Fertility In Israel Research Articles

Exploring the experiences of English-speaking women who have moved to Israel and subsequently used Israeli fertility treatment services: A qualitative study.

Israel's pronatalist cultures result in a social expectation to have children and drive Israel's fertility rate of 2.9. Israeli policy reflects this through funding unlimited fertility treatment up to two children. Societal pressure to have children exacerbates challenges of fertility treatment. Furthermore, the lack of financial burden creates a culture of perseverance following treatment failures. Whilst the experiences of Israeli women using fertility treatment have been studied, the experiences of women who migrated to Israel and were therefore raised in a different society have not. This study aimed to address this gap in knowledge. A qualitative study using semi-structured interviews to investigate the experiences of 13 English-speaking women who utilised Israeli state funded fertility treatment. Participants were located across Israel and were recruited using purposive sampling through social media. Data was analysed using framework analysis. Despite not being aimed at specific ethnic or religious groups, all respondents were Jewish. Three themes were identified: 1. Systemic factors: The lack of financial burden was positive, however, participants struggled to navigate the bureaucratic healthcare system, especially when experiencing a language barrier. 2. Influence of others: Encountering a cold bedside manner alongside contending with the expectations of a pronatalist society was challenging. Participants utilised support from other migrants who appreciated the same culture shock. Understanding of healthcare professionals regarding shared religious values further improved treatment experiences. 3. Impact of journey: Participants often withdrew socially and the treatment process implicated upon their lives, jobs and relationships. Navigating a bureaucratic system and pronatalist society are difficulties associated with fertility treatment in Israel. The lack of financial burden and an understanding of religious and cultural beliefs by healthcare providers improved treatment experience. Better provision of resources in English and further research into supporting women who are navigating Israel's pronatalist society is required.

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.

Religiosity, nationalism and fertility among Jews in Israel revisited

This paper focuses on competing explanations of childbearing behaviour among Jews in Israel. Despite evidence of the second demographic transition in Israel, total fertility has not declined during the last three decades, unlike in most western high-income democracies. Two alternative explanations in the literature address this phenomenon. One is religiosity and the other is a nationalist sentiment at the aggregate level – both driving the high fertility rates. Using structural equation modelling, the current study tests the association of each of these two factors with fertility. Religiosity and nationalism were constructed as latent variables based on individual-level observed measures. Supporting previous studies at the aggregate level, the current analysis confirms that religiosity is the main determinant of fertility at the individual level, whereas nationalism has an effect on fertility only due to its high connection with religiosity. Parsimonious and comprehensive models of Jewish fertility in Israel and further research directions are suggested.

JACQUELINE PORTUGESE, Fertility Policy in Israel: The Politics of Religion, Gender, and Nation (Westport, Conn: Praeger Publications, 1998). Pp. 211.

Scholars often acknowledge reproductive behavior as a core issue in Israeli politics but they seldom examine how public policies affect family size. Israel has designed no official government fertility program, but the country's leaders are nevertheless obsessed with Jewish natality. Israeli women are bombarded with regulations affecting access to contraceptives and abortion procedures and with all sorts of unsubtle massages about the importance of mothering as a factor in the state's continuing vitality and fulfilling its national purpose. Jacqueline Portugese explains Israel's ongoing efforts to encourage a high Jewish birthrate by focusing a feminist lens on public discourse, popular culture, and particular policies, all of which, she argues, have a highly pernicious impact on women. Despite the differences in feminist perspectives on the issue of fertility, they share a critical stance toward state regulation of the family, and all aid Portugese's narrative in uncovering and explaining the large repertoire of relatively intrusive regulatory mechanisms at the disposal of the government. The special insight of Fertility in Israel lies in its clarifications of the connections between seemingly benign welfare benefits and tax incentives and denying women autonomy with regard to the decision to bear children.

The Contraceptive Revolution in Israel: Changing Family Planning Practices among Ethnoimmigrant Groups

This paper uses data from the 1974–1975 Israel Fertility Survey and the 1987–1988 Study of Fertility and Family Formation to examine trends in fertility control among ethnoimmigrant groups in Israel. From 1974 to 1988, Israel underwent extremely rapid economic growth and there occurred what might be considered a contraceptive revolution in the realm of family planning. Specifically, the nonuse of family planning and reliance on less effective techniques of fertility control (withdrawal and abortion) were largely replaced by more efficient modes (e.g., pill, IUD) of family size limitation. In addition, ethnic differences in patterns of fertility control diminished. Meanwhile, socioeconomic and cultural variables such as religiosity and income maintained their importance as determinants of variation in family planning practices among Israeli women.

Socioeconomic and cultural determinants of abortion among Jewish women in Israel.

This study uses data from the 1974-75 Israel Fertility Survey and the 1987-88 Study of Fertility and Family Formation to examine the changing determinants of abortion among Jewish women in Israel. Over the course of socioeconomic development, some economic and cultural variables (e.g., education, employment, and ethnicity) lose their explanatory power whereas others become increasingly important for understanding variation in the practice of abortion. This article argues that the relationship between these variables and abortion is mediated by a variety of external and macro-level factors including social norms, the availability of contraceptive technology, and laws governing access to abortion.

Religiosity, nationalism and fertility in Israel.

The present paper seeks to re-evaluate explanations for the apparently high level of Jewish fertility in Israel. We suggest that previous explanations, based on ethnic origin or religiosity, are sociologically incomplete, and substitute well established empirical correlational associations for theoretically grounded explanations. We argue that Israel's high fertility stems, directly, from the form and salience of nationalist sentiments in the Israeliconscience collective, which in turn derives from Israel's special position in the Middle East and in the world-economy. Using voting returns from Israel's proportional vote elections, we classify census statistical areas by religiosity and their support for radical nationalist parties. We show that area-level fertility is a function of nationalist support and the area standard of living, and that once these are controlled the effect of religiosity is insignificant. We therefore conclude that the statistical association between fertility and religiosity in Israel is spurious, and that much of the religiosity recorded in fertility surveys is an expression, in consciousness and in the mode of daily living, of a strongly felt nationalist sentiment.

