm bank in Israel. More than 53,000 sperm samples are stored here, in numbered vials or thin plastic straws, frozen at -196C. As well as samples from donors and IVF patients, there is sperm from men with cancer, frozen before their chemotherapy, and from trans people, before gender reassignment. Some of the samples even contain the possibility of life after death: sperm taken from the bodies of dead Israeli soldiers in the hours after they have been killed. In the nine and a half months following the Hamas attack on October 7 2023, sperm was successfully taken from the bodies of 160 soldiers and 15 civilians, according to data from the Israeli Ministry of Health.
Postmortem sperm retrieval (PMSR) is a relatively simple procedure. “We open the testes and we take a biopsy,” says Dr Noga Fuchs Weizman, director of the male fertility unit and sperm bank at the hospital. “Generally speaking, these are fertile men, so a small biopsy should be enough.” They will then isolate sperm cells from the tissue, check them under a microscope for motility and other signs of viability, and freeze what looks promising.
But it is also a race against time. Sperm can remain alive for days after a man dies — the team will freeze sperm up to 80 hours after death if it appears viable — but the sooner it is retrieved, the more likely it is to lead to successful conception. While they search for sperm to freeze, bereaved families wait to bury their dead.
Before October 7, Fuchs Weizman and Barda used to perform a handful of PMSR cases a year. The hospital would receive testes from Abu Kabir, the morgue where autopsies of those who have died unnatural deaths are conducted. In the aftermath of the attacks, they were sent entire corpses.
“We learnt after the first couple of cases not to expose the full body, just the groin area,” Fuchs Weizman tells me. She shuts her eyes. Beads of tears appear at their corners. “These are people who could have been killed by blast injuries, smoke inhalation, sharp injuries.” At first, much of their effort was in vain. Around 1,200 Israelis lost their lives on October 7, and it took several days for all the bodies to be formally identified. When the first candidates for PMSR arrived in hospitals, in many cases it was too late. “There was nothing to work with. There was nothing to preserve,” Fuchs Weizman says.
The government and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) quickly revised their practices. The Ministry of Health now oversees the process, splitting cases between Israel’s four major hospitals. Since October 11, the IDF has been offering every family the possibility of PMSR at the time they break the news that a loved one has died. Fuchs Weizman estimates that 30 per cent of soldiers who die in service now have their sperm retrieved and frozen after their death.
There has been another change. In 132 out of the 175 retrievals, from October 7 2023 to July 23 this year, it was at the request of the dead man’s parents, rather than his partner. They want to be able to use it to create grandchildren after their son’s death. With some exceptions, the attorney-general has removed the requirement that parents must have permission from a judge before their son’s sperm can be retrieved.
The dead man does not need to have provided prior written consent for his sperm to be taken — or used — after death. In a country where many are descendants of Holocaust survivors, family continuation is deemed paramount. It’s assumed that everyone wants to have kids. Where pronatalism, grief and reproductive technology collide, the question of whether the young men who died would actually have wanted their sperm taken and used to create grandchildren for their bereaved parents is merely an afterthought.
The first case of PMSR documented in medical journals involved a parent trying to preserve the fertility of a dead son. In Los Angeles in 1980, a doctor named Cappy Rothman successfully retrieved sperm from the body of 32-year-old Robin Cranston at the request of his father, California senator Alan Cranston, after Robin had been fatally injured in a traffic accident. The sperm was frozen, but ultimately never used. Rothman went on to perform PMSR around 180 times throughout his career. “There were probably only about 10 cases where the sperm was actually used for conception,” Rothman tells me. “The purpose of doing it is to help people through the grieving period.”
In 1997, Diane Blood won a landmark legal fight against the British government, which resulted in the world’s first case of postmortem conception and birth. Blood had asked doctors to extract sperm from her husband, Stephen, when he was dying of meningitis in 1995, but she had to fight the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for the right to use it after his death, because there was no written record of Stephen’s wishes. She won, and went on to have two sons conceived with Stephen’s sperm. But her victory led to a change in the law in the UK. A person’s gametes or embryos can only be used after their death if they’ve given written consent.
