Orthodox Single is another way of saying Forever Infertile... and that's unfair.

I recently shared a shabbos lunch with three single women. They were around 50 years old. One was divorced with a teenage child; the other two had never been married. These women were accomplished professionals—funny, intelligent and all around good company. I wouldn’t presume to guess why they never married, but I caught myself wondering if they still considered themselves on the make. Did they still think that their life was incomplete without a spouse? Were they deeply unsatisfied or had they come to terms with living a single, but vibrant and meaningful life?

It then occurred to me that their marital status was really not the issue at all. What intrigued me was that two of these women never had their own children and most likely never will. Sometime during the meal we were discussing property taxes and estate planning and the topic of children who fight over their parents’ estate came up. One woman leaned over to the other and mumbled, “I’m lucky I’ll never have that problem.” She laughed at the irony, but I saw it as nothing less than tragic.

I suppose that by today’s progressive standard a woman can be complete without having experienced childbirth or motherhood, but I feel that would only hold true when considered in the context of choice. A woman who does not wish to be a mother is better off staying single and/or childless. But these women at my table, who are orthodox and theoretically family oriented, are forced into childlessness not by choice, but by circumstance.

Outside of the orthodox world, it’s becoming the norm for single women to be having children. Even in the most liberal crowd, there’s a stigma that goes with artificial insemination, but I think this last resort for a single woman running out of time is considered more or less reasonable. The Jewish Week ran an article some time ago about women who became pregnant without a partner and concluded that they are higher up on the ladder of acceptability than unmarried women who are naturally impregnated, by accident or not. Mind you, these considerations are not based on religious or halakhic standards. Now consider the orthodox woman who is in a totally different playing field, where the standards of acceptability are the most stringent. With so many who remain unmarried these days, so much so that the term ‘old maid’ has become quaint and irrelevant, their issues must be addressed. I don’t care to judge them or call them picky or too ambitious and career driven; the reality is that they are put in a terrible bind by virtue of their being orthodox.

So how do we treat single middle aged women: as lepers who should be punished for their inability to settle down, as unstable and incompetent people who can’t be trusted with parenting and should therefore not be allowed any viable alternative? Or how about treating them simply as infertile? Many women are infertile because of biological reasons; let these women be considered infertile based on sociological reasons.

Infertile couples have many options and untraditional ways to become parents, from adoption to in-vitro fertilization to surrogate pregnancy. Sperm donation is the most restrictive and complicated option, (if the child later marries a relative of the sperm donor, it would be incest/ if the donor is a cohen, his sons are cohanim and are restricted in who they may marry, etc…) but there have been ways to circumvent the problems, e.g. using non-anonymous donors. Despite the countless ethical and halakhic issues involved in each of these choices, the rabbanim have been making huge and commendable efforts to enable orthodox couples to use the latest technology and to adopt what’s available to halkaha (see infertility resources). The question is, who should qualify as infertile so that they can benefit from all these options.

Until now the window of opportunity has been tightly guarded by the powers that be, lest the argument be made that gays should also be given the opportunity to procreate using whatever means available. But while homosexuality is a halakhic issue, single motherhood is not. I’m not convinced that giving women who don't have the opportunity to have children in a traditional way a chance to do so outside of marriage would destroy the sanctity of the family.

As radical as my opinion sounds, I predict that should this become a reality, the first people to jump on it would be the frummest. Most older singles I know are modern orthodox. In many ways it’s easiest to be single in the modern world, because there’s more opportunity outside of family life for fulfillment (communal, professional, and in some circles even physical). But a highly observant single who passes a certain age without marrying is virtually doomed to remain lonely, separate and completely uninvolved in community life, because nobody can accommodate them. It’s the same reason infertile religious couples have such a hard time finding acceptance and support—because everyone married has children and there is simply no room for any deviation from that lifestyle. But why should being single be considered deviance?

I state my case especially for women, because a man never quite runs out of time (until he’s dead) or capacity for having children, whereas a woman has that ominous biological clock hanging over her head. This is very much my gut feeling and not an informed opinion—I know very little about the halakhic implications of fatherless conception—but even if it were unsolvable, the possibility of adoption remains. Everybody knows a frum single woman who would die to adopt children and raise them in the proper way, but doesn’t only because it’s just not done. Well, I don’t think ‘it’s just not done’ is a good enough reason to stop people from doing positive things that could be accommodated for in halakha.

It’s obvious that what used to work no longer does. Insisting on sanctimonious values and relative definitions of Jewish family hurts the growing number of people who don’t fall into traditional categories. (This isn’t even tradition so much as a recent and local definition because, for instance, before the cheirim d’Rabeinu Gershom one man could have been the father/husband to many families and his presence was unnecessary. When arranged within the bounds of halakha, a woman can raise her children alone and be recognized as a family unit.) If this puts me on the fringe, then so be it, but I feel that it’s only a matter of time before these supposedly scandalous alternatives will be uncovered as the reasonable and permissible options that I think they are.