The Truth About Infertility and Equality in Israel

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“High Risk.” It is a label that turns your body into a ticking time bomb.

At thirty-two years old and twenty-seven weeks pregnant with twins, I was exactly where I did not want to be: the High Risk Pregnancy Unit at Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba. I had started having contractions and bleeding earlier that day, and it was far too early in my pregnancy for it to be normal.

I entered my semi-private room and met Urud. She was from Tayibe, an Arab city just a few kilometres away. She was a vision in neon, wearing a bright pink pyjama set with puffy pink slippers that clicked against the floor tiles with the authority of a general. She had long, thick, black hair and huge, brown eyes that seemed to take in my entire history before I had even set down my bag.

Urud was not just staying in the room. She was ruling it.

She stood by her bed, meticulously folding an entire wardrobe of pink pyjama sets. Beside her bed was a fortress of comfort: a mountain of fresh fruit, boxes of cereal, and bags of Bamba.

“How many do you have?” she asked.

“Two boys,” I answered. “And you?”

“Four girls,” she said.

I gasped and looked down at her belly. It looked like a regular, single-occupancy pregnancy. I tried to imagine quadruplets floating around in there, a tiny, chaotic sisterhood waiting for their cue. We were in the same week of pregnancy, but Urud was prepared for a siege.

She looked at me, perhaps seeing the outsider on my face, the immigrant who was still waiting for someone to tell her the rules.

“If you want something, don’t wait for them to bring it to you,” she told me. She snapped a pink pyjama top into a perfect square. “The nurses here are worthless. You have to hound them. And if you think you need more meds, or need to be checked, do not take no for an answer. You need to stand up for yourself here.”

Then, she staged a performance.

“Marta, I need more Acamol!” she bellowed toward the hallway.

A nurse yelled back from the station. “Urud, it has not been six hours since your last painkillers.”

“You know I took Nurofen four hours ago,” Urud yelled back, her eyes sparkling with the joy of the fight. “You can give me Acamol in between. Yalla, bring some over.”

She winked at me, tossed me an apple, and went back to her pink laundry.

Urud and I were very different people. We came from different cities, spoke different primary languages, and had built our lives around different cultural anchors. But we had one thing in common that transcended all of it: we were both pregnant with multiples because of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), a journey that would have cost a fortune in almost any other country. But here, the state had already removed the barrier. In Israel, IVF is free.

It is a fact that often surprises people outside of this small, complicated country. Because Israel prioritizes “the right to parenthood” as a universal value, the state ensures that every Israeli resident, regardless of religion or marital status, has access to subsidized fertility treatments.

My own journey to that hospital room started in a modern clinic in Ra’anana. I remember the cool air of the office and the rhythmic hum of the machines. I watched on an ultrasound screen as two tiny embryos took their path into my womb. It was a moment of profound, high-tech grace. I hugged my stomach and prayed they would make themselves at home and stay.

And they did. Two healthy baby boys remained tucked inside my womb until that night in Meir Hospital when the mechanics of my body started to rebel. The contractions began to sharpen, turning from a dull ache into daggers. The nurses, however, were complacent. Each time they checked the external fetal monitor, they told me the activity was “non-productive.” They insisted the contractions would eventually subside.

Through the curtain that separated our beds, Urud heard me wince.

“You need to be checked,” she said. Her voice cut through the clinical fog with the same authority she used to demand her painkillers. “Do not listen to them. Trust me: if I did not tell them what to do, I would have given birth to these babies a long time ago. Call the nurse back. Tell her you need to be checked to see if you are dilated.”

I had been in the country for almost ten years, but questioning authority was still not natural to me. I was still the girl who was polite and put that value above everything else. But as the pain became too much to bear, I forced myself to leave my comfort zone. I called the nurse back. I timidly suggested that I felt something had changed. I asked if they could check my progress.

“Nu, she has been having contractions nonstop for six hours,” Urud yelled, waving her arms in the air from her side of the curtain. “Roll up your sleeves and check the girl already, for God’s sake.”

The nurse looked at both of us, sighed, and finally gave in. “You know, checking for dilation can lead to further dilation,” she muttered.

“Oh, come on,” Urud shot back. “She could push a watermelon out from there by now, believe me!”

The nurse finally agreed. I was four centimetres dilated.

The quiet expectation of a normal night vanished and the race began. We were racing against the time it would take for the babies to descend into the birth canal, a route far too rigorous for their tiny, premature heads. We needed an emergency c-section. My then-husband managed to leave our two-year-old son with his parents and rushed over, arriving just in time to see me wheeled away.

Inside the operating room, the world became cold and mechanical. I was frozen from the chest down. A screen blocked me from seeing or feeling anything beyond my shoulders. I felt the strange, jarring sensation of the doctors working, and then, in a flash, they ripped the two babies out of me.

There was no first contact with my skin. There was no first suckle at my breast.

They were rushed into incubators and raced out of the operating room toward the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). I was left with only the sound of their cries as they disappeared down the hall. It was not a robust, normal newborn cry: they sounded like little birds, shrieking after the mother who had abandoned them in the nest.

