The State of Israel is known for its pronatalist stance concerning the usage, regulation and subsidising of assisted reproductive technologies, including IVF, egg donation, surrogacy and PGD in order to guarantee the highly valued right of genetic parenthood for its citizenry. Yet, critical scholars have rightly argued that Israel’s pronatalism is a selective one, primarily aimed to serve the reproductive rights of its Jewish population at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population.

This lecture aims to unsettle Israel’s stratified “reproductive-demographic nexus” from a settler colonial and biocapitalist perspective. Rather than understanding Israel’s fertility policies in terms of rights, choice, peace and reconciliation, it will propose a reproductive sabotage framework that takes power, struggle and resistance in/through the reproductive sphere as conceptual and political points of departure. By looking into two particular instances of reproductive sabotage, i.e. sperm smuggling by Palestinian political prisoners and the birth strike promoted by the Gays Against Surrogacy collective, we will explore how practices of (assisted) reproduction can materialise as an equally stratified site of resistance and empowerment in Palestine/Israel.

Organised by Warwick for Justice in Palestine and the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender