Ukraine is fighting a war on two fronts: the one with Russia, and the one over its future population. The BBC reports on a state-backed effort that now pays for soldiers to freeze their sperm, a bid to protect both individual fertility and what one MP bluntly calls the country's "future." Launched by private clinics early on during the full-scale invasion, the program was later folded into law, complete with public funding. Just a year into the war, one private clinic in Ukraine's capital boasted it had thousands of milliliters of sperm on hand, Euronews reported at the time. "You can impregnate half of Kyiv with just one dose," the head of the clinic noted.
Soldiers can now store samples for free, and, if they die, partners can access the sperm for up to three years—provided the soldier gave written consent ahead of time, per the BBC. That policy grew out of earlier controversial rules that required destruction of samples upon a soldier's death, a stance challenged by widows like Katerina Malyshko, who had to go to court to gain access to embryos previously created while her husband was alive, as well as his sperm. "They would store it, but I couldn't use it," she says. A judge finally approved her request to use the sperm about six months later, though she says she isn't ready just yet to get pregnant.
"I think the children of our soldiers who've been killed should have a chance to live," she says. "They have the right to live in the country their parents died for." Another widow whose husband was killed early on in the war, when she was pregnant with their first child, told the New York Times then: "Vitaly will be the father of all our future children." Doctors say war stress is hammering fertility and delaying family plans, even as Ukraine loses many of its youngest men to the war, as well as millions of women who've fled abroad, per the BBC. Officials hope expanded sperm banking soon becomes as routine as giving a DNA sample for identification purposes.
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