Pursuing Piety: Orthodox Women, God’s Calling, and Reproductive Technologies in Israel

Innovations in reproductive medicine have intervened in the (re)generation of human life: a cultural matter of religious significance. Yet rapid developments have left non-secular engagements with assisted reproduction undertheorized, analytically distancing religious ways-of-life from biomedical advancements. Accordingly, this article examines how Orthodox Jewish women’s subjectivity is forged in pregnancy, pursuing a divine calling to continue their ancient lineage through a negotiated adoption of reproductive technologies. Extending Mahmood’s work on Islamic piety movements to the context of Orthodox expectant-mothers, this interrogates (Western) liberal feminist notions of agency as solely resistance (including “liberation” from religious prescriptions). Rejecting the devaluation of their repeated pregnancies as patriarchal instrumentalization, the article centres how Orthodox women understand procreation as devotional worship. Focusing on the localization of artificial fertilization (IVF), such traces the relation of spiritual subjects to the state’s biopolitical management of bodies, populations and religious boundaries. Drawing on Mahmood’s reconsideration of agency to include embodied submissions to ethical commitments, I contend that Orthodox women’s self-formation in pregnancy emerges at the interface of their gendered piety and temporal imperatives. Their subjectivity negotiates the intersection of religious dispositions with Israel’s state structuring of access to reproductive technologies, ensuring the continuity of both spiritual and national communities.