Daring Sperm Smugglers in Palestine Brave Israeli Jails, Implausibility to Get Pregnant

People try to sneak lots of miscellaneous contraband into prison, but how often do they try to sneak things that aren’t people out of prison? Almost never, probably because the whole point of prison is that it doesn’t have anything that anyone wants, except, in the case of Israeli prisons holding Palestinian prisoners, lots of incarcerated semen.

That semen, according to some dubious sources in a report from NBC, is staging a Great Escape-like jailbreak from Israeli prisons despite tight security. Many of the Palestinian men languishing in Israeli prisons are serving multiple life sentences, and, since conjugal visits are an absolute no-no, many of those men’s spouses face the very real possibility of not having children.

Hope, however, springs eternal. Dr. Salim Abu Khaizaran, head of the Razan Center for Infertility in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, is trying to lend a helping, clinical hand to the wives of these Palestinian inmates. He has allegedly carried out several successful IVF procedures using sperm that visiting wives have smuggled out of prison. Take a minute to let the phrase “semen smuggling” permeate your consciousness. Does it somehow remind of the Magic School Bus when the bus shrank to the size of a blood cell and went on a crazy adventure in the human body? It should.

That so much sperm has been smuggled out of Israeli prisons is nothing short of a miracle, according to the Israeli Prison Service. Spouses have to pass through an airport scanner, a body search, and must leave all their possessions in a locker before being allowed face-time with a prisoner. Face-time through a pane of glass. Moreover, Abu Khaizaran and the women he treats have been very vague about the details of these successful smuggling runs and ensuing pregnancies, which means that either nobody’s really smuggling sperm or that this is an inside job.

Whatever is really going on in the illicit Palestinian sperm market, this much is true — there’s an ensemble direct-to-DVD comedy waiting to be made about these daring sperm smugglers.