The Cultural and Legal Reproduction of Poverty: Abortion Legislation in Israel

In this series of essays reflecting on the thirtieth anniversary of the first publication of Beverly Wildung Harrison’s Our Right to Choose, this article shifts our focus. While the other authors examine contemporary reproductive concerns in light of Harrison’s analysis, I consider how well Harrison’s argument has mapped onto another geographic location and another religious tradition. Here, I analyze the discourse in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) surrounding the 1970s legalization of abortion in Israel. A close reading of the debate reveals that various facets of Harrison’s argument resonated with the Israeli Jewish scene. Supporting Harrison’s main argument that we must investigate the economic and racial realities within the sexism ever present in antiabortion discourse, I argue that the economic context of the abortion debate in Israel was critical in shaping the new legislation. In what follows, I consider a few of Harrison’s main arguments in Our Right to Choose and show how the abortion discourse in Israel supported Harrison’s claims.

Harrison touched on abortion in the Jewish community when she wrote, “Orthodox and conservative Jewish women often have to confront the abortion option in the face of growing hostility in their community, born not of traditional Jewish attitudes but rather of pro-natalism engendered by fear for Jewish survival in the modern world.”¹ Like many scholars, Harrison emphasized the role of pro-natalism in Israeli and Jewish attitudes toward abortion.² Indeed, Israel’s history of financially incentivizing reproduction within the Jewish population indicates not only pro-natalism but also a goal of succeeding in the “demographic war” with the Arab population in Israel.³ The first of such incentives was Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s 1949 announcement of a cash prize (100 IL) to every woman who gave birth to her tenth child. Though the government presumed they would be awarding this prize to Jewish women every year, that was not the case. Ten years after the prize was first awarded, Ben Gurion and others realized they consistently awarded Arab women with the prize. As a result, many maintain, Ben Gurion decided to abolish it altogether.⁴ Israel’s contemporary support of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has also provided many scholars with proof for their claims of the state’s pro-natalist goals. The state funds extensive use of reproductive technologies for Israeli citizens up to the birth of two live children. In order to encourage religious Jews to partake of these technologies, the state has also provided rabbinic supervision and certification of ARTs.⁵ Furthermore, the state’s pro-natalist interests still rest heavily on Israeli Jewish women and not Israeli Arab women, who do not have the same access to clinics that offer ART services.⁶

These examples lead scholars to conclude that Israel recruits Jewish women to serve their country as reproducers of Jews.⁷ Just as men (and unmarried women) serve their country in the army, married Jewish women are tasked with bearing children, a job with national and religious significance. The state’s pro-natalist agenda, many claim, presents an environment in which babies are the pride of the state and a woman must reproduce in order to qualify as a woman in the state’s eyes.⁸ This argument indeed has merit, and some scholars have shown that it pervades Israeli culture as well,⁹ but, for many years, the government expressed concern that the state’s pro-natalist agenda was at odds with its economic stability.¹⁰ Encouraging the entirety of the Jewish population to reproduce has required supporting ethnic groups that lived in poverty, something the state cannot afford indefinitely. In the 1960s and 1970s, faced with the reality of these competing interests, policy makers suggested methods of curtailing the birth rate among certain populations while encouraging other Jewish women to reproduce.

Despite the pro-natalist policies many have chronicled, I maintain that there was a competing desire to control and limit the fertility of women from low-income communities because of their economic dependence on the state. In the decades before...