Pregnancy rates,…

…in Israel and Japan are not going well. Here’s a portion of a review of a book called “Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel”:

Ivry categorizes pregnancy for Israeli women as a “risky business.” Unlike the mother-baby dyad of Japanese pregnancies, Israeli pregnancies are strictly woman (not mother) and fetus. “When a woman walks into my office and says ‘I’m pregnant,'” Ivry quotes an Israeli ultrasound expert as saying, “I don’t touch her. I don’t say anything to her, I open a new card, and I write that I recommend an abortion. Then I sign her up on a paper that says that she is aware of all the testing that exists. Now we can begin to talk.”

This attitude characterizes the experience of pregnancy for Israeli women, Ivry says. With more and more prenatal diagnostic tests available for consumption, Israeli ob/gyns encourage women to keep looking for “deformities” throughout the duration of the pregnancy. Because the fetus does not become a baby—a person—until the moment of birth in Israeli understanding, pregnancy is seen as a state of limbo, with potential babies being gestated by women who have the potential to become mothers.

Ivry describes an Israeli advertisement for the ultrasound company Alkoa, depicting a pregnant women with a see-through womb. The image is captioned: “Alkoa gives birth to perfection.” I was frankly horrified by Ivry’s accounts of this aggressive prenatal testing. She describes an event she attended where pregnant women and their partners were viewing a slideshow of ultrasound images: “For each and every ‘normal’ organ,” Ivry writes, “[the lecturer] shows pictures of the same organ deformed (with no indication of how rare they are)”; clearly, “the overall impression of the lecture is that a myriad of deformities and abnormalities occur all the time.”

When pregnant Israeli women contemplate amniocentesis, a diagnostic test that can identify chromosomal abnormalities but carries with it the risk of miscarriage, Israeli ob/gyns routinely frame the decision thus, Ivry tells us: women must weigh the grief of losing a healthy child against the grief of bearing a child with a disability. Nowhere is the grief over losing a disabled child so much as even mentioned; it is taken for granted that a disabled child is unwanted. As for the disabled community in Israel, Ivry notes that “Israelis with disabilities are often quoted in the media as supporting the diagnostic endeavor to prevent the birth of other people who would suffer the kind of life that they endure.”

Ivry concludes that biomedical technologies are not only medicalizing the experience of pregnancy, they are pushing bioethical decisions into the hands of the women who undergo these “routine” tests, turning them and their partners into “moral pioneers.” That’s one way to put it.

A reader comments on the story:

Abortion is everywhere in Japan — but they love children and venerate motherhood like no other country I have lived in or heard of. This article rings true on both these counts. The notes on the “brave new world” of Israeli gynecology is simply horrifying. I don’t know whether this kind of eugenics is an irony of unsatirizable proportions in the country whose gestation is the Holocaust or a consequence of their living with their backs to the wall.

Whatever the reason, I will never think of Israelis as I once did. Isn’t this self-slaughter in the name of genetic perfectionism beyond irony for a people almost obliterated and certainly decimated by a country gone mad for eugenics?

One of the increasingly emblematic images of “Western values” is the weird way in which we put more and more faith in technology (especially technology designed to kill babies and foreigners) while putting less and less faith in mundane things like “having babies”. Israel imbibes deeply of this ethos, beefing up its massive artillery while aborting itself into extinction. But since we do too, we go on treating it like it’s normal instead of sick and depraved and a sign of a rotting culture that cannot endure.