Midis de la recherche

Lea Taragin-Zeller
Woolf Institute and Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc), University of Cambridge
How can ethnography change our understandings of reproductive choice? Reflections from Israel’s Orthodox Jews

As procreation has traditionally been perceived as a divine sphere, the growing possibility to fully manage reproduction creates particular anxieties and paradoxes for people of faith. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Israel’s reproductive landscape, this paper demonstrates how Orthodox Jews delineate borders between the godly and the human in their daily reproductive practices. Exploring the multiple ways access to technology affects religious belief and observance, I describe three approaches to marital birth control, two of which are antithetical: steadfast resistance to and general acceptance of “calculated family planning.” Seeking a middle road, the third model, I have dubbed “flexible decision-making”, reveals how couples push off and welcome pregnancies simultaneously, enabling situations in which children born to parents using birth control are still wanted, intended and even planned.
In this lecture, I use my ethnographic findings to question some of the basic concepts scholars have grouped together while seeking to understand reproductive decision-making. By unravelling the illusion of a binary model of planned/unplanned parenthood, I call for nuanced models of reproductive decision-making and point to the value of exploring reproductive choice and control outside the context of faith communities.