I guess those who want to boycott, divest and sanction Israel ought to not be hypocrites and should not avail themselves of the benefits of Israeli science and research. It will be a cold day in hell when you see the Islamic world make such scientific advances that would benefit humanity. By the way, this is proof that science and tradition do not need to be in conflict with each other.
by Dina Kraft
Jewish and Arab, straight and gay, secular and religious, the patients who come to Assuta Hospital in Tel Aviv every day are united by a single hope: that medical science will bring them a baby.
Israel is the world capital of in vitro fertilization and the hospital, which performs about 7,000 of the procedures each year, is one of the busiest fertilization clinics in the world.
Unlike countries where couples can go broke trying to conceive with the assistance of costly medical technology, Israel provides free, unlimited IVF procedures for up to two “take-home babies” until a woman is 45. The policy has made Israelis the highest per capita users of the procedure in the world.
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“Anyone who lives here is expected to have children,” she added. “In casual conversation you will be asked how many children you have and if you say one, people will ask why only one, and if you say two, why only two?”
Israelis already have a high fertility rate: an average of 2.9 children per family. Beyond the biblical imperative to be fruitful, some Israeli Jews remain concerned with replenishing their numbers in the wake of the Holocaust.
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Arab citizens of Israel, however, have the same rights to state-paid fertility treatments as their Jewish counterparts.
A survey published by the journal Human Reproduction Update in 2002 showed that 1,657 in vitro fertilization procedures per million people per year were performed in Israel, compared with 899 in Iceland, the country with the second highest rate, and 126 in the United States, which trailed far behind European countries.
Experts say Israel’s rate still far outstrips the rest of the world. Four percent of Israeli children today are the products of in vitro fertilization, compared with about 1 percent estimated in the United States.
A major center of the baby-making industry is Assuta, which performs about a quarter of Israel’s approximately 28,000 IVF procedures a year. At the fertility center there, a lab housing 25 incubators and 60,000 frozen embryos stored in liquid nitrogen sits between an operating room where women have their eggs aspirated and a so-called transfer room where the embryos are implanted in the patient.
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While the procedure is entirely state-paid at public hospitals, at private hospitals like Assuta patients using supplementary insurance may be charged a modest co-payment of $150 or so. Patients must also pay for their hormone shots, which are also heavily subsidized by the state.
The Health Ministry says it spends about $3,450 per treatment, although some critics say the real cost may be higher.
In the United States an average treatment or cycle, from egg retrieval to embryo implantation, costs $12,400. Insurance companies that do cover treatment, even partially, usually cap the amount of cycles they pay for.
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Mira Huebner-Harel, the Health Ministry’s legal adviser, said that Israel was the only country to cover not only unlimited IVF treatment until age 45, but to make treatment available for all women regardless of their marital status or sexual orientation. She said a state committee was considering whether to open coverage of fertility treatments to gay men using a surrogate.
“We are very sensitive here to the desire of people to have a family,” she said. “I think our country can be proud that a woman who wants to be a mother can try do so.”
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The booming industry has also provided other advantages to Israeli physicians. The large pool of patients with diverse fertility problems has helped them tailor treatments that end with a successful pregnancy, they say. And because cost is not an issue, there is less pressure to implant multiple embryos, which can lead to larger than desired multiple births — triplets, quintuplets or even the occasional octuplets.
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