KIEV – The latest protest by Ukrainian women is for unborn children. For a few months the soldiers’ wives have been regularly taking to the streets to say that it is time to send them home, their men exhausted from two years spent at the front. But for a few days now there has been another battle that has infuriated them: it is that of the war widows who, after losing their husbands, discovered that a new law prevents them from getting pregnant using the sperm that their husbands had specially stored in their sperm banks before taking up the rifle. And it gets worse: the new rule even states that, after the soldier’s death, it must be destroyed.
If there is anything that Ukraine is terribly sensitive about, it is respect for its “heroes,” the defenders who fell in a war fought largely by brave volunteers. This is why the case that exploded with the complaint of a lawyer specialized in the medical field is raising a wave of indignation in the country. The absurdity of the new law, which provides for the destruction of the seed just when it would unfortunately have been useful, was highlighted the lawyer Elena Babich: in a high post Facebook he told the disheartening case of a girl who knocked on the door of his study.
She was the widow of a young soldier “who dreamed of having children,” and had “cryo-preserved sperm before going to the front. All the necessary documents had been produced – contract, trust deed from the wife, declaration on the use of sperm to give birth to a joint child as desired – but then he was killed.”
It is a choice that many soldiers make, that of keeping their sperm safe to prevent a wound from extinguishing the dream of paternity by compromising their reproductive capacity. But when his grief-stricken wife decided to begin the process of having a child anyway, she discovered that “recently our legislators were so worried about the financial component of the cryopreservation of military biological material who have adopted a law prohibiting the use of a soldier’s sperm after his death.” Indeed, “from March the clinics will be forced to get rid of them”.
The post immediately went viral. It was filmed by Ukrainian media detonating the case even reaches the Verkhovna Rada, the Parliament, where the deputies are now trying to take action so as not to lose face in front of the country. “How do you explain to a grief-stricken woman who literally a couple of months ago was preparing the documents with her husband to have a child, that while her husband defended the state and died our legislators literally deprived him of the right to be father after his death?”.
According to some commentators, the real reason for the law would be scandalous: to prevent those children born from the test tube of heroes from then being able to claim aid from the State. In any case, it has become an epochal fool in front of the country, and the buck-passing has begun by the deputies who have signed laws and amendments to try to place the responsibility on others or to explain, by climbing on well-soaped mirrors, arcane legal reasons why the law would instead have had the merit of bringing to attention the conflict existing between other laws on the subject. In short: it was a mess and it remains a mess.
But the wave of indignation rose so high that in the end the parliamentarians swore to the widows and wives of the soldiers that they would reintroduce the law. They will, they say some of those who had written the law like Mikhail Radutsky or who had signed it like Olga Stefanishina, with a new amendment that as a first effect will save the genetic material preserved by husbands by preventing it from being destroyed in March. But it will be a good opportunity, they explain, to clearly clarify their right to use it to get pregnant according to the law. That is, it is necessary to resolve a series of legal and ethical issues regarding the ownership of the preserved sperm and the ownership of its use once the husband, as deceased, can no longer have access to it.