Originally published at: Israel loosens rules for retrieving sperm from corpses | Boing Boing
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The idea of allowing parents to unilaterally obtain a body harvest seems like pure squick. At least the decedent chose their spouse; though even that seems like a case where some sort of donor form ahead of time would be preferable(a general one; it’s not like men of military age are exactly immune from accidents and other relatively sudden peacetime causes of death).
Especially if parents, not just widows, can make the request it also seems curious that it’s sperm only, rather than gamete generally, unless there’s some technical problem that makes eggs nonviable: sure; a man isn’t going to get very far with just harvested eggs compared to a woman with access to harvested sperm; but either would get closer than parents, who would need to obtain both the matching gamete and find somewhere to gestate the result.
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As I said last time this came up:
But I also hear the sound of a particular strain of demographic panic in this policy. For some reason this government will go to any lengths to ensure that the type of people who serve in its army are having as many children as possible.
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Their sperm being in the army is what makes them the men they are.
I mean, it’s pretty hard to say “we’re trying to build a militaristic ethnostate” quite like a law allowing for nonconsensual extraction of sperm from dead soldiers. But then again a lot of Israeli politicians aren’t exactly shy about stating their desire to build a militaristic ethnostate, so there’s that too.
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At risk of being flagged,
This sounds like a plot of a poor Dogeinstein video game where in the autocratic baddies use the dead to father the next soldiers for the protagonist to mow down in the power fantasy.
please provide your own “are we the baddies” gif.
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Huh, I didn’t realize that I had a monopoly on the “Dead Israeli Soldier Jizz” beat here 
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But isn’t service in the Israeli military mandatory? So there isn’t really a “type”, because everyone has to be in it at some point?
I guess there is a type for people who stay in it.
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There’s a strong de-facto exemption for the ultra-orthodox. My understanding is that this is not especially popular with the people who aren’t exempt; most especially in cases where they perceive religious hardliners to be disproportionately stirring up sectarian trouble at the same time they disproportionally avoid fighting the trouble when it arrives. The relatively sizable amount of welfare collected while being too busy doing important torah stuff to serve apparently rubs it in.
I believe that the same fault line helped add an extra degree of intensity to the displeasure of large parts of the IDF with Netanyahu’s moves to curb the judiciary and generally shore up his position with the support of the hard right.
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You can take it when you pry it from my cold, dead fin…
Hang on… nope
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There are two main exemptions from Israeli conscription- One is as @fuzzyfungus pointed out, the ultra-orthodox population. The other is the Arab citizens of Israel. Both of these groups have a higher birthrate than the Secular to Conservative Jewish population that is conscripted. This is what I think is driving this paranoia about getting every single child possible from the population that does serve.
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So, not killing 4000 children? That’s not the worst thing instead? Because that seems far worse than extracting sperm from a dead soldier, if we’re being honest… Maybe I have my priorities wrong somehow?
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… they’re like medieval castes — priests, soldiers, and workers, everybody has to stay in their lane
Yeah I couldn’t tell if this guy was mad that I wrote about it at all, or if he was mad that I didn’t editorialize more. I felt like it just sort of spoke for itself this time around.
Agreed!
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