shoshana kordova

By Shoshana Kordova

“You have to study your English,” Dvora Ross reminds her 9-year-old son Avichai as she putters around her kitchen, preparing hot chocolate for 6-year-old Bezalel and brushing the hairs of the family guinea pig from the pajama top of his twin sister, Na’ama.

This orderly chaos - complete with scattered toys, bedtime requests and the endless struggle to finish homework - could be the scene in almost any household in the world. And to a large extent, the Rosses are pretty standard fare, except that Avichai, Bezalel and Na’ama didn’t come into the world in the usual way. Their mother, an Orthodox Israeli single woman, was artificially inseminated at age 35, and again at 39, overcoming objections from her self-described “very religious family” in order to fulfill her dream of motherhood. 

Ross, now 45, is something of a pioneer among single mothers by choice in Israel. When she became a mother in 1998, she was fielding regular queries from other young women interested in pursuing the same goal. But lately, the queries have stopped, as single motherhood among Israeli women has become far more common. 

Indeed, single motherhood among Jewish women both in Israel and the United States is on the upswing, the result of delayed marriage, no marriage or the paucity of single Jewish men. Experts who keep tabs on single motherhood by choice rate agree that there has been a marked rise in the number of single women in their 30’s and 40’s in both countries - including, increasingly, religious Jewish women - who are choosing to have children on their own. 

“There’s been an increase in societal acceptance of women having kids on their own without having a partner,” says Rosanna Hertz, a sociologist at Wellesley College who wrote the 2006 book “Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family.” 

As in the United States, so too in Israel, says Dr. Haim Yavetz, head of the Institute for the Study of Fertility at Lis Maternity Hospital in Tel Aviv. “The procedure has undergone a kind of process of social legitimization,” he says. “People talk about it. It’s not weird anymore.” 

Although government statistics both in Israel and the U.S. don’t take into account whether or not women choose to be single mothers, the numbers do indicate a significant change in recent years. In the United States, the rate of births for unmarried women aged 30-44 rose 28 percent between 1995 and 2005, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. In Israel, about 500 single women a year are becoming mothers through artificial insemination - approximately double the number of a decade ago, Yavetz says. 

Even so, the emotional - and for some, the ethical - hurdles to single motherhood still remain high enough for most single Jewish women in their 30’s and 40’s to reject the option. For those who take the leap, however, doubts tend to fade among the diaper-changing and lunch-making normalcy of it all, even if the difficulties are sharpened by the absence of a partner. 

“It’s hard at night,” says Evie Goldfarb, a translator living outside of Tel Aviv who gave birth to her first child, Emma, at 40. “I wish someone else would get up when she wakes up all teething and crying and I have to get up all 17 times instead of half of them.” 

Like the sound of the crocodile that haunts Captain Hook, the ticking of the biological clock weighs heavily for women waiting for their elusive besherts. Women reach their peak of fertility in their early 20’s, and by the age of 35 have about a 15 percent chance of conceiving in each ovulatory cycle (as opposed to women in their early 20’s, who have a 25 percent chance). The chances decrease to about 10 percent by age 37 and 5 percent by age 42. By the age of 44, Yavetz says, women have only a 1 to 2 percent chance of conceiving. 

American Jewish women, it turns out, are more likely than their non-Jewish counterparts to be unmarried during prime pregnancy years. The 2000-01 National Jewish Population Survey found that Jewish women of childbearing age are statistically more likely than the general population to be well educated and nevermarried - two characteristics that typify most single mothers by choice, according to Jane Mattes, founder of the national support network Single Mothers by Choice and author of the 1994 book “Single Mothers by Choice: A Guidebook for Single Women Who Are Considering or Have Chosen Motherhood.” 

According to the Jewish Population Survey, among Jewish American women aged 25-34, 64 percent are married, compared to 70 percent of the general U.S. population. There’s an even bigger gap when it comes to childbearing: 70 percent of Jewish American women aged 25-29 have no children, compared to 44 percent in the general population; the same gap of 26 percentage points holds for the 30-34 age bracket. 

That might explain why about 80 to 85 percent of Lisa Bell’s south Florida branch of Single Mothers by Choice, a support group with local branches across the U.S., is Jewish. “We were always amazed that it’s such a highly Jewish group,” says Bell, a single corporate recruiter who gave birth to Emily, now 3, two days after her 38th birthday. Across the country in California’s San Fernando Valley, Rikki Fayne puts her group’s Jewish representation at about 60 percent. 

Family and children play an important role in Jewish life everywhere, but Israel is particularly child-oriented, says Dr. Dorit Segal-Engelchin, a lecturer at Ben- Gurion University’s department of social work and Center for Women’s Health Studies and Promotion who is researching the phenomenon of single mothers by choice. 

The average size of the Jewish family in Israel was 3.5 people in 2006, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, compared to 2.3 people, but only 1.8 Jews, per American Jewish household, according to the survey. 

“There is quite a lot of social pressure on [Israeli] women to become mothers, and that’s also something that women internalize during their socialization process,” she says. 

One expression of Israel’s focus on family is its subsidy of most fertility procedures, including in vitro fertilization. Thus, women who might not have been able to afford spending more than $20,000 on conceiving a child in the U.S. might still be in a position to do so in Israel. 

Wellesley’s Hertz says that most single mothers by choice would have preferred to do things the traditional way. 