Today, PMSR is explicitly banned in Germany, Sweden, France, Hungary and Slovenia, and legal, subject to specific conditions, in the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Greece, Estonia, Japan and the Czech Republic. In the US, where there is no legislation, it has become increasingly acceptable. Around the world, conceiving babies with sperm from a dead partner has become comparatively unremarkable. But creating grandchildren this way is an almost exclusively Israeli phenomenon.
The Israeli state was founded on the promise of the revival of the Jewish people after the Holocaust. Jews have been told it is their duty to “be fruitful and multiply” since the Book of Genesis. Now, Israel’s advanced medical and tech sectors allow that multiplication to happen through cutting-edge techniques. Israel has the highest number of IVF cycles per capita in the world, and is the only country to cover the cost of unlimited IVF treatment up to the birth of two babies until a woman is 45 (or 51, if she uses donor eggs). At an average of 2.9 babies born per woman, its birth rate is the highest of all the nations in the OECD.
“I think we’re in survival mode,” Fuchs Weizman muses. “That’s not representative of all of Israel, but definitely some.”
Since the mid-2000s, Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails have been smuggling sperm out of their cells for their wives to use in IVF treatment. Figures are difficult to verify, but at least 85 babies are reported to have been born after conception with sperm snuck out of Israeli prisons since 2012. For families in Gaza, where more than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive since October 7, access to the kind of medical infrastructure that could offer PMSR is unthinkable.
Despite several attempts to get a bill through the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, over the past decade, there is no legislation on PMSR and posthumous conception in Israel, only legal precedent. Before October 7, parents were required to obtain a court order before doctors would retrieve sperm and further court permission to use it. Spouses and long-term partners did not need one. In the wake of Hamas’s attack last year, and under pressure from families for whom PMSR occurred too late, the government swiftly created a “fertility war room” that removed the precondition of a court order. Parents still need permission from the court to use the sperm to conceive a child.
There is also a mandatory six-month cooling off period between preserving the sperm and trying to use it, Fuchs Weizman says. “It’s not a decision you want to take in the heat of the moment. Most cases will take more than six months.” While the cost of PMSR, sperm storage, IVF, prenatal care and delivery will be covered by the state, the legal fees must be met by the dead man’s family. The unprecedented demand for PMSR since October 7 means lawyers who specialise in turning dead soldiers into fathers are readying themselves for a busy year.
Irit Rosenblum’s office looks nothing like a legal practice. Her desk and shelves are covered by what, at first, appear to be wedding cake toppers, ceramic models of just-married couples with huge cartoon eyes, troll brides and grooms, bobble heads on springs in top hats and white veils. One of the rooms along the corridor serves as a chapel where Rosenblum conducts civil unions, complete with a Perspex altar festooned with ribbons and flowers.
“The spirit here is about creating new families,” she says. “It might be connected to what happened to my own family.” Rosenblum’s parents were Polish Jews who survived Auschwitz. They arrived in Israel with numbers tattooed on their hands, having lost their entire families. “I never had grandparents, I never had uncles and aunts. All my life, I have lived with death. I have survivor molecules in my DNA.”
Tenacious and irreverent, with the single-minded determination of someone convinced she is right, over the past 20 years Rosenblum has incrementally pushed the legal boundaries in Israel that have allowed parents to create grandchildren using their dead sons’ sperm. “I am a legal artist,” she grins. “My ringtone is ‘Mission Impossible’. I make things possible.” Now 65, and a grandmother herself, she insists her work is all about joy. “Why not cause happiness for those who lost their precious sons? You must use everything you can to be happy.”
This particular mission began for Rosenblum in 2001, when she was working on a prenuptial agreement, and the man came to her with a request. He’d caught a parasitic disease while serving in the army that had left him infertile, he said. He wanted Rosenblum to break the news to his fiancée that he couldn’t have children. Rosenblum agreed and the marriage went ahead. It left her with an idea that seemed obvious: men should bank sperm before they serve in the army. She launched a public awareness campaign and gave a press conference to promote it which made headlines across Israel. “I was treated as if I was a joke. Journalists laughed at me — but they wrote about it.”
