Accommodating Assisted Reproductive Technologies to Rabbinic Law

This chapter discusses a mode of reproductive health care provision mindful of observant Judaism. Following the advent of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in Israel during the late 1980s, Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu entrusted his disciple, Rabbi Menachem Burstein, with the mission of accommodating ARTs to rabbinic law and thus making them usable and accessible to religiously observant Jews. The rabbis have no formal medical education but have learned to speak medical language and are tuned to all new developments in fertility medicine. PUAH's rabbis establish a new kind of medico-religious expertise grounded in mastering two systems of authoritative knowledge: biomedicine and rabbinic law. Kosher medicine reminds anybody who is interested in providing religiously sensitive health care that religion may bring not only "beliefs" and restrictions into the clinic, but also networks of power and authority that might change the course of treatment.