When freezing sperm is a patriotic statement

The couple dreamed of a big family.

They would have five children, with their father’s curls, smile and dreamy eyes.

They taught children to paint and make pottery and took them on long walks in the woods near their hometown of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine.

Then Russia invaded his country, ruining his plans.

The husband, Vitaly Kyrkach-Antonenko, volunteered to fight and was killed on the battlefield when his wife, Nataliya, was three months pregnant with their first child.

Now, still grieving, he says he won’t give up on his dream.

He intends to give brothers to his firstborn.

Like hundreds of other Ukrainian soldiers, her husband froze her sperm before returning to battle in the hope that if he didn’t come home, he would still be able to pass on his genes.

“Vitaly,” said his wife, “will be the father of all our future children.”

For many Ukrainians, the idea of ​​saving soldiers’ sperm is both personal and patriotic.

It helps men who want to make sure something of them remains if they die, and it comforts their partners.

In a country now famous for itsspirit of resistanceit’s also another way to fight back.

It leaves open the possibility, at least, of preserving the Ukrainian lineage, even when the Kremlin insists that the Ukrainian state – and, by extension, Ukrainians as a separate people – is a fiction.

The concept of denying that cancellation has caught on long enough that Parliament is debating a bill that would allow soldiers to freeze their sperm. at the expense of the state.

“This is a continuation of our genetic heritage,” says Oksana Dmytriieva, the Ukrainian lawmaker who authored the bill, which has already cleared a roadblock to passage in an initial vote.

Several clinics have already started offering the service. freerunning with expenses.

And Nataliya Kyrkach-Antonenko unexpectedly became a kind of role model for the cause, using it Facebook encouraging male soldiers and their wives to give themselves the chance to raise a family no matter what happens on the battlefield.

“The modern world allows us to give birth to and raise the children of our fallen loved ones, the bravest human beings in this world,” she wrote.

“Raise them worthy of their father, with the same love for Ukraine, and give them the opportunity to live in the country for which their father shed his blood.”

These messages of resistance appear to have reached Russia as well.

A pro-Kremlin journalist, Olga Skabeeva, recently told Russian state television that freezing soldiers’ sperm is tantamount to “nation-building genetic experiments.”

“With the help of artificial selection,” he warned, “a whole army of selected Ukrainians will be brought up with a higher level of Russophobia“.

Natalya Tolub, a spokeswoman for the IVMED fertility clinic in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, said in an email that the journalist’s remarks were a sign that the Ukrainians had hit home.

. “Success,” she wrote.

His clinic freezes the sperm of a few 10 soldiers.

Petro Patiy, a doctor at a fertility clinic in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk, says many of his clients are still couples who come for family planning counseling or fertility issues, but now he feels compelled to ask too. to men if they want to freeze their sperm.

“It’s very difficult,” says Patij.

“They want to hear something upbeat and you have to offer them to freeze the sperm because one of them could die tomorrow.”

Alone

And for some widows, continuing to bear the children of deceased spouses is not easy.

Nadiia Lytovchenko is one of those who is having a hard time.

Last year’s invasion kicked off on her fifth wedding anniversary to her husband, Andrii.

At the end of the summer he had been killed in a Russian ambush, leaving his wife alone with their son and the sperm he had frozen a few years earlier for fear of an attack. escalation of hostilities with Russia.

“It’s hard to decide and too early to think about using” his sperm, said Lytovchenko, who is struggling with grief, the financial hardship created by her husband’s death and the realities of raising her son alone.

“But it’s nice to know that possibility exists,” he said, before pausing.

“Good to know”.

c.2023 The New York Times Society