I submitted my PhD thesis to the University of Oxford in 2011. At the time, I planned to turn it into a book. But life had other plans for me - campaigning for equal civil partnerships, a career switch from academia to policy, and two beautiful babies. I wish I'd uploaded a PDF years ago, but it seems there's no time like the (uncertain) present.
No doubt some of the later chapters are out of date, and the policy debates have shifted. And I'm sure I'd have framed and phrased things differently if I'd written it now or turned it into a book. But that hasn't happened yet, perfection is the enemy of the good, and there's some useful material in here -- about covert discrimination in child allowances to encourage Jewish fertility, and on the flip side, the lack of data to back up the claim that Palestinian citizens of Israel were the only population group given free contraceptives.
My goal in sharing this now is to prevent any future researchers similarly intrigued by these questions of reproductive politics in Israel having to start from scratch. Hope it helps someone, somewhere, sometime.
Here it is.
