Question- How do new reproductive technologies challenge the cultural

construction of motherhood?

Answer- Susan Martha Kahn focuses on eggs and wombs as the determinants
of maternal, religious and national identity in Israel. She says there is a direct
correlation between the social construction of motherhood and the social
reproduction of national identity where the positive determination of Jewish
identity automatically confers citizenship.

However, the origins of maternality become complicated with the advent of

ovum-related technologies forcing a conceptual fragmentation of maternality
into genetic and gestation components challenging the traditional beliefs of
the origins of motherhood. She also argues that the conceptual fragmentation
of women’s bodies into eggs and wombs de-humanize women and promotes
an attitude that views their bodies as detachable parts that can be combined
and recombined in order to create legitimate maternity according to rabbinic
specifications.

Kahn describes the fieldwork conducted in a small fertility clinic in Jerusalem

where most of the patients were either unorthodox Jews or religious Muslims
though secular Jews and Christian Palestinians also went there for treatment.
She calls the hospital a religious place as all the treatments and procedures
that took place were performed with careful consideration of Jewish law.
Moreover, the hospital’s amenities were quite basic. There were two fertility
laboratories where in the first, the lab workers accept sperm samples from
people undergoing fertility treatment and process the sperm for insemination.
In the second lab, they perform in-vitro fertilization and micromanipulation.
They also prepare gametes, zygotes and embryos for surgical and intravaginal
insertion into the womb.

Because this was a hospital where treatments and procedures were performed
under Jewish law, only married couples with fertility problems were eligible for
treatment. Unmarried women were not accepted. Also, all the fertility
procedures were monitored by “maschgichot” or Halakhic inspectors who
watch each procedure to make sure that there is no untoward mixing of sperm
and eggs.

The maschgichot and the lab workers were all women who seemed to create a
common realm of conversation that revolved around shared family and
domestic concerns like children’s birthdays, weddings, food recipes, hair
coloring or diets. It represented a fictive kinship network within the labs whose
primary objective was to enable patients to conceive.

This positive working relationship between the secular lab workers and the
religious maschgichot was also indicative of the ways medicine and religion
was enmeshed at the hospital which can be seen in the recording of the date
of immersion in the mikveh (ritual bath). Immersion terminates the woman’s
status as niddah, rendering her ritually pure and thus able to engage in sexual
relations with her husband. This state of ritual purity is thus crucial to Halakhic
conception and becomes important for the timing of insemination and embryo
transfer procedures.

The medical domain looks at the woman’s body as a site for slitting, probing,
suctioned and sewing. The activities were done with clinical efficiency and
detachment, far removed from the emotional experience of the woman
undergoing the treatment.

Kahn then refers to Oocyte pickup, a procedure related to surgical removal of

ova from the hormonally hyper stimulated bodies of the woman. It is an
outpatient procedure in which no major incisions are made in the woman’s
body and recovery is usually rapid. There are always three medical
professionals present namely, the doctor, the anesthesiologist and the nurse.
The procedure takes place in a darkened operating room, since the eggs are
sensitive to light. The doctor uses an aspirating needle to pierce the egg-
bearing ovarian follicles.

There are three standard forms of embryo transfer: gamete intrafallopian

transfer (GIFT), zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT) or intravaginal embryo
transfer. The first two are surgical procedures. The overarching influence can
be seen by the fact that in case a woman bleeds because of the procedure, she
enters into the state of niddah which makes her ineligible for the further
treatment. If conception is allowed to take place then the resulting child will
have to bear the stigma of Ben-niddah. The clinical protocol followed
therefore, has to keep this fact in mind while performing the procedure.

However, in case bleeding occurs then depending on the case, the concerned
doctor, patient and her rabbi will have to take the decision. This clearly shows
the way in which Halakhic conception of purity and impurity related to uterine
bleeding become a part of surgical protocol.

The doctor often performs two inseminations namely, intracervical

insemination in which the sperm is inserted in a catheter and placed at the
mouth of the cervix. Second is the intrauterine insemination in which the
sperm is introduced through the cervix and into the uterus. This form of
insemination often produces some kind of uterine bleeding. Looking at the
history and condition of the patient, the doctor chooses one of the methods of
insemination to be done first followed by the other.

However, the actual isolation and fertilization of the oocytes occurs in the
laboratory. The lab workers pour out the blood colored, egg bearing fluid into
petri dish and check it for eggs. When the lab worker locates an egg, she sucks
it into a pipette and transfers it into another petri dish which is kept into the
incubator until the sperm is processed for fertilization.

The method for fertilization is determined by the doctor depending on several

factors including the number of eggs retrieved in the oocyte pickup, the age of
the woman, and most importantly the quality of the husband’s sperm. After
the eggs are fertilized with sperm they are placed in the incubator.

