Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Post
October 28, 2007
Pg. 5
By Tony Allen-Mills, Sunday London Times
It started as an unlikely trend among American and British soldiers worried about becoming infertile if they handled toxic weapons in Iraq.
Yet for Kathleen Smith, the widow of an Army second lieutenant, the movement of storing soldiers’ sperm allowed her to create a family even after her husband passed.
More than two years after her husband, Brian, was killed by a sniper in Iraq, Smith gave birth to his son.
She has since become the leading voice of a group of war widows who turned to artificial insemination to keep their dreams of having children.
Her son, Benton, now 15 months old, was conceived by in vitro fertilization using sperm that Brian had deposited before his departure for Baghdad in January 2004.
“I’ve had some lousy luck in my life,” Smith, 42, told an interviewer. “But Benton has worked out. He is wonderful.”
Smith’s experience has sparked a debate in the Pentagon, which has not resolved whether children such as Benton are eligible for military benefits.
There are known to be at least four children conceived after their fathers died in Iraq.
The issue of IVF for soldiers first arose in 2003 amid reports some soldiers had become infertile after fighting in the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.
The prospect of returning to Iraq prompted hundreds of soldiers to visit sperm banks.
Maria Sutherland was trying to have a baby with her husband, Stephen, an Army staff sergeant, long before he received his orders for Iraq.
After six years together the couple had just begun IVF treatment when Sutherland, 33, left for Baghdad in August 2005. He deposited sperm so that his wife could continue the treatments.
Sutherland was killed few months later.
“He said, ‘If I don’t come back, I want you to be able to go through with this,’ ” she said.
A year later she became pregnant and her son, Stephen Sutherland II, was born in June this year.
October 28, 2007
Pg. 5
By Tony Allen-Mills, Sunday London Times
It started as an unlikely trend among American and British soldiers worried about becoming infertile if they handled toxic weapons in Iraq.
Yet for Kathleen Smith, the widow of an Army second lieutenant, the movement of storing soldiers’ sperm allowed her to create a family even after her husband passed.
More than two years after her husband, Brian, was killed by a sniper in Iraq, Smith gave birth to his son.
She has since become the leading voice of a group of war widows who turned to artificial insemination to keep their dreams of having children.
Her son, Benton, now 15 months old, was conceived by in vitro fertilization using sperm that Brian had deposited before his departure for Baghdad in January 2004.
“I’ve had some lousy luck in my life,” Smith, 42, told an interviewer. “But Benton has worked out. He is wonderful.”
Smith’s experience has sparked a debate in the Pentagon, which has not resolved whether children such as Benton are eligible for military benefits.
There are known to be at least four children conceived after their fathers died in Iraq.
The issue of IVF for soldiers first arose in 2003 amid reports some soldiers had become infertile after fighting in the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.
The prospect of returning to Iraq prompted hundreds of soldiers to visit sperm banks.
Maria Sutherland was trying to have a baby with her husband, Stephen, an Army staff sergeant, long before he received his orders for Iraq.
After six years together the couple had just begun IVF treatment when Sutherland, 33, left for Baghdad in August 2005. He deposited sperm so that his wife could continue the treatments.
Sutherland was killed few months later.
“He said, ‘If I don’t come back, I want you to be able to go through with this,’ ” she said.
A year later she became pregnant and her son, Stephen Sutherland II, was born in June this year.