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The arbitrating rabbis in Israel reversed an important decision concerning donor eggs this week; speeding through the passing of a new law and emotionally affecting even non-Israeli Jewish families. It's a case of a good impulse gone horribly, horribly wrong without regard to the emotional repercussions--either for the parents or the child.
To give background, Judaism is a matrilineal religion and your status is determined by your mother. Determining Jewishness is important in the sense that in Israel, it affects many other rights including marriage down the road. If the mother is Jewish, the child is Jewish--regardless of whether the family practices Judaism. A child who is conceived without assistance by a Jewish mother is by default Jewish. A child who is conceived with the help of fertility treatments is also Jewish.
Where rabbis have stated arbitration is in situations such as a Jewish surrogate carrying a baby for a non-Jewish couple (and the reverse as well, with consideration to both traditional and gestational surrogacy), adoption, and donor eggs.
Prior to this ruling, while using a Jewish egg donor was encouraged for Jewish women, there was leniency, with the belief that since the child was carried by the Jewish woman, the child was indeed Jewish. It not only made sense, but it gave room so commandments (mitzvot) could still be performed. It encouraged Jewish couples to fulfill being "fruitful and multiplying." And let's be frank--with infertility scattered throughout the Torah, including 75% of the Jewish matriarchs infertile, it would have been a slap in Sarah's face to not honour scientific advances that give infertile men and women a chance to build their family. You better believe Abraham's wife would have used donor eggs if they had been available at her local area desert fertility clinic.
The new thought is that Jewishness is determined by the gamete giver--meaning, if the egg donor is not Jewish and the mother is Jewish, the child is not Jewish and needs to be converted at birth in a ceremony.
Michael Broyde was quoted once as saying, "On core matters of Jewish identity, there's no harm in an unneeded conversion. It's good to clarify doubt by a simple mechanism." And yet, I have to disagree with Broyde, and perhaps he is cavalier about his feelings because he has never had to face this situation, but I find the offered solution of conversion incredibly offensive.
My children, as their mother, regardless of how they enter our family, are Jewish, simply by the fact that I am Jewish. And I honour that right by raising my children Jewish. Especially in the case of blended families, where some children enter via fertility treatments and others enter via donor egg, adoption, or surrogacy, it is hurtful to the fabric of the family to create a hierarchy where some children are given the status of Jewish and others are told to convert to Judaism. What are the unspoken statements concerning the tie between the mother and child that stem from this advice? The rabbinate should be considering the emotional implications of their rulings and the fallout of such decisions.
And yet, it is precisely the intended fallout of the decision that led the rabbinate to reverse the ruling. Old regulations encouraged those already undergoing IVF to donate extra embryos rather than have people volunteer and take the medical risk of being solely an egg donor. "Twenty-nine years ago, after a woman died following her altruistic donation of ova, the ministry set regulations that only a woman undergoing fertility treatments could donate extra ova to another woman." In other words, someone undergoing IVF is hyperstimulating her ovaries anyway, and since many IVF cycles result in extra embryos that are frozen instead of being transferred, it makes sense to ask those already undergoing the procedure to be altruistic rather than asking those who have no need for fertility treatments to undergo them for the sake of another person.
Sort of makes sense, right, if you take emotions out of the equation.
But altruistic donation from one infertile person to another isn't what happened. People have been reluctant to donate their leftover embryos to other men and women, and with laws against a non-infertile woman
