Towards a political economy of egg cell donations: 'doing it the Israeli way'

In July 2010 the Israeli Knesset approved a controversial law, allowing healthy, single, Israeli women aged between 21 and 35 to “donate” their egg cells and receive a financial compensation of NIS 19.000 or approximately $ 5400. Women between 18 and 54 who suffer from fertility problems can request an egg donation which will be paid for through the national health insurance. The Egg Donation Law has been analyzed and evaluated as yet another example of Israel’s pronatalist assisted reproductive health policy which includes almost unlimited state funding of in vitro fertilization (IVF), intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), donor insemination, prenatal genetic diagnosis (PGD) and surrogacy. Israel’s permissive stance on egg donations and assisted reproductive technologies in general has often been explained and legitimized from a culturalist perspective, focusing on the centrality of reproduction in Judaism, Jewish culture and tradition. I will argue that instead of strictly focusing on cultural an ethical narratives of ‘Jewishness’ to explain Israel’s pronatalist stance, one should also look at the political economy of reproduction in Israel/Palestine. This perspective should not only take into consideration the centrality of reproduction within the ongoing Zionist settler colonial project, but also Israel’s leading bio-economic position in the globalized health and research market. From a political economy perspective I contend that Israeli policies on egg cell donations were co-produced within a logic of capital accumulation to benefit its emerging stem cell economy and within a logic of elimination to safeguard the demographic balance in its settler colonial project.