Borderlands of reproduction: bodies, borders, and assisted reproductive technologies in Israel/Palestine

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the intersection of bodies, borders, and assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in Israel/Palestine. By turning to Palestinian women's experiences in Israeli hospitals, the case of sperm smuggling in the West Bank, and Israeli medical staff's perception of the fertility clinic, this article examines reproductive border-crossings. Israel's fertility economy is thriving and the country is among the most liberal states worldwide regarding the regulation, implementation, and subsidization of ART. However, Israel's pronatalism is best described as selective and stratified. As a function of settler colonialism, it mainly targets Jewish citizens of Israel, which results in a politicization of Palestinian and Israeli bodies and populations. Drawing on fifty in-depth interviews with Palestinian women and medical staff in Israeli fertility clinics conducted in Israel/Palestine between 2016 and 2019, this article provides a spatial analysis of assisted reproduction, drawing out continuities between past and present technologies of power in medical space.

KEYWORDS:

• Assisted reproduction
• Israel/Palestine
• settler colonialism
• body politics
• borderlands

Acknowledgements

I would like to express sincere thanks to Najla Fawwaz and Mary Khadija for their Arabic-English translations and thoughtful suggestions. I also thank Sophia Goodfriend, Michelle Pfeifer, Gökçe Yurdakul, Morgana Karch, Yoav Koko, Ruth Patir and Moritz Gansen for their valuable feedback and comments on earlier versions of this article. Four anonymous reviewers from Ethnic and Racial Studies have helped me hone my arguments further. Many thanks to the organizers and participants of the Sexuality and Borders Symposium at NYU in 2019 for their feedback and for making this Special Issue happen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sophie Lewis argues that pregnancy had already been “techno-fixed” before that. Safer, i.e. medically supported pregnancies were mostly a privilege of the (white) upper classes and in that sense, technologies such as surrogacy ultimately constituted a mere continuation of that “gestational fix” (Lewis 2019). However, in this article, I am concerned with technologies specifically aiming at enhancing or enabling pregnancies (for all sorts of reasons, usually subsumed under the term infertility, but also in cases of sex selection), such as in vitro fertilization, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, intrauterine insemination, third-party donation of eggs and sperm, freezing and storage of sperm, embryos, oocytes, and ovarian tissue.

2 Helga Tawil-Souri describes the state of Israel as “de-bordered” for two reasons. On the one hand, Israel was founded as a nation-state of the Jewish people worldwide, not simply for its Israeli citizens, Jewish or not. On the other hand, Israel's external and internal borders continue to be contested.

3 Most names of interview partners have been changed and institutions have been reduced to a generic description, except for some of the names and institutions involved in the sperm smuggling case upon participants’ request for visibility.

4 The term Mizrahi refers to Jewish people from Middle Eastern and North-African descent.

5 The most well-known case in this context is Yigal Amir, convicted of the murder of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Caroline von Humboldt Program (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and a doctoral fellowship by the Heinrich Böll Foundation.