Facing a demographic catastrophe, Ukraine is paying for troops to freeze their sperm

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The law funds troops who want to freeze their eggs or their sperm, as Ukraine's population plummets.

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"Our men are dying. The Ukrainian gene pool is dying. This is about the survival of our nation," the soldier tells me, speaking by phone from a position somewhere near the eastern frontline.

The 35-year-old is serving with Ukraine's National Guard and when he returned on leave recently his wife persuaded him to visit a clinic in Kyiv and leave a sperm sample.

It was frozen free of charge as part of a programme to help serving soldiers.

If Maxim were killed, his wife could use the sample to try to have the child they've always wanted.

But he says his frozen sperm could be crucial to creating a family, in any case.

"Whether you are right on the 'zero point' of the frontline, or 30 or even 80 kilometres back, there is no guarantee that you're safe," the soldier says, explaining that Russian drones overhead are a constant threat.

"That means stress, and this [can have] an impact: your reproductive ability declines. So we have to think about the future and the future of our Ukrainian nation."

Private fertility clinics began offering what's known as cryopreservation to servicemen and women in 2022 at the start of Russia's full-scale invasion.

They could freeze their sperm or eggs for free in case they were injured in action or their fertility was affected.

The following year parliament stepped in to regulate the practice and provide state funding.

"Our soldiers are defending our future, but may lose their own, so we wanted to give them that chance," is how MP Oksana Dmitrieva describes the law she helped draft.

"It's to support them, so they can use their sperm later."

The politicians' initial efforts caused a public outcry though, when they stipulated that all samples should be destroyed on a donor's death. That came to light when a war widow tri

Source: BBC

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