From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   When Freezing Sperm Makes a Patriotic Statement   
   By Emma Bubola, April 16, 2023, NY Times   
      
   The couple had dreams of a big family. They would have 5 kids, who would have   
   their father’s mop of curls, his smile and dreamy eyes. They would teach the   
   kids how to paint and make pottery and take them on long walks in the forests   
   near their hometown,   
    Sloviansk, in eastern Ukraine.  Then Russia invaded their country, shattering   
   their plans. The husband, Vitaly Kyrkach-Antonenko, volunteered to fight and   
   died on the battlefield when his wife, Nataliya, was three months pregnant   
   with their first child.    
    Now, still deep in mourning, she says she will not give up their dream. She   
   intends to give siblings to her firstborn. Like hundreds of other Ukrainian   
   soldiers, Vitaly froze his sperm before heading back to battle in the hope   
   that if he did not make it    
   home, he could still pass on his genes.  “Vitaly,” his wife said, “will   
   be the father of all our future kiddies.”   
      
   For many Ukrainians, the idea of saving soldiers’ sperm is at once personal   
   and patriotic. It helps men who want to ensure something of themselves remains   
   if they die, and it brings comfort to their partners. In a country now famous   
   for its spirit of    
   resistance, it is also one more way of fighting back. It leaves open the   
   possibility, at least, of preserving Ukrainian bloodlines even as the Kremlin   
   insists that Ukrainian statehood — and by extension Ukrainians as a separate   
   people — is a fiction.   
      
   The concept of denying that type of erasure has caught on enough that the   
   Parliament is debating a bill that would allow soldiers to freeze their sperm   
   at the state’s expense.   
      
   “This is a continuation of our gene pool,” said Oksana Dmytriieva, the   
   Ukrainian lawmaker who wrote the bill, which has already cleared a hurdle   
   toward passage in an initial vote.   
      
   Several clinics have already begun offering the service free, at their own   
   expense. And Ms. Kyrkach-Antonenko has unexpectedly become something of a role   
   model for the cause, using her Facebook page to encourage male soldiers and   
   their wives to give    
   themselves the option of making a family, no matter what happens on the   
   battlefield.   
      
   “The modern world allows us to give birth and raise the children of our   
   fallen loved ones — the bravest and most courageous humans in this world,”   
   she wrote. “Raise them worthy of their father, with the same love for   
   Ukraine, and give them the    
   chance to live in the country for which their father shed his blood.”   
      
   Such messages of resistance seem to have reached Russia too.   
      
   A pro-Kremlin reporter, Olga Skabeeva, said recently on Russian state TV that   
   soldiers’ freezing sperm amounted to “genetic experiments to construct a   
   nation.”   
      
   “With the help of artificial selection,” she warned, “a whole army of   
   selected Ukrainians with an increased level of Russophobia will be bred.”   
      
   Natalya Tolub, a spokeswoman for the IVMED fertility clinic in Kyiv, the   
   capital, said in an email that the reporter’s statements were a sign that   
   the Ukrainians had hit their mark. “Success,” she wrote.   
      
   Her clinic, she said, is freezing the sperm of about 10 soldiers every week.   
      
   Among them was Yehor, 31, who had been with his girlfriend, Svitlana   
   Braslavska, 25, for only a few months when they decided to freeze his sperm.   
      
   As he headed back to battle last month after a short break, he said that he   
   felt calmer and more fearless than the first time he went. He credited   
   experience, time — and the sperm he left behind in a clinic.   
      
   “We are fighting for freedom for our children; we also have the right to   
   have them,” said Yehor, who asked to be identified only by his first name   
   for security reasons. “Doesn’t matter if they will be born in that way, or   
   even after us.”   
      
   But he said his interest in freezing his sperm was also “about not   
   decreasing the number of our patriots, people who will later defend, develop   
   and build our country.”   
      
   Ms. Braslavska does not want to think about whether she would opt for assisted   
   reproduction if he did not return, but she said the war had made her think   
   about having children for the first time. She interpreted her new interest as   
   a “physical effect”   
    that the war was having on her, an “impulse to continue our nation.”   
      
   Despite Ukrainians’ bravado in the face of adversity, experts say that   
   Ukraine cannot rebuild its population, which was already declining before the   
   war, by using frozen sperm for pregnancies. But Jay Winter, a retired Yale   
   historian, said that wasn’   
   t the point.   
      
   By offering not only to die for Ukraine, but also to provide for new life,   
   soldiers were making a statement — showing their commitment to national   
   survival. “And the survival of the Ukrainian nation,” he said, “is what   
   this war is about.”   
      
   The exact number of Ukrainian men who have frozen their sperm is hard to come   
   by, but Oleksandr Mykhailovych Yuzko, a doctor and the president of the   
   Ukrainian Association of Reproductive Medicine, said that requests had risen   
   at clinics all over Ukraine.   
      
   He said he expected the sperm to be used not only by some widows, but also by   
   women whose husbands suffer injuries — physical or mental — that render   
   them impotent. He said the government needed to do more to help women have   
   soldiers’ children, by    
   paying for assisted reproduction procedures as well.   
      
   “The first part is the preservation of reproductive cells,” he said.   
   “The second part is the restoration of the reproductive potential of   
   Ukraine.”   
      
   The idea of freezing soldiers’ sperm is not new. During the Iraq and   
   Afghanistan wars, several cryogenic firms offered the service free to American   
   troops. In Israel, the families of fallen soldiers have gone a step further,   
   fighting to advance a bill    
   that would allow a family to use the sperm taken from a dead soldier’s body   
   for procreation, unless he had previously objected to it. Critics in Israel   
   call the notion planned orphanhood.   
      
   Dominic Wilkinson, a professor of medical ethics at Oxford University, said   
   that in his view the rush by some Ukrainian soldiers to freeze their sperm was   
   ethical, so long as both partners agree beforehand that it can be used if the   
   man dies.   
      
   “There are many children who have only a single living parent,” he said.   
   “That doesn’t mean that it would be wrong to bring that child into the   
   world.”   
      
      
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