Jewish perspectives on oncofertility: the complexities of tradition.

I begin this reflection on Jewish bioethical response to the dilemmas within oncofertility with a familiar caveat: there is no one particular authority on Jewish ethics, nor even on the legal, or halachic norms that govern Jewish community practice. Jewish bioethics has historically been an account of optimism about research, as a project of repair in a broken or unfinished world [1]. While Freedman has raised some cautionary caveats about the need for full consent and safety [2] and while others have raised some questions of justice (including this author), the main thrust of Jewish responses to both artificial reproduction and to new technology in treating cancer has been to celebrate the advances as a part of the general goal of human development, creativity, and capacity. Unlike Catholic moral theology, the moral status of the human embryo is not that of a person, or even a potential person. The embryo created in a Petri dish is an artifact, existing extracorporeally, and having no potential of being other than what it is, unless complex science, a women’s hospitality, and a great deal of luck combine to allow a pregnancy to develop. Halachah, or Jewish law, is clear about both the duty to learn [3] and the duty to heal [4] and clear about essential commitments to a pronatalist position on creating embryos. All of this has driven both a robust support for research in medicine and a practical enthusiasm for public funding for research and its emerging therapies. International Hadassah, the Jewish Women’s Organization, diasporic Rabbinic boards, and congregational organizations, as well as Israeli state policy clearly support research on embryos, stem cells, genetics genomic and made robust social and economic support of ART a matter of urgent policy. Thus oncofertility, a technology which builds on the fields of ART to treat cancer sequella, seems poised to be normatively supported by Jewish text and tradition. Oncofertility in Jewish thought is framed by several constraints. A Jewish contribution to the debate on fertility and infertility is based both on what is written