Twenty-four hours after the eggs and sperm have been combined; they are
examined under the microscope. Fertilization is determined according to
whether a dividing cell is visible which is then introduced into a woman’s
fallopian tube through zygote intrafallopian transfer. A connection between
medicine and kinship is thus created by the creation of the child.

Forty-eight hours after the fertilization, the dividing cell is seen as an embryo
and is introduced into woman’s womb intravaginally through the embryo-
transfer catheter. This kind of transfer is performed without any anesthetic and
takes two seconds.

However, there have been various Halakhic questions raised by ovum related
technologies. The rabbis’ central concern in cases of ovum donation is about
determining the mother. Is it the woman who donates the egg, or the woman
who carries the pregnancy and gives birth? In the light of this interpretive
dilemma some rabbis advocate that it is legitimate to decide that maternity is
derived from the genetic substance of the ova. While others argue that it is the
woman who carries the pregnancy and gives birth should be regarded the
mother. This suggests that maternity should be determined at parturition. Still
others argue that a child born as the result of ovum donation should be
considered to have two mothers, one biological and one gestational. Finally,
some rabbis suggest that any child conceived with an egg extracted from
ovary, fertilized and replanted in a womb should be regarded to have no
mother at all.

Some rabbis have developed novel explanations of these issues. For example,
some rabbis discard the biological model, in which men and women are
understood to contribute genetic material equally to an embryo and in its
place they suggest the agricultural model, in which conception occurs when
men sow the seeds in women’s fertile soil. Men are thus the active donators of
the reproductive material and woman are passive receptors of it.

The other concern revolves around the question of determining the Jewish
identity of a child who for example, is conceived with a non-Jewish egg but
gestated within a Jewish womb, or who is conceived with a Jewish egg and
gestated in a non-Jewish womb. According to Bleich such a child would have
two mothers but it is still unclear which mother confers Jewishness.
Bleich explains this by saying that for those rabbis who believe that maternal
identity is determined at parturition, a Jewish woman can give birth to a Jewish
baby even if the baby is conceived with a non-Jewish egg. Other rabbis, who
believe in the genetic basis for maternal identity suggests that a child born to a
non-Jewish mother needs to be converted to sanctify the people of Israel.

These non-Jewish eggs enter the ova marketplace via many foreign women
from Turkey, Europe and the United States who come to Israeli fertility clinics
for treatment. In 1999 Israeli newspapers reported that Israeli doctors were
setting up a fertility clinic to meet the demand for ova and to circumvent Israeli
regulations against buying and selling eggs for profit. And to enlarge the pool
of available ova, unmarried women were allowed access to fertility treatment
so that their unused eggs could enter the ova market place.

The eggs of unmarried Jewish women are considered the most desirable eggs
for donation for two reasons: 1. there is a widespread social preference for
eggs that a considered to be genetically “Jewish”; 2. Eggs that come from
unmarried Jewish women are often preferred because they circumvent the
Halakhic problem of gestating an embryo that is the result of an adulterous
combination of a married Jewish woman’s donated egg and the sperm of a
Jewish man who is not the egg of donor’s husband.

A Jewish egg thus not only carries the religious identity of the woman who
produces it but also contains her marital status and as her marital status
changes, so does the status of her eggs.

Kahn further presents two egg stories- one from the doctor’s point and the
other from the patient’s point. She begins with doctor’s story and says that the
doctor informed that only secular Jewish women, Sephardic Jews and Christian
Palestinians are asked to donate eggs. Muslim women and religious Ashkenazi
women were forbidden from donating their ova for religious reasons. The
doctor also clarified that he asks for eggs from women under thirty five since
younger women produce more and better quality eggs.
The patient on the other hand also revealed some unusual features of the
fertility clinic. It was found that people had preferences such as the woman to
be short, with brown eyes, brown hair, Ashkenazi and smart. They also bribed
the donator with something or the other to get the donation faster.

Thus, the intensive market demand for ova in Israel fueled by the desire to
have children creates complex dilemmas for both infertile and fertile Israeli
women. Therefore, it can be concluded by saying that these ovum- related
technologies bring into sharp relief a question central to the conceptualization
of kinship about the origin of mothers posing women closer to nature and
culture with the central question of Jewish citizenship. Bleich thus, argues that
to circumvent such questions contemporary rabbis must begin to recognize
genetic substance as a codeterminant of identity, together with the traditional
determinant parturition. Kahn however, says that majority of rabbis stick to
traditional notion that parturition of Jewish women determines the identity of
the child and it is this Jewishness which is questioned in ovum related
technologies.