A newer version of an age old issue.

Mac, leave me with a baby.

Mrs. Beverly McConnell (Paula Prentiss) to her husband, Lieutenant Commander William "Mac' McConnell (Tom Tryon) before he ships out.

This is a story as old as mankind. Men going off to war, and their wives and them are concerned of making a family if he returns. A very serious concern. I'm reading George C. Marshall: Education of a General by Forrest C. Pogue, and currently it's covering his service in World War I. One of the items that stuck me was the loss of life. I've been told before both Britain and France lost a generation of you men in the trenches of World War I, and that was one of the (many) reasons France was taken so fast. The men who would have been there to defend France were never born because their fathers were killed a generation before. I've read that one of the reasons Field Martial Montgomery was not as aggressive to engage with his army after D-Day was he had the last army Britain could field. They were scraping to find manpower, reclassifying former draft rejects to fill their needs. 

From the book (pages 157-158), "The British Expeditionary Force at the end of 1917 was nearly one hundred thousand men smaller than the year before, and there were not enough men left at home to make up the deficit. The French, in the same cruel state of exhaustion, had had to distance one hundred separate battalions for lack of replacements." Good God. 

Well, a modern solution to the age old possibility of loosing the family after the father goes to war. Many Ukrainian couples are freezing sperm so they can have children if, God forbid, the father dies.

Before going to fight, many Ukrainians are freezing their sperm

Couples want babies even if the father never comes home

It is one of the concerns for mothers and expectant mothers at the clinic, who spoke to AFP of their hopes and fears for the future as around five children are born at the hospital every day to both local women and internally displaced people (IDPs) forced to flee from Russian-held areas of the country. After the war began, the hospital set up a shelter in the basement including a room with beds for mothers and cots for newborns. 

Natalia kyrkach-antonenko found out within two hours of it happening. An artillery strike. Shrapnel to the head. Death in seconds. Volunteers identified her husband Vitaly by his devilish looks and long hair; his nom de guerre “Beautiful” was no accident. One telephone call later, and Ms Kyrkach-Antonenko’s dreams of a family together were gone. But she had prepared for the eventuality. Now she intends to raise a family alone using sperm the couple froze on one of Vitaly’s two rotations back home. In an emotional appeal on social media, written a month after her husband’s death, she urged other couples to take out the same insurance policy. “It could be your only chance. Think and don’t put it off, I beg you.”

Russian tanks brought Ukraine’s booming fertility industry to a shuddering stop in February. The clinics reopened in April to a changed world. Previously the customers were typically foreigners, taking advantage of Ukraine’s liberal rules on surrogacy. Now they are often Ukrainian couples, anxious because the husband has to go and fight. Mother and Child, the country’s largest fertility clinic, launched a programme to meet the new demand, encouraging servicemen and women to freeze their sperm or eggs free of charge, lest they be injured or killed on the front. Their partners were offered large discounts on assisted-conception programmes that usually cost between $1,300 and $4,000. The most needy were given the treatment free. Doctors called the initiative “Hero Nation”, a nod to the growing number of babies conceived to dead or seriously injured parents. They credit the programme with helping the clinic return to roughly 80% of its pre-war capacity...

I've known people who have had issues with conception and gone to in vitro fertilization to have a family. One of the greatest technologies developed in the last century,  People will go to their whatever means they have to to have a family, and now technology is helping men become fathers beyond the grave. Truly amazing.