Jerusalem – More than four years after her 20-year-old son was killed in action in the Gaza Strip, Rachel Cohen is hoping for a grandchild after winning a court case to have a woman inseminated with the dead soldier’s sperm.
The case, decided this month by a court near Tel Aviv, is the first in the world in which a court permitted a woman to be inseminated from a known, dead sperm donor who was not her partner, according to the lawyer who argued the case, Irit Rosenblum.
The parents of the Israeli soldier, Staff Sgt. Keivan Cohen, had his sperm extracted and frozen after his death and fought a lengthy legal battle for the right to use it to inseminate a woman he never met.
The Cohens argued that although their son did not leave a written will, he had on many occasions expressed a wish to become a father.
“On the one hand I’m terribly sad that I don’t have my boy; it’s a terrible loss,” Rachel Cohen, 43, said in a telephone interview from her home in the town of Petah Tikva. “But I’m also happy that I succeeded in carrying out my son’s will.”
A year after her son’s death, Cohen contacted a newspaper and told her story, saying she was seeking a woman willing to be inseminated with her son’s sperm and to “take the responsibility of being a mother.”
Preparations are now underway to inseminate the woman chosen by the Cohens, a 35-year- old unmarried economist who has declined to be publicly identified.
“She’s like family to us,” Rachel Cohen said. “Cruel and good fate brought us together.”
