Parochialism and Fertility Related Legislation – Insights Form a Religion Sensitive Analysis of the Israeli Surrogacy and Egg-Donation Laws

The bioethical debate regarding the motivations of women donating their eggs or serving as surrogates generally contrasts commercialism and altruism. Based on literature review, this paper examines this debate using an analysis of the Israeli surrogacy and egg-donation laws. The analysis focuses on a dominant normative stance in Israeli bioethics- the Jewish orthodoxy, informed by the Jewish law. Jewish law has been identified as a cultural script explaining the Israeli pro-natalism and general acceptance of reproductive technologies. However, Jewish orthodoxy is also an active political actor. Many rabbinical authorities will support reproductive technologies as long as their usage meets the Jewish law and tradition. A detailed overview of the laws indicates a connection between the restrictions they include and the Jewish law. The laws instruct that the surrogate and/or egg-donor should be unmarried, not related to the prospective parents, and that both parties must belong to the same religion. Those specifications result from rabbinic concerns regarding illegitimacy, incent and the religious status of the resulting child respectively. The surrogacy law’s limitation of the procedure to heterosexual, legally paired couples also reflects the Jewish religious perspective on family integrity and formation. Those restrictions further represent mechanisms of social and political power-relations. The so called ‘same-religion’ restriction highlights the concept of religious affiliation also strongly connected to nationalism. Categories of different Levels of Religiosity are further discussed in the context of the prioritization of “traditional” – religiously acceptable family models over other “secular” family forms. The current legislation thus represents biomedical fertility/reproductive segregation based on religion related categories. I conclude by discussing the legislation as reflecting a new type of motivations connected to specific social reciprocity and solidarity based on predetermined religion related collectivities. This brings to the fore the relevance of the concept of parochialism in understanding altruistic motivations.