Rosenblum began receiving calls from parents whose sons had died in service. They had donated their organs, but no one had ever mentioned the possibility that their sperm could have been preserved. She started investigating, asking fertility doctors what might be medically possible. Then 19-year-old Keivan Cohen was killed serving in Gaza in 2002, and his distraught mother turned to Rosenblum for help on the day of his death — “I knew we had to move fast.” She convinced Israel’s Supreme Court to allow Keivan’s sperm to be extracted. The decision of whether to use it would be taken at a later date, she argued. But when it came to getting the second court order that would result in conception, she faced years of pushback.
“Their attitude was ‘accept the death’. But we didn’t accept it, because we knew we have the technology, we can revive them,” Rosenblum declares, her palms splayed. “It’s the same as finding oil, discovering electricity. Why not use the technology we have?”
After four and a half years, the attorney-general ruled that if the Cohens found a woman willing to carry their grandchild, the court would be prepared to rule on whether Keivan’s sperm could be used. It was a high-profile case, and “hundreds” of women got in touch with Rosenblum, she says, “single women in their late thirties who saw a way to have everything, a family, grandparents, uncles, aunts for the child, a hero as a father, without needing a spouse”. For Rosenblum, it was more evidence of what a great idea this was. “It makes everyone involved happy. The child will be born into a very warm family that wants him to be born. And don’t ask me about the child’s rights, because there is no such thing — nobody asks to be born.”
Of course, I do have to ask her about the child’s rights. This is a child who will be conceived without a father, after all. “I don’t care,” Rosenblum replies. “Once he’s born we must support him, give him the right to be raised in the best way possible. That’s it.” When I suggest that a child created in these circumstances might feel the burden of the hopes and expectations of grandparents who fought so hard to have him or her, she bats the idea away. “This is bullshit. It’s very nice to be born in a great family that loves you, that worked so hard to have you. A child needs love. That’s it.”
It took 12 years and three prospective mothers before Keivan’s baby was finally born in 2013. Two women dropped out because the court process took too long, and their fertility was dwindling. While she waited for a decision in the Cohens’ case, Rosenblum took on at least 100 other cases involving bereaved parents, she says. As well as soldiers, she represented families who had lost sons in accidents, and to diseases. Soldiers were a good place to start, she tells me. “We are army fans, as a society.” But her intention, all along, had been to allow any family to create life after death, if they wished.
In another strategic move, Rosenblum campaigned on the issue of grandparental alienation — where grandparents are denied access to their grandchildren after divorce, death, immigration or family feuds. “I convinced Knesset members in 2010 to change the law, giving grandparents the right to see the child under supervision, but the main idea was to solve the problem of those families who have lost a son.” So the legal right of grandparents to a grandchild became enshrined in law.
Rosenblum draws up the contracts between prospective mothers and grandparents. “This is the first time a mother can define her role as a daughter-in-law. It’s great,” she grins. The contract gives total autonomy to the mother. She alone can decide where the child will live, how he or she is educated and any other details relating to upbringing. She even has the right to terminate the pregnancy. Grandparents need to make a specific provision in their wills for posthumously conceived grandchildren to inherit anything. For Rosenblum, it is essential to demonstrate that there is no financial incentive for the women.
Fuchs Weizman is already aware of several cases where the wishes of bereaved parents and widows or partners are not aligned, including some where the partner not only does not want to use the sperm herself, but doesn’t want the parents to use it either. Courts are more likely to favour the wishes of spouses, Rosenblum says, and that makes her furious. “If you decide to get divorced from the sperm, leave the family to find another woman that wants to marry the sperm. Their soul is in your hands, and you’re killing it. I think it’s evil.”
Since October 7, she has been promoting the idea that people should leave a biological will detailing exactly what they would like to happen to their gametes in the event of their death, in the knowledge that when PMSR cases come to court, judges will look for assurance that the dead man wanted children. But she considers even this process to be another frustrating and unnecessary obstacle.