“The vast majority of women who are becoming single mothers are going this route because they have not met a partner to have a child with, and if they had their druthers, they would be partners and not single,” she says. “Women, for whatever their reasons, want to have kids - and if there’s no one to have kids with, some women are going to do it on their own.” This is the case in Israel as well, says Segal-Engelchin of Ben-Gurion University’s women’s health studies center. 

Goldfarb, who moved to Israel from Cleveland when she was 5, says she spent most of her 30’s thankful that she was spared the ache of wanting a child. But when that changed at 39, Goldfarb moved quickly, becoming a mother to slight, pixie-faced Emma less than a year later, in October 2006. 

“I did not have any urges to become a mother until I got hit by the baby bug when I was 39,” says Goldfarb, her long, dark curly hair held off her face by a maroon bandana. “All of a sudden I thought, ‘What, is nobody ever going to call me Mommy?’” 

As she cuts up pieces of melon for Emma in their home in Kiryat Ono, Goldfarb puts her finger on a point that is a make-or-break issue for single women deciding whether to become mothers, as well as a key element in the debate over the legitimacy of voluntary single motherhood: the removal of motherhood from the context of marriage. 

“My wanting to be a parent has to be a separate issue from my wanting to be in a couple relationship,” says Goldfarb. “Once you internalize that, there’s nothing stopping you, and you have to just go ahead and do it.” 

For many women, giving up the expectation of a traditional family life is the biggest obstacle to becoming a single mother. 

That traditional vision has been an obstacle for “Leah,” as the former New Yorker asked to be identified. Now 43, the Jerusalem resident had been thinking about having a child on her own since she was in her mid- to late-30’s. She never went through with it, though, in part because she found it too difficult to let go of the hope that she would be married. Leah even went as far as ordering a sperm sample - only to cancel the order when she got cold feet. 

“I wasn’t sure emotionally if I could do it, and then there was the thought that I’ll get married,” she says. Still unmarried, Leah is still considering having a child through a donor egg or adoption on her own, even as she mourns the loss of a decent chance at having a biological child. 

While Ross and Goldfarb decided that they did not need husbands to become parents, Leah, almost despite herself, clung to her image of marriage and motherhood as nearly inextricably linked. That linkage is precisely what many Orthodox rabbis seek to maintain by discouraging single motherhood by choice. 

Unlike the Reform and Conservative movements, Orthodox Judaism takes a dim view of single motherhood by choice. Menachem Burstein, an Orthodox rabbi who directs an institute providing rabbinic counseling and assistance to couples with fertility problems, cites potential halachic problems with single women becoming mothers - including an opinion that artificial insemination for single women is considered prostitution. Furthermore, he says that even if the process were halachically permissible, the rabbinic leadership would still reject the practice because it undermines the structure of the Jewish family. 

“The Jewish family is the most important thing there is - and if we destroy it, that will destroy the Jewish people,” says Burstein. “A family is, as the Torah says, ‘male and female He created them’ - and this is not ‘male and female.’ This is not a family.” 

Concern over undermining the institution of the Jewish family even pervades the opinion of one of Israel’s more liberal and outspoken Orthodox rabbis, Yuval Cherlow, one of three rabbis to head Yeshivat Hesder Petach Tikva. Nonetheless, Cherlow acknowledges that some women find themselves in situations that fall short of what he describes as the ideal. Stirring some controversy within the Orthodox world, Cherlow has publicly ruled that single women who have been making every effort to get married but have not succeeded in doing so are halachically permitted to be artificially inseminated if they have not found a husband by the age of 37. 

It is not only religious figures who question the wisdom of intentionally building a one-parent family. Ned Holstein, the executive director of Fathers & Families, a Boston-based nonprofit advocating the active involvement of both parents in children’s lives, says the trend of women choosing to become single mothers is ultimately harmful to society at large. 

“I don’t think it’s something for society to celebrate,” says Holstein, a physician. “I think there are many phenomena in modern society in which something’s good for an individual but is not good for society, and I think this might fall into that category.” 

Holstein says his position is backed by research showing that children of single mothers don’t do as well as those with two involved parents. For instance, sociologist David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, argues in his book “Life Without Father” that the absence of fathers from children’s lives - whether because of divorce or single motherhood (by circumstance or by choice) - is a major factor behind problems like crime, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy and substance abuse, in part because fathers interact with their children in a way that stresses initiative and independence, and ultimately teaches them self-control. 

As the mother of two boys, Dvora Ross hasn’t decided yet what exactly she will do when the time comes to teach her sons to put on tefilin and read from the Torah, but she doesn’t seem overly concerned. For his part, Avichai is already interested in the identity of his donor, an American non-Jew, and wants to know why he isn’t eligible for American citizenship (”because he’s not a father, he’s a donor,” Ross explains). Ross says she had thought about what it would mean for her children not to have a father, but saw that many children seemed to be in a similar position due to death or divorce. “Everyone lacks something,” she says, “and this isn’t the worst thing to lack.” 

Still, Goldfarb, Emma’s mother, does not whitewash the challenges of single motherhood. “There’s nobody to hand the baby over to,” she says. “I’m the only adult in the house, and that means that I can’t go throw the garbage out without her. I know that sounds minor, but you can’t just say, ‘Here, will you watch the baby, I’ll just…whatever.’” 

But for all the challenges that Goldfarb and other mothers like her face, she remains convinced that she made the best decision given her less-than-ideal circumstances. 

“I’m sorry I don’t have a partner. It’s tiring making all the decisions,” Goldfarb explains. “But the alternative is not to have Emma, not to be a parent - and that just hushes every qualm.”