Pentagon to Offer Plan to Store Eggs and Sperm to Retain Young Troops
By Michael S. Schmidt,
The New York Times
| 02. 03. 2016
Untitled Document
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter believes he has come up with a way to help the Pentagon retain troops: freezing sperm and eggs.
As part of an initiative to make military service more appealing and family friendly, Mr. Carter has created a pilot program that will pay for troops to have their reproductive cells preserved.
The goal is to give those in uniform the peace of mind that if they are hurt on the battlefield — hundreds of veterans suffered injuries to their reproductive organs in Iraq and Afghanistan — they would still be able to have children.
The program is also meant to encourage women to stay in the military during their 20s and 30s, a time when many leave after giving birth. By freezing their eggs, they will have the flexibility to remain deployed overseas or otherwise pursue their careers and put off having children.
Women who reach 10 years of service — what Mr. Carter called “their peak years for starting a family” — have a retention rate that is 30 percent lower...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 10.29.2026
At the beginning of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s blockbuster documentary You Can See Everything, Billy Evans (partner of Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes), says that they decided to do the film for one purpose: “radical transparency.” As they work on “Theranos 2.0,” Evans and Holmes want to show the public that she has been misunderstood –– painted as a liar and a fraud in the public imagination (and the courts) despite, as she claims in the...
By Jennifer Denbow, Guest Contributor
| 10.29.2026
Almost every day I am reminded that we are in the midst of a fertility panic. Whether it’s the Vice President exhorting Americans to have more babies or The New York Times running yet another story about the fertility cliff, fear about falling fertility rates is everywhere. While centrally concerned with declining rates of childbearing, Anna Louie Sussman’s new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, is a welcome antidote to the panic.
Sussman has written...
By Anna Louie Sussman, The New Republic | 10.26.2026
There’s a certain kind of novel that’s not quite apocalyptic enough to be science fiction, but just far-fetched enough to be speculative. No one is from outer space; society has not yet been carved up into a hierarchy of groups...
By Gary Sernovitz, Bloomberg | 10.21.2026
Three years ago, at the age of 50, I found out I have dangerous genes. So in June, I went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see how they could be fixed. Among my 6 billion base pairs of DNA are two...
