Creating Life Amidst Death: The Lived Experience of Medical Professionals Performing Posthumous Sperm Retrieval

Abstract

Posthumous sperm retrieval (PHSR) situates fertility clinicians at the paradoxical intersection of medical practice: creating the possibility of life during encounters with the dead. Little is known about how practitioners navigate the tension between professional duty and human vulnerability in such an extreme context. To address this research gap, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 Israeli medical professionals (physicians, embryologists, and laboratory staff) directly involved in PHSR during a period of heightened national loss. Interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed cyclical psychological shifting between three themes: detachment, breaches, and connection. Detachment was initiated through technical framing, selective attention, and intentional imaginative devices, enabling task performance under emotional strain. Breaches in detachment emerged via sensory or symbolic intrusions—a glimpse of a face or name, media coverage, or contact with bereaved families—that punctured the defensive scaffolding, thereby re-humanizing the deceased. Connection followed, ranging from acts of meaning-making to empathic attunement to families’ needs, before practitioners ultimately re-asserted distancing mechanisms in order to resume their work. Interpreted through an integrative framework that bridges Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body with Winnicott’s concept of holding, these oscillations reflect an ethic of ambivalence in which professional functionality and humanity are jointly sustained. Findings underscore needed institutional normalization of emotional reflexivity and support of clinicians’ capacity to “hold” death while enabling life. The study extends scholarship on posthumous reproduction and medical humanities by articulating the lived dynamics through which care remains possible in existentially charged clinical contexts.