{"id":15,"date":"2021-06-08T22:18:52","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T22:18:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/?p=15"},"modified":"2021-06-08T22:18:53","modified_gmt":"2021-06-08T22:18:53","slug":"unit-three-kinship-and-religious-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/2021\/06\/08\/unit-three-kinship-and-religious-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Unit Three: Kinship and Religious Law"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hi everyone! I\u2019ve never written a Scholarblog before, so hopefully this actually posts! This Tuesday\u2019s readings concern the implementation of reproductive technologies, like IVF and sperm donation, and the religious reception of said technologies. Our first reading is several chapters from Sue Kahn\u2019s book Reproducing Jews: <\/em>A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel<\/em>, <\/em>and the second, written by our own Dr. Seeman, is \u201cEthnography, Exegesis and Jewish Ethical Reflection: The New Reproductive Technologies in Israel\u201d in Kin, Gene, Community: Reproductive Technologies Among<\/em> Jewish Israelis<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sue Kahn is an ethnographer who, as a Jewish, Lesbian, and unmarried woman, is able to relate to some aspects of her study. She, along with many of the women she interviewed over the course of her two years researching in Israel, decided to go through with IVF treatments. Many of these interviews are featured in the first chapter, \u201cA New Continuum of Israeli Conception.\u201d According to Kahn, the purpose of this chapter is to \u201cdelineate eight stages that help conceptualize unmarried women\u2019s experiences of artificial insemination and autonomous motherhood in Israel,\u201d the stages serving as \u201ca heuristic device to make literal a new process through which Jews are reproduced in Israel” (Kahn 11). Through these steps, we learn about the difficult social experiences that unmarried Israeli women go through before, during, and after they give birth via reproductive technologies. There is a stigma surrounding single motherhood and artificial insemination, especially within religious communities. Although halachah, or Jewish law described in the Talmud, does not ban artificial insemination, Rabbis still believe that the nuclear family is core to Jewish life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, Israel has become a center for implementation of new reproductive technologies because the government actively promotes these practices by including them in their socialized medical plans. Israel\u2019s pro-natalist stance is due in large part to its ties with Judaism, which is the country\u2019s official religion. Besides the biblical command to \u2018be fruitful and multiply,\u2019 the decimation of a significant portion of the Jewish population during the Holocaust is another factor influencing Jews\u2019 desires to have children. An aunt of mine lives in one of Israel\u2019s ultra-Orthodox communities, and she already has five sons at the age of 32. She and many of her peers see reproduction as a duty. Israel also financially supports reproduction because more citizens means more strength and stability against other bigger foreign powers with whom they have conflict. These pro-natalist ideologies are the reason Ruti Nahmani won her legal battle that Kahn outlines in her second chapter, \u201cThe Legislation of Reproduction and the \u201cIssue\u201d of Unmarried Women.\u201d In the early-mid 1990s, Ruti wanted to use her ex-husband\u2019s frozen sperm to go through with IVF treatments after they divorced, and her ex-husband opposed the idea. The highest court ultimately ruled in her favor because the state of Israel, which is so entwined with the pulse of the Jewish people, prioritized her right to be a mother. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jewish motherhood is not only prioritized as a cultural experience and religious imperative, but as a biological, halachic requirement. In Judaism, a child is only a Jew if the mother is Jewish. If the mother was not born Jewish, she must convert if she wants her children to be Jewish (I know this because if my mother had not gone through Orthodox conversion prior to my sister\u2019s and my births, my extended family would almost certainly have shunned my dad). When we consider reproductive strategies like surrogacy in Israel, halachic problems arise regarding the ova. Kahn notes in her fourth chapter that \u201cova were not thought to exist in the traditional rabbinic imagination,\u201d therefore an \u201cinterpretive dilemma\u201d arises amongst rabbis (Kahn 129). Is the woman who provided the egg the mother? Is the woman who actually gave birth to the child the mother? There is no clear answer. But it is<\/em> clear that Israel\u2019s reproductive technologies, although an avenue for maternal autonomy, are deeply connected to the government\u2019s inherently Jewish agenda. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since Jewish law influences Israeli law, Dr. Seeman recognizes its significance in how Israel regulates reproductive technologies. Dr. Seeman\u2019s article helps us understand the nature, so to speak, of how religious texts relate to the ethical conceptions of these technologies. Of course, religions have different approaches when determining what is natural, normal, and allowed, even if they derive these differences from the same text. Jews and Christians share the Old Testament, which is the five books of the Jewish torah. An important interpretive distinction is that Jewish writers focus on \u201clegal portions of the biblical text,\u201d while \u201cCatholic and Protestant writers who use the bible tend to focus on what can be derived from narrative\u201d (Seeman 348). This contrast explains why Israel\u2019s stance, informed by Jewish law, is more flexible than any informed by the Church elsewhere. To paraphrase Dr. Seeman, it is difficult to rule out any strategies that halachah does not explicitly prohibit, while the Church\u2019s subjective approach creates more restrictions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Seeman writes about how to improve anthropology\u2019s intervention in religious bioethics. While he emphasizes the importance of acknowledging differing interpretations of biblical texts in the conceptualization of ethics, he equally promotes ethnographically analyzing how said interpretations are employed in \u201clocal moral worlds” (Seeman 350). In Israel, \u201c[o]rthodox rabbis, state planners, public health experts, and advocates for single or lesbian women\u201d all have a stake in the reproductive technology debate (Seeman 356). Whether they are techno-optimists, pessimists, or skeptics, they have separate experiences informing their opinions, impacting their decisions, and influencing their emotions. Communities, kinship, and individuals interact in complex ways that are not reducible to factors statistical analysis considers.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi everyone! I\u2019ve never written a Scholarblog before, so hopefully this actually posts! This Tuesday\u2019s readings concern the implementation of reproductive technologies, like IVF and sperm donation, and the religious reception of said technologies. Our first reading is several chapters from Sue Kahn\u2019s book Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel, and… Continue reading Unit Three: Kinship and Religious Law<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7404,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7404"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions\/16"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/bioethicsummer2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}