“He’s not here any more. He can’t change anything, so who cares what he wanted? You have the power to give life to the family, not to kill it another time. Let’s glorify him and continue his line. It’s great.”
In a sparse apartment a few streets back from the beach in Tel Aviv, in mid-July, Liat Malka is visiting her sister, Rachael, who has been evacuated from her home near the Gaza border. On a low shelf, there are family photographs in frames and a pencil drawing of Rachael’s husband Gil, who was murdered when militants stormed their home on October 7.
“We lost Gil,” Liat nods. “It was very difficult, because he was a father figure to Shira.” Liat’s eight-year-old daughter, Shira, never had a father of her own. Her biological dad died seven years before she was born. Growing up one of six, Liat always assumed she’d have lots of kids. But when she was 35 a doctor did some tests and told her she needed to start trying for a family soon if she ever wanted to be a mother.
“I felt lucky to live in a society where a single woman is able to have a child on her own. She doesn’t need to be married. She won’t be looked down on,” Liat says. But when she looked into sperm banks, her heart sank. “My future child would not have the option to know who the father is. It’s like a hole in your history — you don’t know who you belong to, who you can relate to.” Then she stumbled on a YouTube video of Yulia and Vlad Poznianski talking about their son, Baruch, a brilliant soldier and grad student who had died aged 25. They were searching for a woman willing to have his baby.
Liat contacted their lawyer, Irit Rosenblum, and a meeting with the Poznianskis was arranged. Yulia and Vlad brought an album of photos of Baruch at every stage of his life. Liat saw a young man with kind, smiling eyes, surrounded by friends. The Poznianskis were in tears talking about him and she felt wary of asking too many questions, but she learnt he was smart and happy, a loving, affectionate son. She felt a connection to the man in the pictures.
Baruch died from mouth cancer in 2008, but he had banked sperm before his chemotherapy. Knowing he had chosen to preserve his sperm was important to Liat, yet every cancer patient in Israel is routinely offered gamete freezing before they undergo treatment that could affect their fertility. Agreeing to have sperm stored is not the same as giving consent for it to be used.
Liat found it hard to be in touch with the Poznianskis while she was undergoing fertility treatment, which was stressful enough. She didn’t tell them when she went to hospital to give birth. “It was a very weird feeling, because these people were still strangers,” she says. “You can’t have people you don’t know waiting around for you to have your baby.” The day after the birth, she shared the news that Shira had arrived.
The Poznianskis are no longer strangers. They see each other every two weeks. “Now we’re a family, and I love them. I respect them. They respect my privacy, my boundaries. I feel comfortable talking to them about anything.” When I ask if things would be different if she had a partner, Liat crinkles her nose. “Hmmm. I think it probably would. But I would do anything to keep that connection. I know that these two people love my daughter more than anyone else does, besides me. They have pure, unconditional love . . . the kind that could only normally come from the father.”
Shira bounds into the room, her bright blue eyes and blonde hair a stark contrast to Liat’s dark features. Liat pulls up her phone to find a photo of Baruch at the same age, with the same colouring, nose and smile. She holds the screen next to her daughter’s face. “It’s like looking in a mirror!” Shira exclaims. She tells me about going into her dad’s bedroom, reading his report cards, choosing one of his table tennis trophies to take home. She is bemused that a journalist is here, that there is anything remarkable about her story.
So far, Shira has been happy with her mother’s choice. “She says, ‘Mum, I’m very happy you made this decision, because I am happy that there is me,’” Liat tells me. But when Shira was younger she didn’t understand death, and thought Baruch might one day knock on their door. “It hurts to hear her say, ‘I wish I had a father. I wish I could see him. I wish he could see me.’ Sometimes she has difficult questions. ‘Does he know that I exist?’”
“Shira is just like Baruch. She shines,” her grandmother Yulia tells me a few days later. Sixteen years after his death, she still finds it impossible to speak about her son. “I cannot,” she says, simply, when I ask what he was like. But she wants to tell the story of her granddaughter, so other bereaved parents can learn about what’s possible. “When I held newborn Shira, I felt my heart began to beat again. It had been still for seven years.”
