Caren Chessler writes about her experience having IVF treatment and the implications of using a donor egg in terms of Jewish law.
And of course our baby would be Jewish, given that I am. Under Jewish law, a baby’s religious identity is determined by his mother.
Or so I thought.
Since the 1990s, the consensus among Jewish authorities has been that the bearing mother, not the woman who provided the gametes, is the child’s mother. But recently the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. Some rabbis in Israel now say if the donor is not Jewish, then the child is not Jewish. Opinions coming out of Israel carry a lot of weight.
“If the egg is from a non-Jew, then the DNA is from the other person,” said Rabbi Shaul Rosen, who founded A TIME, a support network for infertile Jewish couples. “In order for that child to be Jewish, it would have to go through a conversion ceremony like any other non-Jew.”
Read more of the fascinating opinions at http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/what-makes-a-jewish-mother/?hpw
This was a no brainer from the outset. The donor is the real biological mother; therefore, the child to be born would have the physical and other traits from that donor. The birthing mother is just carrying the child and, therefore, why should she be considered the true mother? The child, like an adopted non-Jewish child, would have to be asked at age 13 whether he wishes to be part of the Jewish people and give him/her the option of leaving the Jewish fold or remaining; am not sure whether the conversion takes place when the child is adopted or first done at age 13. Modern science (with all its good) has brought many problems to the world, and specifically to the Jewish world.
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