From Bloomberg:
Rozhkov, a Ukrainian immigrant turned soldier, was killed 20 years ago, when he was 25. […] The paraphernalia from Rozhkov's service forms a shrine in the apartment. His M16 rifle is framed on a wall with pictures of him wearing his green beret. On a desk sit military medals and trophies. Many of the mourners—now leafing through photos, gently mocking their younger selves—knew Rozhkov. They served with him and were his neighbors. His mother, Ludmila, a former teacher in Crimea who lives alone in the apartment, tells the group that their presence is comforting. "An apartment should be filled with children and light," she says in heavily Russian-accented Hebrew. "Thank you for bringing them."
One of the children darting among the mourners—sitting on laps and nodding shyly—is 5-year-old Veronica. She never met Rozhkov, of course, but she's his daughter. Thirty hours after he was killed, his sperm was extracted, preserved in liquid nitrogen, and, 14 years later, used to fertilize the eggs of Irena Akselrod. She didn't know Rozhkov, but she volunteered to bear and raise his child after meeting Ludmila. "I was moved by her story," Akselrod says. "She's alone in Israel, she lost her only son, and had no grandchild."
From there, the article gets into some of the complications of this, umm, fascinating new industry. Things like legal ramifications: can you prove that the deceased did in fact want children, and/or that the deceased wanted you to have their posthumous jizz cup? What if sperm is retrieved from the corpse, but the deceased's widow remarries, and doesn't want her late husband's family to give his sperm away to someone else — whose property is that semen, anyway?
And of course, there's already a US-based company making plans to offer similar services here.
Postmortem Sperm Retrieval Is Turning Dead Men Into Fathers [Ethan Bronner and Chen Shalita / Bloomberg]
Israel extracting sperm from dead soldiers and using it to create children [Maggie Harrison / Futurism]
Image: Public Domain via RawPixel
