In Ukraine, many soldiers are freezing their own sperm to guarantee the possibility of having children even if they die in the war: in that case their female companions could use it with an artificial insemination carried out in the clinic where it was frozen, and thus have genetically linked children to the father even if he is dead. It is an option not yet regulated by Ukrainian law, which raises even complex ethical questions and which many fertility clinics have made possible, in some cases for free, only after the start of the Russian invasion.
A case in which the sperm of a killed soldier was used to conceive a child was reported by Le Monde, and concerns a Ukrainian artist, Natalia Kyrkach-Antonenko, who was also one of the first people to make her choice public : Her husband, a soldier, had been killed in the fall of 2022, a few days after he went with her to a sperm freezing clinic. Now Kyrkach-Antonenko is four months pregnant.
Technically the freezing of sperm – as well as that of ovules, i.e. female sex cells – is called cryopreservation: it provides that the cells are frozen at very low temperatures (-196 °C) in liquid nitrogen, in order to be used in the future and thus preserve the ability to reproduce. It is a technique generally used for various reasons: by women who want to be able to plan a pregnancy later, perhaps for work or economic reasons, or perhaps by people who want to preserve their fertility before undergoing therapies or treatments that could put it at risk.
In Ukraine, the reasons why many soldiers are resorting to this technique – and why the clinics are making it possible even without a law that allows it – are of a completely different type, linked above all to the ongoing war against Russia. Olena Babich, a lawyer who deals a lot with issues related to assisted reproduction, told Le Monde that there are political reasons behind this choice: «Transmitting and protecting our genetic heritage is a right, and at the same time a way to resist the genocide carried out by the Russians”. According to Halyna Strelko, director of a clinic in Kiev, the war will cause a serious demographic decline that needs to be remedied.
More generally, it seems that the war has prompted many more people to start a family: in the first six months of 2022, over 103,000 couples got married in Ukraine, a 21 percent increase compared to the same period of the previous year and a quantity who hadn’t been seen for seven years.
Until the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian fertility clinics were used a lot by foreign couples, including Italian ones, and in particular for the use of gestation for others, the assisted procreation technique with which the gestation is carried out by a person outside the couple (in Ukraine it is legal, unlike Italy). Vitaly Radko, of the Mother and Child clinic in Kiev, told The Economist that mostly Ukrainian families now turn to Ukrainian clinics, 40 percent of them with a soldier in the couple.
In Ukraine today, hundreds of thousands of men are drafted into the army and engaged in fighting the Russian army, while a third of Ukrainian women have left the country and gone abroad. The programs activated so far by the Ukrainian clinics provide for the possibility of freezing one’s sperm cells for free, and at the same time big discounts for the assisted fertilization process necessary to use them.
A private clinic in Kiev, IVMED, reported 150 soldiers who froze their sperm, and 50 conceptions. But having precise data is difficult, because the use of post-mortem sperm in Ukraine is not regulated (even in Italy there are no clear rules in this regard, at least with respect to fertilization with cryopreserved sperm and collected before death, while collection after death is forbidden).
Ukrainian soldier Vitalii Khroniuk with his partner Anna Sokurenko during a visit to the IVMED fertility clinic in Kiev, February 4, 2023 (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
The regulation of this practice has been discussed in Ukraine for some time: the committee of the Ukrainian parliament that deals with bioethics was dealing with it until 2022, but then stopped doing it because the beginning of the war shifted the focus on something else.
In fact, the freezing of sperm and its post-mortem use raise some ethical and legal questions on which precise regulation is necessary: for example, one can evaluate whether it is the case or not that the parents of a deceased man use his frozen sperm to have grandchildren, perhaps resorting to gestation for others. Or can a post-mortem child claim inheritance rights from a deceased man who ultimately chose not to have children?
Some professionals interviewed by Le Monde also expressed other types of doubts, relating precisely to what is happening in Ukraine. Lisna Hiryna, a psychologist, believes that a few months should pass between the death of her partner and the use of his sperm cells, to allow herself time to mourn: otherwise, Hiryna said, the use of assisted fertilization with frozen sperm it could be mistakenly experienced as a loss compensation.
– Read also: Sperm rise and fall
