Saturday, May 15, 2010

Are those gametes kosher?

Proposed Israeli fertility-treatment bill is racist and gross:
Under current law, only women already undergoing fertility treatments can donate their eggs, but a new bill expected to pass the Knesset would allow many more young Israeli women to donate. In an effort to win support from the Knesset's ultra-Orthodox factions, the bill also has a provision requiring a woman undergoing fertility treatments in Israel to do so only with eggs from a woman of the same faith.
Sadly, this bill is positioned as a reform, and motivated by recent rabbinical rulings "that refer to the birth mother as an 'incubator' or to her womb as an 'external tool.'" Children born of mere incubators from non-Jewish eggs are, by those rulings, not Jews.

I'm not sure how the egg access works in this scheme for people who aren't Jewish by Orthodox law---whose eggs would the Buddhist daughter of a Jewish father and Christian mother get? How fine are faiths diced? Isn't this effectively condemning many infertile members of religious minorities to childlessness (unless they are willing to go overseas for eggs)?
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