‘Cheaper than a newcomer’: on the social production of IVF policy in Israel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the shaping of health policy in terms of power relations and group interests, as enacted in Israel's IVF policy. A comparison with the principles of IVF provision in other countries (UK, Canada, USA) shows Israel's policy to be substantially more 'liberal'. In order to explain this exception, the policy is initially located within the context of the state's pro-natalist reproductive policy, women's impaired equality and a complex system of healthcare provision. A Parliament Committee discussion on the subject is then analysed in greater detail, revealing three narratives that are used to account for the state's IVF policy: a nationalised narrative of reproductive medicine as a source of international acclaim, a personalised narrative of compassion for anguished women, and a medicalised narrative of experts as being best capable of regulating IVF. All three narratives have merged within the local IVF discourse, enabling the creation and maintenance of consensus among the participating politicians, physicians, consumers and women activists. Of significance is the muted argument regarding the state's interest in enlarging its Jewish population, which dominated other discussions on this topic. I argue that it is the demographic interest which crucially underlies the state's willingness to sustain its costly IVF policy, and that it is this interest which has enabled the various participants--who all shared an interest in unlimited IVF provision--to present a unanimous agreement. State representatives then used this consensus as a firm civil ground for the development and maintenance of Israel's exceptional IVF policy. The paper concludes with several implications regarding women's health and wellbeing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".