The ethical crossroads of posthumous parenthood

A growing number of children are being brought into the world with plans for them to be raised by single mothers — not because the father left or made decisions that would prevent him from being part of the child’s life, but because the father has died before the child is even conceived.

An article from World News Group shares the story of a West Point cadet, Peter Zhu, who died in a skiing accident but was kept on life support for three days after being declared brain dead because he was an organ donor. In that time, Zhu’s parents obtained a special court order that allowed them to harvest his sperm. The New York Times originally reported the story, which made headlines, as it is very rare for a posthumous sperm removal procedure to take place in the U.S. The parents declined to comment on if Zhu’s sperm would be used for the creation of a child.

One country where posthumous sperm removal is becoming more and more common is Israel. Parents who find out their son has been killed in the war are asked by military officials if they would like to have their son’s sperm harvested. The procedure has the highest success rate if the sperm cells are collected within 24 hours of death, although they can live for up to 72 hours. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, there have been some 200 sperm retrievals.

Avi Harush, whose 20-year-old son, Reef, was killed in combat earlier this year, said he absolutely wanted his son’s cells harvested.

“Despite the horrible loss, we choose to live,” he told BBC.

Reef did not have a girlfriend or wife, but the Harushes are looking for the right woman to become the mother of a child with Reef ’s DNA.

Although the sperm cells can be harvested and frozen in a lab, they cannot immediately be used in IVF (in vitro fertilization). In Israel, the family first has to demonstrate in court that the dead man wanted to have children. This can be an extensive process, taking years. The first parents in Israel to preserve and use their dead son’s sperm were Rachel and Yaakov Cohen, whose son Keivan was shot and killed by a Palestinian sniper in 2002, the BBC reports. They found a woman to carry and raise their granddaughter. The Cohens’ granddaughter, Osher, born from Keivan’s sperm, is 10 years old. She knows about her father and her room is decorated with dolphins, the animal her dad loved. She has plenty of extended family members on both sides to help raise her, although nothing replaces a dad.

Children raised in single-parent families can of course go on to be successful adults. However, it’s one thing for a child to end up being raised by a single parent due to life circumstances or because they were adopted by a single parent. It’s quite another for the grandparents or widow to purposefully choose to create a child using the dead father’s sperm, knowing the child will grow up with a deceased parent and the trauma that comes with that. However, many Israeli families strongly value preserving their family lineage, so it’s important the child comes from their son’s “seed.”

“Family is an extremely important social institution in Israel and what makes a family is the children… Anyone who lives here is expected to have children,” said Sigal Gooldin, a Hebrew University medical sociologist who was quoted in The Times.

Israel has a high fertility rate: an average of 2.9 children per family, well above the global fertility rate of 2.3 and the U.S. at 1.8. Israel is also far ahead of other nations when it comes to using assisted reproductive technologies (ART), with women ages 18 to 45 provided with free, unlimited IVF procedures for up to two “take-home babies.” “There is something deeply humane about this policy, this idea that people have the right to be parents,” said Vered Letai-Sever, an Israeli mother who gave birth through IVF, in an article for The Times.

The conversation about what types of limitations should be placed on ART hinges on the supposed right to be a parent. Having children is a beautiful blessing, but not a right. Unfortunately, we live in a broken world, one subject to disease and death. We are not guaranteed any number of blessings in this life, be it health, wealth, a spouse, children or peaceful times to live in. Our very lives are like a vapor that could end just as quickly as they started.

With advances in technology, we may be tempted to play God, but at what cost? When it comes to issues of life and death, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Brad Littlejohn wrote an opinion piece on the ethical dangers of assisted suicide for World News Group. However, his piece dovetails with the topic of ART quite well. He writes: “With the advent of easy contraception, we began to think of the creation of a new human child as fundamentally a matter of choice, and if a matter of choice, a matter of technique. Human will, aided by scientific know-how, could be employed either to ‘make’ a baby (via artificial insemination by donor, in vitro fertilization, or perhaps even cloning) or to stop one being made (by contraception and chemical or surgical abortion). That which we have the power to make, however, logically, we must have the power to unmake. If human life is a miraculous gift of divine power, it is outside our control. If it is the routine product of our own techniques, we can do with it what we want—ending it or encouraging others to do so when it is no longer wanted.”

I can’t imagine our great-grandparents could have envisioned a world where the mother and father’s sex cells would be harvested and combined before the embryo is transferred into the mother’s body, or where parents would have the chance to pick the gender of their future child or eliminate embryos susceptible to certain genetic disorders. Advancements in technology could open the doorway to a “build-your-own kid” model, with the couple choosing the traits they deem most desirable. With that comes a host of moral and ethical concerns.

It is a strange new world. Now that we’ve let the genie out of the bottle, who’s to say where it ends?

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