"The time arrived but the father didn't:" A New Continuum of Israeli Conception

If you're not a mother, you don't exist in Israeli society. —Social worker in a Jerusalem fertility clinic

It is a hot Jerusalem night in July, and I am sitting on a large, rooftop patio with six Israeli women. We are drinking Diet Coke and lemonade, eating pretzels and olives, and discussing reproductive decisions and dilemmas. These women have been meeting monthly for over a year as a support group for unmarried women who are considering artificial insemination. Everyone refers to it as the "maybebaby" group.

They know I am writing about them, in fact they call me the "spy," but I have assured them that I will not reveal their real identities (all names have been changed to protect the identities of participants) and so I have become a regular member. We have all gotten to know each other over the past months, and everyone is joking around. Tonight a new member has joined, so everyone gives more personal background information than usual. After a long, informal chat about work, politics, food, and relationships, the "formal" discussion begins with a go-around.

Hagit, a thirty-eight-year-old teacher who lives in Jerusalem, goes first:

I see each stage of getting pregnant in and of itself, to look at the whole process from beginning to end is like looking at a huge mountain, it's too much. I try not to think about it, the more I think about it the less natural it seems. There is a limit to all the thinking you can do. Other people just get pregnant and are parents without thinking twice about it, why should I obsess about something that is so natural for most people? I was thinking a lot about it, how do it, with a man or not, the sperm bank. I chose the sperm bank because to make an agreement with someone you don't love to have a child is very problematic. It seems unfair to divide the child in two before he is even born. Working out the problems in a relationship is difficult enough.

You have to get shots, then checkups, then go to work, then shots, checkups, ultrasound, work, fit in Pesach vacation, and on and on. If all goes well it should only take a month from first checkup to interviews to insemination. But with me it takes longer because I have trouble getting pregnant. I took a Chorigon (hormone) shot yesterday and I get the insemination tomorrow morning at 7:30 A.M. [Everyone wished her luck.]

Katya, a forty-year-old nurse, was next:

I'm taking a break. I got through all the stages until they told me I need a measles vaccination and must wait three months to continue. It's given me time to think. I'm going to Turkey to take a break, I'm not so sure now that I really want to raise a child alone. I started thinking about how hard it is to be a single parent. I'm not sure that's what I want. I know what it is to be tired, I know how much work it is to have a baby, I'm not so sure now.

Tamar, the new member, spoke next:

I grew up in Jerusalem but I live in London now. I was married for ten years to an Israeli guy, my high school sweetheart. After a few years, I found out he was infertile, it's a long story, but we ended up breaking up. I had five unsuccessful inseminations in London, and so I came back to Israel for a few months to check out the options here, and to see my family and friends. Maybe I will have better luck here, I thought.

An interesting thing happened a few weeks ago, I met an old friend from the army, a gay man, and we started talking. It turned out he really wants a child, too. So it seemed perfect, and we got very excited about it. But now I am starting to feel less sure about it, he wants too much from my life. I am leaning toward the sperm bank again. I think it's important what you say, Hagit, that you don't want to divide the child before he is born. I sort of assumed that people who chose the sperm bank option were people who had trouble forming relationships, but I'm not so sure that that's true, maybe it comes from a certain maturity about the relationship that you are in.

Everyone thanked Tamar and welcomed her to the group. Chana spoke next; she said she had made no "progress" and was still in the thinking stages. Then came Vardit. She said that she had recently told the women in her office that she was starting to inseminate, and they were all very supportive. "It was a big step," she said, "to talk about it at work. I was afraid of the reactions. But I was missing so much time because of all the doctor's appointments I had to say something. One woman in my office made it seem very simple, she just said to me: 'the time arrived, but the father didn't.' It makes it much easier now that everyone knows."

The discussion on that hot July night echoed many of the individual interviews I conducted with unmarried Jewish women, both heterosexual and lesbian, religious and secular, who were seeking to get pregnant via artificial insemination in Israel. In addition to confronting a wide range of emotions in their journeys to become mothers, they had to be extraordinarily determined and persistent to navigate the sea of logistical hurdles that make up the Israeli insemination bureaucracy. A complex kind of reproductive agency informs these pathways to pregnancy. It is a reproductive agency that assumes reproduction is something one can take into one's own hands and accomplish on one's own, that is bolstered by deep cultural beliefs that motherhood is the most primal and natural goal for women, and that is enabled by the traditional rabbinic belief that children born to unmarried women are considered legitimate, full-fledged Jews.

In this chapter I delineate eight stages that help conceptualize unmarried women's experiences of artificial insemination and autonomous motherhood in Israel. The stages serve as a heuristic device to make literal a new process through which Jews are reproduced in Israel. These stages are not always discreet, nor do they often flow smoothly one after the other. Rather, they are often interrupted by long gaps, as women cope with the frustrations of unsuccessful inseminations, lingering doubts, or other intervening life events. Nevertheless, when read as a sequence, these stages illuminate the lived experience of artificial insemination for unmarried Israeli women.

I animate these stages with select commentaries culled from interviews with a random assortment of thirty-five unmarried Israeli women I interviewed between 1994 and 1996, as well as those in the "maybebaby" group. The unmarried mothers among whom I gathered life stories and whose lives I shared during my fieldwork were randomly assembled; they do not constitute any sort of spatially bounded...