Reproducing Jews is an ethnographic account of Israeli Jewish women seeking reproductive technology the implications it has for the status of these children in society, Jewishness, and the vitality of the Israeli state. It is important to note that this book has nothing to do with Palestinians, as if they are irrelevant and not central to legal, religious and cultural politics. Today, there are 5 million Jews 4.5 million Palestinians and half a million non-Jewish immigrants. Even with this population distribution, all laws justify Palestinians as second-class citizens.
Beyond the cultural roots of reproduction among Jews, which is explained later, lays a deeply political and historical root as well. There is a large discourse among demographers, policy makers and Israelis themselves about the large Arab and Palestinian birth rates in comparison to Jewish fertility rates. Israeli state pro-natalism is based on the desire to create Jewish babies.
Some believe that Jews must reproduce for the Israeli army; others feel they must replace the 6 million Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust while others maintain very child-centered notions on family. Whatever the motivation, reproductive technologies and single-parenthood have been supported by the state, which is an example of how self-managing reproductive initiatives are encouraged under the rubric of the state.
To illustrate state support further, Kahn points out that non-Jews have equal access to fertility treatment in Israeli hospitals under the National Health Insurance Law (1994). The law provides equal coverage for all residents of Israel, both Jewish and Palestinian. However, this law covers Jewish residents of the Occupied Territories but not Palestinian residents. Palestinians may receive fertility treatment in Israeli hospitals but the extent to which varies according to the form of health insurance they carry. Therefore, if Palestinians don’t have access to these services materially and socially, then they cannot use them. The National Health Insurance Law guarantees that every Israeli citizen has the right to receive healthcare.
I argue, that state and religious support for reproductive technologies is part of a broader eugenics movement in Israel. In the early 20th century in the United States, for example, Margaret Sanger, who later went on to start Planned Parenthood, was a crusader for women’s rights to birth control. At the same time, the eugenics movement in America appropriated Sanger’s crusade with a campaign to remedy America’s social problems stemming from ‘biological degeneracy.’ The eugenicists advocated the rational control of reproduction in order to improve society. What this meant in practice is that people of color, mentally disabled persons, and other ‘undesirable and unfit citizens’ (i.e. convicted felons, drunkards, etc.), were deemed genetically inferior and were oftentimes forcibly sterilized.[1]
Many eugenicists advocated positive eugenics, which encouraged the breeding of superior citizens and voluntary cooperation in forming the most desirable unions. By 1913, twenty-four states and Washington, D.C. had enacted laws forbidding marriage by people considered genetically defective.
Today, the eugenics movement in the United States functions a bit differently with state-sponsored population control initiatives among poor women of color. Thousands of black women have been pressured into trying Norplant, a very controversial form of birth control, in efforts to curb their birthrates. The new contraceptive was eagerly embraced by policymakers, legislators and social pundits as a way of curing the birthrate of poor black women.
For example, on December 12, 1990, only two days after the FDAs approval of Norplant, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an editorial entitled, “Poverty and Norplant: Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass?” The editor began the piece by linking two recent news items: one announced the approval of Norplant and the other reported the research finding that half of all black children live in poverty. The editor went on to propose Norplant as the solution to inner-city poverty (as if all poor black people live in cities). He endorsed giving women on welfare financial incentives to encourage them to use the contraceptive (of course he fails to mention that numerically there are more white women on welfare than black women).[2]
So what does this have to do with states-sponsored reproductive technology in Israel? Either Israel is the remarkably secular society it claims to be or there is something clearly wrong here. What is evident from this text is that these freedoms to use reproductive technologies are only enlightened and special for Jews.
A University of Haifa professor Arnon Sofer stated, “If the non-Jewish population continues to outpace population growth, Israel could become an underdeveloped Third World country by 2020.” Arab reproduction is viewed as an obstacle to ‘development.’ The Population Resource Center published statistics indicating that in 2000, the total fertility rates (TFR) in the Gaza Strip were the highest in the world at 7.4 births per women, the TFR in Palestine was 5.9 while in Israel it was only 3.0. Within Israel, Jewish women have a TFR of 2.7 compared with 4.8 for Arab women.[3]
According to the Egyptian newspaper, al-Ahram Weekly, strategic planners, former army generals and scholars met privately last year in Israel to discuss “adequate solutions for dealing with the demographic threat.” [4] Solutions being proposed include birth control, forced emigration (through economic pressure) and population transfer—a new euphemism for what in the Balkans became known as “ethnic cleansing.” In a state that claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East, we see lawmakers candidly discuss ways and means to curb the birth rate of a given section of society on the grounds that they do not have the right religion and race. This is just one of many manifestations of the racist Israeli state. It allows its Jewish citizens libertarian freedom to have children without husbands within the context of a patriarchal society. Kahn spends most of the book highlighting the context within which Jewish women are able to have children without husbands.
The book examines issues of parenthood as a very integral social experience for adult Jews and how these women are able to reconcile their wish to have children out of wedlock within the dictums of Jewish cultural beliefs. A woman who cannot bear children is an example of suffering in the Israeli and Jewish imagination. The childless woman is pitied and prayed for while the Biblical command “to be fruitful and multiply” resonates very deeply in the consciousness of many people and is celebrated and childbirth is regarded as the essence of female joy.
Jewish citizens of the Jewish state can only come from three places: through immigration, from conversion to Judaism, and from Jewish mothers. Oftentimes, Jewish women are the primary agents of the reproduction of their race and there is much pressure for these women to reproduce Jews.
Kahn opens her text with a group of single professional women in their thirties and forties discussing the challenges of getting pregnant, not finding the ‘right man,’ and dealing with single motherhood. It is clear that these women struggle with patriarchal relationships in their society and simultaneously challenge them. The fact that women deliberately conceive children out of wedlock is not a sign of ‘promiscuity’ for these women, but a manifestation of a legitimate desire to have a child and become a mother.
The social context in which unmarried women in Israel choose to pursue pregnancy with artificial insemination is that they are able to make this choice within a culture of high visibility and state support for unmarried mothers. Unmarried mothers are very much a part of the social landscape through divorce, widowhood and large cohabitation rates.
These women exhibit deep cultural beliefs on motherhood, which state that the most primal and natural goal for women is to be a mother. This is in conjunction with rabbinical principles that children born to unmarried women are considered legitimate, full-fledged Jews AND is supported by the state. In 1992, the Knesset passed the Single-Parent Families Law, which subsidizes single parents in housing, childcare, and tax exemptions. This law is ideal for these Jewish women who wish to procreate, and this is for the betterment of the Israeli state. In 1994, the Aloni Commission, a government-sponsored investigation into the legal, social, ethical, and religious issues implicated in the use of reproductive technology, concluded that there should be no interference in the right of access of these technologies and that it does not threaten the fabric of society, but rather, is a guaranteed as part of her basic right to privacy. Here we see reproductive technology couched as integral to a progressive society.
Israeli state-sponsored reproduction initiatives exhibit strong similarities to the United States' policies and initiatives. What is evident is that reproductive choices among people of color at the international scale are not supported by states and ruling classes, they never have and they never will be. Women’s reproductive liberation calls into question the authority of gender roles, the cultures of interpersonal communication including sexuality, and how men individually and through religious and state institutions dictate these roles in ways that subordinate women.
Susan Martha Kahn. Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000. 216p.