During the time it took the Poznianskis to find Liat, Yulia gave birth to another child, a son who is now 13. But she bristles at the suggestion that this shows she was never creating a grandchild as a replacement for Baruch. “What’s wrong with having a replacement? I wanted a replacement. Baruch was the sun, the centre of my life. We lost the purpose of living. Yes, of course, it’s a replacement — I’m not ashamed of it.” She bristles too when I ask whether Baruch wanted kids. “We didn’t have a lot of discussion about it. When a young man goes into the army, goes to war or falls ill, I don’t think he thinks a lot about children.” The army should make all new recruits donate sperm before they go into service, she says, and if not, it should be taken from dead bodies as a matter of course. Unless men opt out, their consent should be assumed.
For Yulia, posthumous conception is a medicine for grief. “If you have something to help people, you must use it. Use the development of science. Once tuberculosis was a fatal disease, now we have antibiotics. What’s the difference?”
Posthumous conception is not like antibiotics. Fuchs Weizman worries about how little physicians understand about the quality of sperm preserved. “The general agreement is that as soon as we see something viable we freeze it, but we don’t know what the cut-off is, in terms of time, in terms of the mechanism of death.” She fears there will be families today going through the turmoil and expense of trying to find a mother and applying to a court for permission to use their son’s sperm when there may be no chance of it leading to a baby.
She is also troubled that families are routinely presented with the option of freezing sperm at the same time as learning of a death. “The IDF proactively suggest doing it in every case when a soldier dies, which is problematic.” If parents are told their son has died, but that some of him can be preserved if they act quickly, it will be almost impossible for them to make a clear-headed judgment, she says. “That’s very scary. We are bombarding those families with decision-making at such a stressful time.” If the man had left an indication of what he wanted, it wouldn’t be up to parents, and doctors could be confident they were acting in accordance with his wishes.
“The assumption that all soldiers who die would have wanted kids — and, specifically, would want someone else to raise a child they would never know — I think that’s a stretch. I don’t feel comfortable with that,” Fuchs Weizman says. She tells me about a case where a soldier who died by suicide after October 7 had his sperm preserved. “As physicians, the general notion is that those are the cases that we feel least comfortable with,” she says quietly. “That person did not want to live, so I don’t think he wanted continuity. But the parents are holding on to something. They are allowed to. They don’t need to go through court to preserve the sperm. There’s no discussion.”
She wants an open public conversation about how and when consent should be obtained, how the option of PMSR is presented to bereaved parents and what the role of doctors should be. “Am I supposed to proactively help people find a woman, for example? I’m happy to be involved in discussions, but I wish the government would initiate them.” When I ask if her work is more about dealing with grief rather than making babies, she sighs. “I think to some extent it’s delaying bereavement. It’s helping people hold on to something.”
Bella Savitsky, a senior lecturer and doctor of public health at Ashkelon Academic College, is the first researcher to investigate whether Israeli soldiers actually want their sperm to be used to create children they will not meet. Her research was self-funded, and conducted amid almost unbearable grief. Her son, Jonathan, was shot and killed aged 21 on October 7.
When Jonathan was in kindergarten, he preferred to play with girls; the other boys were too rough. “But when he was 14, he said he was tired of being this gentle, skinny boy — he wanted to be more masculine,” Savitsky tells me over Zoom. He got into the Swedish power-metal group Sabaton. He started working out and doing extracurricular activities that would better prepare him for army service. He was brilliant at coding. “But he told us it wasn’t enough — he also wanted to be a man. During his army service, he wanted to do something more significant than sitting in front of a computer. And he did, unfortunately.”
