‘Abuse’ of newborn babies!

It has just come to my attention that non-citizen mothers who choose home birthing can no longer receive a birth certificate from the Ministry of Interior. Their only option to receive a birth certificate is to bring their newborns to a hospital within several hours of birth. Requiring a newborn baby to leave home and come to hospital constitutes outright abuse!

Now as best I can piece the story together, it is a bureaucratic glitch and can – and must! – be corrected immediately. Israeli citizens who gave birth at home receive birth certificates on demand from the Ministry. Somehow the ministry closed such a service for non-citizens somewhere more than six months ago.

Israel on the whole is not all that accommodating to home birthing, which could be a matter for debate among health experts. But home birthing with a qualified midwife ia an accepted practice, and the midwife’s documentation is accepted by the Interior Ministry as valid proof of birth – if the mother is  a citizen. So it seems unlikely tat the government has chosen its tactic of pressure against home birthing solely against the temporary resident population. It would seem equally absurd that someone in the Interior Ministry has chosen to use this tactic to “encourage” (aka coerce) registering for citizenship. The best I can guess is that someone in the Interior Ministry just cancelled the procedure for non-citizens, without considering the negative impact on newborns.

This constitutes an “error” that can be corrected. This blog simply calls for the Director General or Minister to correct it immediately and restore proper issuing of birth certificates to noncitizens who have given birth at home, because failure to correct the error immediately and maintaining the current situation constitutes abuse of newborn children.