The Only Man Not in the Room

When a casualty notification officer knocks on a door in Israel and tells parents that their son has been killed, she now tells them one thing more: that his sperm can be retrieved and that there are only hours to decide.

What appears at the door is not a grandchild. It is the possibility of one. For most people the thought is close to unthinkable, and yet it is hard to name what exactly is unthinkable about it.

Not that a child may be born after his father’s death: a woman widowed while pregnant is a familiar figure here. Not that bereaved parents want something of their son to continue; that wish is old enough to have shaped villages, foundations, and street names. Not even the medicine, practiced here for more than twenty years.

What is unusual is the sequence of decisions that begins at the door. Within hours, someone must decide whether sperm may be taken from the man’s body and preserved at his family’s request. Years later, someone may decide whether it can be used to conceive a child, a question that falls, in the end, to a family court. Israel treats these as separate matters, for good reason. The only person absent from both is the man they concern.

The scale is no longer small. Sperm has been retrieved from roughly a quarter of the soldiers and security personnel killed in this war: 253 men as of April 2026, 82 percent at a parent’s request. Before October 7 a parent needed a court order even to ask; a special order removed that requirement in the war’s first week. Only two families have so far been granted permission to conceive. What exists at scale is held possibility, not children, held under guidelines written in 2003 for a handful of cases a year, and no ruling binds the next. Friction has been eased at every point in the sequence except the one that would have involved him.

It would be easier to read this as an oversight if Israel had no settled view about what a person may decide in advance concerning his own body. It has an elaborate one. A will binds. Burial follows what the deceased wanted. Most pointedly, the 2008 transplant law requires explicit consent for organ donation: an ADI card signed in life, on which a person may exclude particular organs or require that a member of the clergy be consulted before anything is taken. A national apparatus of cards, registries, and campaigns exists for no other purpose than to record, while a man is alive, what may be done with his body once he is not. The state concluded long ago that his answer is worth the cost of collecting it in advance and that nobody else’s reconstruction of it will serve. A will, a burial instruction, and a donor card are the same principle administered by three different offices. None of it reaches sperm.

In their place, a court weighs a reconstruction offered years later by the people asking for the outcome. Where the request comes from parents, the wish has to be proved. Calling that his autonomy is generous. And the objection that he is beyond harm proves too much: the man wronged is not the body in the hospital. It is the soldier who was alive, who had a stake in whether he would have children and with whom.

The scrutiny at the second stage is real, and it rests on treating the first as mere preservation. But retrieval is already something done to his body at another person’s request, and unlike the second decision, it is never revisited. The urgency explains why it has to be made quickly. It does not explain why it has to be made by someone else.

Other countries reached the opposite conclusion from opposite directions. Britain permits retrieval only where he consented in writing while alive; without his word there is nothing to preserve. Canada and the United States require consent as well; France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Slovenia forbid retrieval even where he gave it. Their reason is that some things a signature cannot settle, among them the position of a child conceived to fill an absence. That objection is serious, and it is a different one: it is an argument about the child, and this is an argument about the man. What is striking is that Israel belongs to neither camp. It is alone in preserving first and asking afterwards.

Written consent is the right rule for men who have been asked and the wrong one for men who have not. None of the 253 were asked, and their silence is the state’s omission rather than their answer. But once the question has been put, an unreturned form stops being an accident and becomes a refusal. The presumption in his favor may well be right in many cases; it has never been tested, and the one time anyone put the question to living Israeli men, nearly half said they would refuse their parents.

A form could put both questions to him while he is alive: whether his sperm may be retrieved and whether it may then be used to conceive. The answers need not be the same: a man might permit preservation while setting conditions on how, or by whom, it could later be used. It would spare parents from testifying to their son’s wishes at the worst hour of their lives and from carrying the answer for years afterward. It would spare a judge from assembling a mind out of other people’s memories. And where a man had said yes, it would put the matter beyond argument.

It would have to be revisable. A soldier of eighteen is not the reservist of twenty-seven with a wife, and a form that could not be changed would reproduce the original error under a new author, binding a man to someone he had stopped being. That is an administrative problem, and an army that updates a soldier’s file for every other purpose can update it for this one.

These are cruel questions to put to a young man, and the IDF has said it has no plans to put them; its representatives have noted that even the ADI card is not part of induction and that this is a considerably weightier matter. But a state that trains him to use weapons and prepares him for the possibility that he will not come home has already said the hard part out loud. Not asking spares no one the thought of death.

The arrangements improvised under the pressure of these years will outlast them, and they will settle more than memory and mourning. The question is not whether bereaved parents should be allowed to hope. It is who decides. Everyone else has been given a role: the parents, the doctors, the courts, the state. The only man not in the room is the one whose answer matters most.