Jonathan was four months away from completing his service on October 7. His unit was called to defend the besieged army outpost at Kissufim near the Gaza border, where unarmed women soldiers had been stationed. During a seven-hour gun battle, Jonathan’s 13-man unit rescued 50 people, but he and two other soldiers were killed. Their bodies were transferred to the Shura military base. That day, “the base received more than 1,000 bodies. Sometimes several bodies were in the same body bag, with burnt or chopped body parts belonging to different people,” Savitsky says. It took two days for the IDF to formally identify her son, and ring her doorbell.
“When they told me my son was not alive any more, my first thought was, ‘How can I keep him with me?’ Immediately, I said, ‘I want posthumous sperm retrieval.’” The procedure was performed 72 hours after Jonathan’s death, but no viable sperm was found. “It was a final wiping out of my son from earth. There was nothing left. He only exists in our memory.” I ask Savitsky if Jonathan wanted children. She nods, “I knew that he wanted children, but that’s different from wanting children after his death. We never spoke about that, so I don’t know.” She adjusts her glasses, then shakes her head. “I’ll tell you the truth — I didn’t care what he would have wanted. I wanted him back, in any kind of form.”
After her son’s death, Savitsky spiralled into a deep depression and had suicidal thoughts. In an effort to find meaning, she began participating in a Ministry of Health committee in the Knesset where PMSR was being discussed. “As a bereaved mother who didn’t succeed in retrieving her son’s sperm, I could give that perspective. But then I realised nobody really knows what the men want, and nobody really cares.” So she decided to find out herself.
Savitsky created an anonymous online questionnaire, and went on television and radio appealing for men to fill it in. “In the event of your unexpected death, would you agree that your parents can use your sperm to bring a child/children into the world?” the survey asked, followed by, “Would you want your partner to use your sperm in the event of your unexpected death to bring a child/children into the world?” Between February and April 2024, the survey was completed by 600 Israeli men aged 18 to 49. When she was sure her sample was demographically representative of the population, Savitsky began to analyse the data.
Of the 507 respondents whose parents were still alive, 47 per cent would not want them to use their sperm to conceive a child; 38 per cent said they would agree to it, and 14 per cent didn’t know. Of the 312 men in a committed relationship, 37 per cent would not want their partner to use their sperm, and 49 per cent would agree. Savitsky tells me about a separate study published this year which found that 88 per cent of single Israeli men who froze sperm prior to chemotherapy wanted it destroyed in the event of their death.
“The assumption that almost every man desires genetic continuity, even after death, is not correct,” she says. Soldiers are in a special group, she adds. “It’s easy to ask them and we should.” That would “release the family from needing to make such serious decisions in this difficult moment.”
The survey also asked the men to explain the reason for their answers. Savitsky has analysed these replies for a qualitative study. “I’ve read all of the responses. It felt like my opportunity to speak with my son. It was amazing,” she says, eyes sparkling. One response, in particular, stuck in her mind. “The young man was saying the state should invest in the mental rehabilitation of bereaved parents, instead of creating a human being whose life purpose is to be a monument. This sentence made me sit and think how selfish I was. I really wanted to have a kind of monument.” But when I ask whether she would still want to have retrieved Jonathan’s sperm, Savitsky smiles. “Yes. Yes. Yes,” she says. “I would. I would.”
After Jonathan’s death, Savitsky’s marriage collapsed, and she moved out of the family home. She takes antidepressants, sees a psychiatrist and a psychologist, does weekly art therapy and attends a support group for bereaved parents. She discovered a love of power metal and went to a live performance of an Israeli band that dedicated a song to Jonathan. “I cry a lot, but I’m working,” she says. “I don’t know if there’s an afterlife. But if there is, I think he’s very happy that I’m doing something apart from sitting on his grave, which I also do once a week. It’s the only place where I feel really good.”
There is no cure for grief. But there will be dozens, perhaps hundreds, of babies born in Israel over the next few years whose fathers died before they were conceived. And since October 7, across Israel and Palestine, many more babies whose fathers were killed while they were in the womb have already been born.
“Whether or not they were conceived during or after their father’s life, there are bound to be a lot of new orphans who have never met their parents,” Fuchs Weizman says. “A whole generation is going to be dealing with such difficult beginnings.”
Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
Read the full article here
