Tikvah Scholar
Academic Year 2011-2012
Yehezkel Margalit
Yehezkel Margalit recently completed his Ph.D. in Law at Bar-Ilan University. He specializes in family, contract, Jewish law and bioethics.
His academic and professional experience includes: lecturer on “Legal & Bioethics Dilemmas at the Beginning of the Life” and “Modern Biology and its Ethical Challenges”, Bar-Ilan University, and “Jewish Law—Between Tradition and Innovation” and “Survey of Means to Solve the Problem of the Agunah,” Family Law and Jewish Law, Ono Academic College; researcher in the Gertner Institute for Epidemiology and Health Policy Research, Israeli Health Ministry.
His publication includes: “‘Freedom of Contract’ in Halachic Family Law? – A Comparison of the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud” 25 Bar-Ilan Law Review 803 (2010) (Heb.); “The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of the Genetic Foundation for Legal Parentage Determination” 3 Journal of Health Law and Bioethics 125 (2010) (Heb.); “On the Dispositive Foundations of the Obligation of Spousal Conjugal Relations in Jewish Law” XVIII JLAS 164 (2008); “Temporary Marriage – A Possible Solution to the Problems of Mesorevet Halizah and Agunah?” Jewish law annual (forthcoming); “Are there no Conditional Marriages?” 5 Family in Action (forthcoming) (Heb.); “Three Fathers and Four Mothers… On the Challenge of Establishing Legal Parentage” 5 Haifa Law Review (forthcoming) (Heb.).
Research
National Health or Procreation Insurance? – Parenthood at Every Age, Every Price and Subsidized by the State?
My research will focus on the contemporary anomalous Israeli policy concerning subsidizing the various Assisted Reproductive Technologies by the state. For sociological, demographical, religious and security reasons the State of Israel invests a vast amount of money to develop and use the various Assisted Reproductive Technologies.
Israel, today, has the highest per capita consumption rate of infertility therapy, with In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) the most prevalent. This situation is sustained by a uniquely generous public health policy that poses hardly any restrictions on the eligibility of Israel’s citizens for infertility treatments within the National Health Insurance (NHI) system. The situation recently worsened when the Israeli Knesset passed the 2010 Eggs Donation Law that extends the eligibility limitation on the age of the mother from 51 to 54 and even covers all the expenses in some incidents of egg donation by the State of Israel.
Given the health risks as well as the emotional and financial costs involved in the excessive use of IVF, especially in the case of the potential mother’s advanced age, this pattern of regulation and consumption calls for a most careful, ethical and legal consideration of this law’s implications.
In this research, I will thus reconsider the legitimacy, efficiency and feasibility of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies regulation, from the legal, medical, economic and bioethics point of view. For example, the latest empirical medical evidence shows that the use of IVF endangers both the mother and her infant, especially as the mother advances in age. I will argue, inter alia, that contemporary Israeli policy should be carefully reconsidered as to whether it is reasonable to invest huge amounts of money in an almost futile effort to encourage giving birth at every age, at any price and still subsidized by the state.