The modern shift to below-replacement fertility: has Israel's population joined the process?

Fertility has declined to below replacement levels in many of the modern industrialized countries during the last three decades. This decline has been explained by various modern socio-economic characteristics, such as the change in women's status, their increased participation in non-familial activities, modern consumption patterns, and increasing costs of raising ‘quality’ children. The Jewish population of Israel is a modern society with such characteristics. Yet, total fertility in Israel during the 1980s was at least one child higher than in most European countries. It is shown that social heterogeneity makes this an over-simplified comparison. Indeed, it is the high fertility of the orthodox population among the two major ethnic groups, combined with the decline towards below-replacement fertility of the non-orthodox, which produces the high mean fertility of the entire population. While during the 1950s and 1960s the major explanations of fertility variation were concerned with ethnicity and socio-economic status, these were replaced by religiosity in the 1970s and the 1980s.

The impact of induced abortions on fertility in Israel

The impact of induced abortions on fertility in Israel is considered, bearing in mind that this is the country with the highest fertility rate in the developed world. The public health point of view is examined and from the data collected it seems that most of the efforts to prevent abortions, not based on medical grounds, should concentrate on young women and the newly married.

The Impact of Social and Economic Factors on the Size of Israeli Jewish Families

The purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness of several variables in predicting and explaining actual fertility in Israel. From the wealth of literature on the subject we shall select five key variables often presented as affecting birthrate: income level of education duration of marriage ethnic origin and religiosity. The ways in which each of these are connected to birthrate are complex and depend on the socio-cultural setting. We shall discuss each variable and the ways it operates separately. Data are for a sample of 811 intact Jewish urban families in Israel. (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA) (EXCERPT)

Intergenerational effects on fertility: theory and evidence from Israel.

On the assumption that genetic inheritage and experience during adolescence influence the taste for children, the characteristics of a couple's parents may be used to improve on the explanation of fertility which can be obtained from variables that only refer to the couple itself. We find that in Israel fertility depends positively on the mother's siblings and negatively on the grandfathers' wage, but apparently does not depend on the father's siblings. Since fertility also depends positively on the mother's predicted wage, the number of children is positively related to improvements in the economic achievements from one generation to the next.

Immigration, social change and cohort fertility in Israel

14000 Israeli women were interviewed between 1973-1975 in a series of surveys designed to identify cohort fertility trends of specific immigrant subpopulations in Israel and their socioeconomic correlates. The complexity of fertility changes was found to be masked when fertility of the total Jewish population was examined; thus ethnic breakdowns were utilized. Initial completed fertility of European immigrants regardless of period of migration was 2-2.5 children/married woman but showed a general increase and convergence among more recent marriage cohorts. Initial fertility for migrants from Asia and North Africa was 6.5-7 and 7.5 respectively but in both cases this initially high rate was cut in half between marriage cohorts 25-30 years apart as fertility began to respond to the more modernized conditions in Israeli society. Israeli-born of Afro-Asian origin have lower fertility levels than immigrants from these countries; conversely Israeli-born of European descent show higher levels than European immigrants. Overall an intergenerational fertility convergence between ethnic groups is complemented by a convergence within immigrant subpopulations indicative of a rapid fertility response appropriate to societal changes. In addition all ethnic groups show recent fertility increases among younger cohorts. This is interpreted as an insurance effect due to the high rate of war casualties.

Immigration, Social Change and Cohort Fertility in Israel

Immigration, Social Change and Cohort Fertility in Israel

On Changing Matchmaking, Marriage, and Fertility in Israel: Some Findings, Problems, and Hypotheses

Recent trends in marriage and fertility in Israel are reviewed. Patterns of age at marriage and mate selection among Jewish population groups of Middle Eastern (Oriental) origin are contrasted with those of the Moslem Arab population. The institutionalization of fertility control and declining fertility among the Oriental Jewish couples marrying in Israel is contrasted with sustained high fertility of Moslem Arab couples. The relationship between change in matchmaking and amrriage patterns and change in matchmaking and marriage patterns is explored, and three conditions under which young couples beome independent decision-making units and try to control fertility are hypothesized.

Economic Analysis of Fertility in Israel: Point and Counterpoint

I view, in this paper, cross-section evidence on fertility in Israel through a very simple hypothesis based on the links among education, the cost of time of women, and the full price of children. The hypothesis is useful in explaining some aspects of behavior, but important facets of the variation in fertility remain unexplained. In recent years there have been several attempts to bring the determination of family size within the scope of the economics of household behavior (see Leibenstein 1957; Becker 1960; Mincer 1963; Easterlin 1968, 1969; Schultz 1969; and others). An economic theory of fertility starts with the postulate that hotuseholds maximize some utility function in which children and other goods appear as arguments subject to resource constraints in which the prices or the costs of production of the arguments appear. The effect of a change in any variable on the number of children depends on the extent to which it lifts the general resource constraint and induces an income effect and the extent to which it changes relative prices and induces a substitution effect. Recent developments in the theory of the household (particularly by Becker [1965] and Lancaster [1966]) provide a unified framework for handling various aspects of the fertility decision. However, in choosing

Economic Analysis of Fertility in Israel: Point and Counterpoint: Comment

Economic Analysis of Fertility in Israel: Point and Counterpoint: Comment