Reviewed by: Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women by Michal S. Raucher Cara Rock-Singer Michal S. Raucher. Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020. Pp. ix–xiv, 228. Paperback $24. ISBN: 9780253050021. Michal Raucher’s Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women is an ethnographic account of Haredi women’s embodied reproductive ethics. Conceiving Agency is based on two years of fieldwork in Jerusalem, Israel, which involved participant and nonparticipant observation in homes, prenatal clinics, educational settings, and the anti-abortion organization EFRAT. In addition, Raucher conducted multiple interviews with Haredi women who had at least three children, and with doctors, nurses, and doulas (labor coaches). From this rich and varied ethnography emerges a compelling story of a “paradox” of how Haredi women exert agency during pregnancy and birth, despite the fact that these life cycle events are highly regulated by a “matrix of control” of rabbinic and medical authorities as well as state and charitable institutions. As Raucher argues, repeated reproductive experiences and theological commitments, together, “empower” women to claim agency over their own reproductive decisions (3–4). The book adds significant nuance to scholarship on Haredi Jewry and Jewish ethics, which have both centered on texts and their predominantly male interpreters as the locus of religious authority. Raucher instead focuses her study on the embodiment and lived experience of pregnant and birthing [End Page 249] women, and in doing so, she also contributes to the ethnography of reproduction in Israel. She shows how books and bodies; God, men, and women; and segulot (folk practices) and medical technologies all take part in embodied reproductive ethics. Raucher’s argument builds through a series of five chapters. The first two chapters lay out the context in which Haredi reproductive agency can emerge. In chapter one, Raucher explores the roles of doctors and rabbis, who compete for authority as they collaborate to control Haredi women’s reproductive decisions. As doctors and rabbis negotiate their epistemological and cultural systems, “secular” and “religious” authorities make accommodations to each other’s values and needs, but in serving their own social and economic interests, Haredi women’s experiences are “overlooked” (43). The overbearing competition among authorities initially serves as an “obstacle,” but ultimately leaves these women “space” to make their own reproductive choices. The second chapter explores the “pathway” through which women come to develop reproductive agency in a culture where the rabbinic textual tradition and its male interpreters claim authority over all domains of life, including the reproductive lives of women. Raucher argues that women display pregnancy advice books, as symbols of legitimate textual authority, even as they subvert the importance of book-based knowledge and rely on their own embodied experiences to make prenatal decisions. By doing a textual analysis of two popular pregnancy advice books, Raucher shows how these books present frameworks for integrating religion and medicine, which help women cultivate confidence in their own reproductive agency. Chapters three and four represent the heart of Raucher’s ethnographic engagement with the core concept of reproductive agency. Following Saba Mahmood, Raucher defines agency as “capacity for action,” which emerges within the constraints of a patriarchal society where secular and religious competition and gender segregation also create freedom for women’s independence to make reproductive choices (95). By framing pregnancy as repeated, “bodily ritual” (102), Raucher argues that, by their third or fourth pregnancies, women come to understand pregnancy as a religious identity, akin to Torah scholar, and to cultivate authority over reproductive decisions based on their own embodied experiences. Chapter four clarifies and complicates this picture through engagement with the theological underpinnings of embodied authority, namely, that “pregnancy [is] a time of authority due to women’s unique connection to God” (117). Raucher shows how women deemphasize rabbinic knowledge while amplifying and reinterpreting traditions that link pregnancy to the messianic return and the physiology of pregnant bodies as tools for God’s creation. Rather than turn to rabbinic authorities, they rely on themselves and God: women invoke the theological concepts of hishtadlut and bitachon, which they use to mean human actions and God’s interventions, to negotiate prenatal decisions. In the fifth chapter, Raucher draws on...
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Jun 1, 2024
Kate Errington 
Open Access