Article on Posthumously Conceived Children of Fallen Soldiers

David Teitelbaum recently published a Note entitled, Be Fruitful and Multiply After Death, but at Whose Expense?: Survivor Benefits for the Posthumously Conceived Children of Fallen Soldiers, 14 Cardozo Pub. L. Pol’y & Ethics J. 425 (2016). Provided below is a summary of the Note:

Imagine the following scenario: a 19-year-old soldier, unmarried and single, suffers a fatal injury as a result of being shot by an enemy sniper. The young man dies in a hospital with his two distraught parents by his side. Fraught with grief, the parents plead with doctors to perform postmortem sperm retrieval on their son in the hopes of preserving his chance of fathering a child. While never having obtained the fallen soldier’s formal consent, the doctors perform the procedure and freeze a sample of the young man’s sperm. After five years of intense legal battles with the court system, the parents are able to obtain their son’s sperm from the hospital. In response to a newspaper advertisement placed by the fallen soldier’s parents, 200 women come forward to be interviewed for the opportunity to conceive and raise a child of the deceased. The parents select a candidate, and after years of attempts at in vitro fertilization, a baby girl is born to a woman whom the fallen soldier had never met.

While this scenario may appear to be nothing more than futuristic science fiction, it is in fact an accurate account of the events following the death of Sergeant Keivan Cohen of Petah Tikva, Israel. Stories like the one described above, made possible by Israel’s revolutionary stance on the issue of posthumous conception, raise a series of legal and ethical questions. This Note focuses on the issue of posthumous conception as it pertains to fallen soldiers. More specifically, it investigates the “survivor benefits” afforded to the posthumously conceived children of male soldiers who die during their military service.