In the US, soldiers are not the only men taking out biological insurance by freezing their sperm. But their posthumously conceived children face legal battles to establish their rights, reports Anna Mundow
With more than 114,000 "US personnel", as they are called, already serving in Iraq, the weekly - often daily - reports of deployment orders have become so commonplace that you hardly notice them:
July 14th: Associated Press reports that the 778th Transportation Company of the Kansas Army National Guard has been mobilised for duty in Iraq.
July 15th: The Wichita Eagle reports that the 317th Quartermaster Battalion has been called to active duty.
July 23rd: The Third Infantry Division announces that it has received deployment orders to return for at at least a year to Iraq.
Behind each bulletin are thousands of personal stories. Wives losing husbands; parents losing children; children losing parents; men and women coming home paralysed, blind, insane. The perennial story of war.
This time, however, soldiers and their families are taking out a futuristic form of biological insurance.
An increasing number of US troops who face deployment are freezing their sperm in order to procreate after injury, even after death. They join the ranks of civilians who, when confronted with terminal illness or contemplating suicide, choose to freeze their sperm in order to create a family they will never see.
Inevitably, the phenomenon has triggered historic legal battles as the offspring of cryogenic unions sue for recognition and for survivor benefits that the government typically denies them.
Patrick Atwell, aged 30, a sergeant in the US Army National Guard, was motivated by the threat of infertility rather than the prospect of death.
"I'd feel robbed if I couldn't have children," Atwell told USA Today recently, adding that he was alerted to the wartime risk of infertility by "a buddy who said he became sterile after a previous deployment and an anthrax vaccination".
Terry Turner, also 30, serving in the army reserve, was prompted by his wife.
"I asked him to do it because of all the stuff that may occur," Angela Cruz, a 36-year-old nurse, explained. "He was getting vaccinated, there could be biological warfare. We don't have children and we want them. Maybe I'm a little too cautious but I thought it was a reasonable thing to do."
Cruz was not alone. Earlier this year, when California Cryobank, a sperm bank in Los Angeles, offered free analysis and one year's free storage of sperm to military personnel who were being deployed to Iraq, the company received more than 80 calls and processed 37 appointments in the first three weeks. (The company charges approximately $165 for semen analysis, $250 for specimen freezing and $335 for one year's specimen storage).
Fairfax Cryobank, in Virginia, currently sees two to three military clients a week and expects those numbers to grow as mobilisations increase.
"Most of the time it's the wife or girlfriend who gives us a call," says Fairfax director Brent Hazelrigg. "They want to bank the sperm before any smallpox or anthrax vaccination. They've also heard stories of men coming back from the first Gulf War not being 100 per cent."
US military spokesmen decline to comment on the trend, in much the same way as they remain silent on Gulf War Syndrome, depleted uranium or any other battlefield biohazard. Soldiers, however, have learned not to rely on their superiors for information.
"They talk to each other," says Robert Dove, a counsellor with the American Friends Service Committee. "They all know what's going on, that this war is out of hand, that there is no plan, that there's no end in sight. And they know they're being lied to about how long they'll be there, what risks they're being exposed to."
Dove sees sperm storage as another "desperate measure" being taken by men in their 30s, many from the army reserve and national guard, who essentially "are being trained as truck drivers so that they can be shot". If the risk of dying in combat is undeniable, the risk of sterility is a long-established fact.
"I'm old enough to have seen the fallout from the Vietnam War," says Dr Cappy Rothman, a specialist in male infertility, "I saw hundreds of GIs who were made infertile both by specific genital or spinal-cord injury and by chemicals like Agent Orange."
DR ROTHMAN SPECIALISES in post-mortem sperm retrieval where "the typical scenario is that a young man dies accidentally and usually a parent or spouse asks that his sperm be retrieved in order that a child of his may be conceived". In such cases, sperm is surgically removed and frozen as soon as possible after death in order to maximise its reproductive potential.
California Cryobank, where Rothman is now a consultant, advises its clients to wait for six months after bereavement before making the decision to use the frozen sperm to attempt conception.
Lauren Woodward waited for 16 months before conceiving twins in 1995 from sperm which her husband had frozen when he was diagnosed with leukaemia at the age of 30.
"It was a dream we both had," Woodward commented at the time. "So after he died I knew that's what we both wanted."
The Social Security Administration was unmoved. When Woodward applied for survivor benefits for her twin daughters she was denied on the basis that her husband was only the sperm donor at the time of conception, not the legal father. In January 2004, a Massachusetts superior court ruled otherwise.
"Posthumously conceived children may not come into the world the way the majority of children do," Chief Justice Margaret Marshall wrote. "But they are children nonetheless. We may assume that the legislation intended that such children be entitled . . . to the same rights and protections . . . as children conceived before death."
Rhonda Gillett-Netting's case was slightly different. She and her husband were already trying to conceive through in vitro fertilization when Robert Netting (59) was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He delayed starting chemotherapy in order to have his sperm frozen and 10 months after his death Rhonda became pregnant. The Netting twins were born in August 1996.
When a district court ruled that the children were ineligible for survivor benefits because they were not dependent on their father at the time of his death, Rhonda appealed the decision. Last June, the court of appeals in San Francisco ruled that the twins were Netting's legal children and were therefore entitled to survivor benefits.
"In no way should these children be punished for the manner in which they were conceived," argued Priscilla Smith, an attorney for the Centre for Reproductive Rights, noting that the Netting case is likely to set a nationwide precedent favouring posthumously conceived children.