I waited in the recovery room for answers. I was alone in a quiet, empty room, lined with beds waiting for women who were just coming out of birth. I lay there in the silence, waiting for my legs to thaw out. Were they alive? Did they survive the transition from the safety of my womb to the harsh light of the operating room?

Finally, after a few hours, my then-husband arrived. He told me they were both breathing on their own without the help of life support. For babies born at twenty-seven weeks, it was a miracle. Baby One weighed exactly one kilogram. Baby Two weighed nine hundred and sixty-five grams.

We were physically and emotionally numb. We just stared at each other, caught in the shock of what had just unfolded. In Israel, every birth is usually met with a chorus of “Mazal Tov,” but we did not know if the words applied to us yet. Was this a celebration, or was it a waiting game?

The next morning, the adrenaline evaporated and everything hurt. I had been transferred during the night to the maternity ward. I was surrounded by the sounds of new mothers caressing their newborns, but my arms were empty. My babies were a floor above me, and I had no idea if they had made it through the night.

My new roommate was an Ethiopian woman who had also given birth to twins. Her experience was the mirror image of mine. Her babies had made it to term. They were warm, breathing, and robust little miracles. I was frantic: I wanted to jump out of the bed and run to my babies, but my body would not let me.

When my roommate’s mother came to visit her new grandbabies, she walked past my bed. I felt a surge of desperation and, for the first time, I demanded help like a true Israeli. Like Urud. I stopped her and assertively asked if she could take some time away from her grandchildren to take me upstairs to the NICU to see my babies.

She was a small woman, dressed in a long skirt with a kerchief covering her head. She looked at me at first as if she were confused, as if she did not quite understand what I was saying. Then, with a heavy Amharic accent, she answered. “Of course, yalda sheli.”

She pushed me in a wheelchair toward the elevator. My blue and white hospital gown barely protected me from the draft of the hallway. I felt exposed and untethered, vulnerable in a situation where I had absolutely no control. 

Before I could enter the NICU, I had to suit up in a surgical gown and scrub my hands. I scoured my skin even though I knew I would not be allowed to hold them yet. They were wired to too many machines, and their world was defined by plastic and glass rather than my arms.

The nurse wheeled me between the two incubators. To my left was a tiny baby bird with a dusting of fuzzy, blonde hair. The smallest diaper the hospital had was still too big for him: he lay inside it as if it were a cocoon. To my right was a slightly larger bird with brown fuzz. A CPAP machine hummed beside him, forcing oxygen into his nose.

I looked from left to right in a state of shock. This was not the birth I had imagined. I did not dream of the silence of the recovery room or the week-long wait to feel their skin against mine. One moment, they were fine. The next, their heart rates would drop and the monitors would wail. A team of staff would rush to the incubators, and I would watch them do a frantic dance of saving life.

The nurses were angels. They tended to the infants, but they also held the parents who wandered the halls like shadows. There were those who cried on a nurse’s shoulder when their preemies died, and those of us who watched on, hoping we would not become one of them. Photos lined the walls of those who had survived the NICU before us. There were letters from parents and pictures of children celebrating their first, fifth, or tenth birthdays. It was a gallery of hope, proof that these tiny, struggling beginnings can eventually lead to a full and happy life.

And it did for us. Every week, the twins grew bigger and stronger. They eventually passed the thirty-week mark and moved out of the immediate danger zone. I spent most of my days for two months with them in the NICU, taking turns holding and feeding them, before racing home to be with my two-year-old for dinner and bath time.

Then, one morning, the nursing staff seemed more stressed than usual. There was a flurry of movement as if they were preparing for an arrival. The elevator doors opened and four incubators rolled out, one after the other, with a baby girl in each one. Urud had made it to thirty-five weeks. Her daughters were healthy, filled out, and breathing on their own. As I watched the parade of life roll past me, I felt a surge of pure, uncomplicated joy.

The next day, a tired but radiant Urud waddled into the NICU to be with her girls. She was moving slowly, the physical cost of four new lives etched into her stride, but her face was alight with a fierce, quiet pride.

“They are all okay,” she told me. “We will go home together in about two weeks.”

I told her “Mazal Tov” with a sincerity that only another mother in a surgical gown can truly understand. I told her that we, too, would finally be going home.

This is the part of the Israeli story that rarely makes it into the headlines. Behind the noise of global politics and the labels people try to pin on this country, there is a quiet, stubborn insistence on the value of life.

The desire to build a family and continue a legacy is treated here as a fundamental human right. My lived experience in that high-risk ward showed me the opposite of the “apartheid” narrative that the world so often repeats. It is more than just photos of Jews and Arabs sharing a bus or a university campus. It is the state refusing to discriminate when two women, one Jewish and one Arab, wanted to bring life into the world. This country did not look at our backgrounds, our religions, or our ethnicities when it sanctioned the growth of our families.

This is the Israel I know. This is my Israel.

I am profoundly grateful that this country helped make Urud’s dream of four children a reality after years of infertility. And I am grateful that it made my own dream of three beautiful children possible. All of them are welcome, loved, and protected here.