An Israeli court recently ruled that a dead soldier's family can use his sperm to impregnate a woman he never knew or met. When 20-year-old Keivan Cohen was killed in 2002, two hours after his death, his parents insisted that a sample of his sperm be taken and preserved.

Five years after his death and a bizarre, precedent-setting court case later, Cohen is on his way to fathering a child with a woman he never met. During the trial, his mother testified about her son's desire to have children and provided video recordings of him professing his desire to be a father someday.

Whether he wanted to be a father after he was dead, however, he never mentioned, and Cohen did not have a will. Irit Rosenblum, who represented the Cohen family during the trial, said that some soldiers, including American ones, have begun to leave sperm samples or leave instructions for post-mortem sperm extraction in case they die in battle for these purposes. Currently, the law in Israel allows a spouse to make such a request, and this latest ruling now sets the precedent that parents can as well.

Some may draw parallels to organ donation debates and families deciding whether or not their relatives' bodies can be used for those purposes, but the prospect of a child being born from a dead father who did not explicitly indicate that this was his wish, and with a woman he did not know, strikes a different and more concerning chord.

What if Cohen had wanted to father a child with a particular woman? What if his desire was not only to father a child, but also to raise it and see it grow himself? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions were lost when Cohen died, and it is questionable whether it was right to allow his parents to answer them on his behalf.

Cohen's parents suffered the deepest loss a parent ever could, and they have our sympathy. For them to continue his legacy and bloodline with a woman he never knew without his permission, however, is an issue that only Cohen himself could have tackled.