A Liquid Nitrogen Bank Containing Sperm and Eggs Samples - ivf - in vitro fertilization, egg freezing.

Egg Freezing in Israel: Legal Framework and Women’s Viewpoints

By Yael Hashiloni-Dolev and Nitzan Rimon-Zarfaty

In 2009, Israel was one of the first countries to authorize social egg freezing, before it was declared non-experimental.

Israel is a highly pronatalist familistic society with relatively high marriage rates, low divorce rates, and the highest birth rate among OECD countries. Israeli pronatalism frames the favorable Israeli approach to fertility medicine and preservation. Currently, egg freezing is used for both medical and social reasons, and for transgender men.

Israeli policy views social egg freezing as primarily enabling, based on liberal ideology, “individual autonomy.”

Indeed, on one hand, social egg freezing has been praised as a revolutionary solution for women’s age-related fertility decline, thus providing women with liberating opportunities. On the other hand, it has been criticized for as oriented toward women’s bodies rather than toward taking away social obstacles to their full participation in the labor market and society in general. Giant corporations such as Apple and Facebook have offered funding for social egg freezing to their female employees while provoking ongoing bioethical and public debates regarding their implications, including; medicalization, (dis)empowerment, “appropriate” motherhood, medical risks, and success rates. This post considers these debates with a focus on the Israeli context.

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Vaccines.

Promote Trust, Avoid Fraud: Lessons in Public Health Messaging from the Booster Roll Out

By Carmel Shachar

Even in September 2021, it was fairly clear that boosters for all adults, regardless of risk factors or which vaccines they initially received, would be coming soon.

Indeed, within two months, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revised its recommendations to say that all vaccinated adults should receive a COVID-19 booster.

Unfortunately, the discrepancy between past messaging, which restricted access to boosters to select groups, and the current, broad recommendation has spawned two, related public health communications problems.

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Fake Vaccine Cards and the Challenges of Decentralized Health Data

By Carmel Shachar and Chloe Reichel

Soon the U.S. will have vaccinated all adults who are not vaccine hesitant. Our next key challenges will be reopening workplaces, restaurants, schools, and other public areas, as well as encouraging vaccine uptake among those who are hesitant or resistant to the vaccine.

Vaccine passports or certifications could be a tool used to address both of those challenges.

But our approach to health care data management may undermine this next stage of the pandemic response.

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Masked statue of Meir Dizengoff, the first Mayor of Tel Aviv. Photo courtesy of Aeyal Gross.

Rights Restrictions and Securitization of Health in Israel During COVID-19

By Aeyal Gross

Facing the novel Coronavirus, Israel adopted a series of legal measures that have restricted various human rights both directly and indirectly.

The earliest restrictions — requirements established in February for people returning from abroad to isolate — were, in March, gradually broadened to restrict freedom of movement within Israel, ranging from a general lockdown, which at its peak restricted any outing to walking or exercising only within 100 meters of one’s home, except for specific purposes, to cordon sanitaire for areas with bigger outbreaks, which prohibited movement into and out of those regions.

The various restrictions created severe limitations not only on the right to freedom of movement itself, but also on family life, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.

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The Law of Breast Cancer

By Alex Stein

During an annual mammogram screening for breast cancer, the radiologist detects a nodule in the patient’s breast. The nodule is large enough to require a biopsy, but the radiologist prefers to schedule a follow-up appointment with the patient for six months later. This appointment reveals that the nodule had grown and the radiologist refers the patient to a biopsy. The biopsy is carried out four days later by a surgeon. The surgeon determines that the nodule was malignant and diagnoses the patient with breast cancer. The patient consults two breast cancer specialists who unanimously recommend mastectomy and chemotherapy. These procedures and the ancillary treatments prove successful. They make the patient cancer free in one year. The chemotherapy caused the patient to experience hair loss, pain, nausea, headaches and fatigue, but all these symptoms are now gone as well.

The patient is happy with the result but is still upset. She believes that a timely discovery of her cancer would have given her a far less painful and less disfiguring treatment option: lumpectomy followed by radiation therapy.

Can the patient successfully sue the negligent radiologist? Read More