Supreme Court nixes use of sperm from dead soldier

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by the parents of a fallen soldier to allow his frozen sperm to be used to father children via a surrogate mother.

Capt. Shaked Meiri died in 2004 in a military accident in the Golan Heights while on reserve army duty. Immediately after the accident, some of his sperm was extracted in the event that there was a desire to use it at a later date.

However, Meiri’s widow ultimately decided she did not want to have child through her late husband’s sperm, and after herself remarrying and establishing a family with her second husband refused to allow Shaked’s sperm to be used to father children via a different surrogate as requested by his parents.

Although lower court rulings found in favor of the parents, an appeal by the widow to the Supreme Court was upheld in December, while the court rejected an appeal by Shaked’s parents to reexamine the case in front of an enlarged panel of justices on Monday.

Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, head of the Ethics Department of the Tzohar rabbinical association, gave his backing to the Supreme Court ruling.

“It is heartbreaking, but the Supreme Court was correct in its ruling,” the rabbi argued. “When a man forges a covenant with his wife and his wife with him, this covenant precedes any other. This ethos is written in the account of creation when it says, ‘A man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and they will become one flesh,’ and this is the appropriate ethical approach.”