Israeli Egg Scandal
How two greedy Jewish doctors left Israeli women nervous about donating their eggs.
by Larissa Remennick
Motherhood is both a private and national priority for most Israeli women, including those who cannot conceive by natural means. The country is known for its cutting-edge research and clinical practice of reproductive medicine. It has the highest number of infertility clinics per capita (about 30 for the population of 7 million) and an ever-growing share of babies born by means of new reproductive technologies approaching 4 percent of the total.
Although most couples try to achieve pregnancy by means of in vitro fertilization (IVF) using their own gametes (ova and sperm), an increasing number of women need egg (ovum) donation due to older age when ovum “quality” is deteriorating. After age 45, Israeli IVF clinics only admit women for the treatment when donor eggs are available.
Yet, since the early 2000s, it became almost impossible to obtain Jewish eggs as Israeli women almost completely stopped voluntary egg donations in the course of infertility treatment.
Two doctors get greedy
This refusal is a response to a 2000 scandal involving "egg trade," whereby two senior obstetrics and gynecology specialists and “magicians” of reproductive medicine—Profressor Zion Ben-Rafael of the
Rabin
Medical
Center
near Tel-Aviv and his colleague Ya'akov Ashkenazi from
Hasharon
Hospital
—were investigated and later convicted for violation of patient rights leading to potential health damage. Both physicians caused extra ovarian stimulation in their patients (which often led to severe symptoms and ER visits) to obtain a large number of ova—many more than was agreed upon in the informed consent form—for subsequent “donation” to other women, for a fat fee and without informing the unsuspecting donors.
This practice continued for several years, until six women who suffered from overstimulation and accidentally discovered what happened to their “extra” eggs, complained to the Ministry of Health and police. After a prolonged trial (during which most colleagues of Ben-Rafael and Ashkenazi refused to testify against them due to “professional solidarity” or fear of reprisal), both physicians lost their senior posts with the public health system, but continue their private practice.
The industry heads to poorer countries
This affair, widely covered by the media, strongly affected the morale of Israeli women undergoing IVF, and nowadays few of them agree to donate extra eggs at the expense of their own health risks. As a result, the egg donation “industry” has moved to the poorer countries with lax legal regulation of medical procedures, such as
Romania
,
Ukraine,
and
Cyprus
. Israeli reproductive specialists set up branches of their clinics in
Bucharest
,
Kiev,
and Larnaca, where women come for a week or so to receive a “donation” from a local woman willing to undergo ovarian stimulation and egg extraction for a modest pay (around $500-1,000).
The husband's sperm (transported in a vial along with the woman) is then used to fertilize donor eggs in a local lab and up to three embryos are implanted into the woman's uterus. The whole service package costs about $5,000, excluding travel expenses and hotel stays. Given that pregnancy rates in a single IVF cycle with donor eggs, in a woman older than 45, are below 5 percent, many women fail to conceive and have to repeat the procedure several times (if they can afford it). Then, of course, not every pregnancy in an older woman is carried to term (or even to pre-term viability), so the live birth rate is even lower.
Thus, most babies conceived by Israeli Jewish women by means of egg donation, are not considered Jewish by the halakhic definition, as a non-Jewish ovum produces a non-Jewish child. Not many babies have been born through these means to date so far (a few dozen), but those who have will have to undergo conversion to Judaism at some point in their lives to be recognized as Jewish. It seems solutions to Jewish fertility problems are increasingly found outside the Jewish world—one more pathway to the incipient assimilation, for better or for worse.
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