A new generation ,"sound mind in a sound Body", was the ultimate end of the prolonged Israeli nation building process.
The process , which took place at the beginning of the last century, aimed to re-create the Jewish nation by relocating it in the promised land in one hand, and by ...
(Show more)A new generation ,"sound mind in a sound Body", was the ultimate end of the prolonged Israeli nation building process.
The process , which took place at the beginning of the last century, aimed to re-create the Jewish nation by relocating it in the promised land in one hand, and by establishing a new native Jew, on the other. This ideological theme was shared by national leaders and doctors as well, and demanded of mothers to have a lot of children and to raise them according to specific rules and orders. Their was to raise -
Doctors and national leaders praised birth and its national benefits, and glorified motherhood. But they were quiet worried because of the low birth rates in the urban and educated strata, and from the high birth rates of the poor and uneducated- both Jewish Immigrants and poor Arab residence of the country. The doctors wrote in Israeli women magazines of the 30's and 40s about an anti-reproduction social sentiment and about the fear from bearing children.
This social phenomenon was accompanied by vast usage of abortions. Abortions were illegal in the British Mandate period, unless for health reasons. “The medical reasons, as you all know, are highly subjective” wrote one of the doctors, Dr. Josef Meier, when he turned to his collages to try to stop the abortions.
Using content analysis, articles from the Israeli women magazines (Mainly Haisha and Dvar Hapoelet) will be discussed in order to conceptualize the significance of abortions in the Israeli nation building Process.
The Abortion discourse in the Israeli women's magazines of the time drew the lines between the explicit calls of famous doctors and political leaders to stop abortions out of national, social and medical reasons, and the anonymous objections of single women who wrote in favor of free abortions. Part of the doctors openly favored abortions for the poor and the uneducated, but not for middle-class urban women. In this unique set of political and social circumstances, religious arguments from one side and feminist arguments from the other, made surprisingly little significance comparing their essential position in the contemporary abortion debate in Israel.
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