Every birth holds the power to shape not just a life, but a lifetime.
We believe that childbirth should be a moment of strength, dignity, and respect, a process in which every woman is seen, heard, and empowered. Yet for too many women in Israel, birth has not always reflected the joy and meaning they had hoped it would bring.
The Birth Freedom Israel Movement strives to change that reality by advocating for a birthing culture that prioritizes bodily autonomy, emotional safety, and informed choice. Our mission is rooted in the belief that every woman deserves access to care that honors her voice, her body, and her experience.
As thousands of women and families seek to reclaim childbirth as a positive and transformative event, our movement continues to grow stronger every day. We are a diverse and dynamic community of midwives, educators, activists, and mothers, united by a shared vision: to create a just, compassionate, and woman-centered childbirth system in Israel. Together, we are raising awareness, influencing policy, and paving the way toward a more respectful and empowering birthing reality, for this generation and the next.
Photo by: Sunny Korman
Our Goals
• To ensure every woman’s right to choose where, how, and with whom to give birth.
• To advance the midwifery paradigm as both a worldview and the preferred model of care.
• To recognize the existence of obstetric violence and work toward its eradication in all birth settings in Israel.
• To engage all stakeholders in the field of childbirth in the realization of this vision.
Our Vision
Our vision is of a society that recognizes the profound significance of the birth process for both mother and child, respects a woman’s full autonomy over her body and her life, and provides a supportive medical–midwifery system that enables every woman to give birth according to her wishes and worldview, with appropriate professional care.
The Birth Freedom Israel Movement is dedicated to transforming the birth environment in Israel, striving to bridge the gap between current realities and our vision.
Our Roots
Birth Freedom Israel was founded in March 2001, originally under the name Women Calling to Give Birth. It began with 14 women who gathered to protest the closure of the Misgav Ladach Birthing Center in Jerusalem, driven by deep frustration with the way Israel’s healthcare system treated birthing women. From that first meeting, the movement gained momentum. By the time of our founding conference in June 2001, 180 participants had gathered in solidarity.
Today, more than 20,000 individuals have joined our call for change, making us one of Israel’s most powerful voices advocating for birthing rights, dignity, and maternal autonomy.
Our projects
One of Birth Freedom Israel's core missions is to promote the midwifery paradigm – not just as a clinical approach, but as a holistic worldview. This paradigm is rooted in the understanding that childbirth is a natural, physiological process, rather than purely a medical procedure.
Key principles of this approach emphasize a deep trust in the natural process of childbirth, recognizing it as a physiological event rather than solely a medical one. Central to this model is the provision of continuous, personalized support by skilled professionals selected by the birthing individual, ensuring both emotional safety and autonomy throughout the birthing experience.
To bridge the gap between Israel’s predominantly medicalized model and the midwifery paradigm, we are working to build a new infrastructure for community-based midwifery.
In 2025, we formed a cohort of 20 midwives to lead this transformative change. As a new and evolving initiative, we are eager to see its growth in the coming year.
Over the past three years, through our direct work with Bedouin women in the Negev, we identified a critical and unmet need: a professional childbirth preparation course in Arabic. To date, no such program has existed in Israel.
To assess demand, we conducted Arabic-language surveys and received responses from approximately 180 Bedouin women. Their answers confirmed both the urgent need for such a course and the lack of culturally appropriate, accessible courses. We also held meetings with Bedouin nurses and midwives to ensure cultural relevance in the program’s design.
Following the outbreak of war, we began providing accessible content through Zoom sessions led by midwives, nurses, physicians, and physiotherapists. A Bedouin midwife working with us also launched a WhatsApp group focused on pregnancy and childbirth, which has attracted nearly 400 women since October 7.
Throughout 2024, we designed and developed the course curriculum. The pilot was successfully launched in June 2025, marking a major milestone.
We are currently working to expand the course to additional regions across Israel, with the aim of reaching broader Arabic-speaking communities. Our immediate focus, however, is to scale the existing program by launching additional training cohorts within the Bedouin population in the Negev. This initiative not only equips women with recognized professional credentials, but also provides them with critical, culturally relevant knowledge related to pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, empowering them to make informed decisions and support others within their communities.
This marks our first collaboration with the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, and we are pleased to welcome this important partnership.
Coping with birth trauma can be an isolating and deeply challenging experience. Phrases like “At least the mother and baby are healthy”, though often well-intentioned, can unintentionally silence women who have experienced emotional or physical trauma during childbirth. For many, these words obscure a profound sense of loneliness and invalidation.
One of Birth Freedom Israel's central goals is to bring visibility to the phenomenon of obstetric violence, a term that encompasses various forms of mistreatment or disregard experienced during pregnancy, childbirth, or postpartum care. While not every traumatic birth results from obstetric violence, addressing the issue requires first recognizing it. That’s why we are committed to collecting and analyzing real testimonies from women across the country.
What was once our Mothers’ Hotline has now evolved into a powerful new tool: The Testimony Form. This form is open to anyone who has experienced or witnessed harm, whether physical, emotional, verbal, or a violation of rights, at any stage of the childbirth journey. These submissions help us gather critical data, publish reports, and raise awareness through advocacy and education.
Beyond its research value, the act of sharing one’s story is often the first step toward healing. For many women, providing testimony affirms their experience and becomes a moment of reclaiming personal agency. Those who submit the form are also invited to remain in contact with our team for further guidance and support, ensuring that no woman feels alone, and that every story helps pave the way toward a more respectful, compassionate birth culture.
In September 2025, Birth Freedom Israel will launch a unique, mobile presentation series, bringing powerful conversations about birth, meaning, and empowerment directly into living rooms and home gatherings across the country. This initiative is designed to spark intimate dialogue, foster community connection, and share our vision in spaces that feel personal, welcoming, and real.
This presentation invites open, grassroots conversations about birth, meaning, and life, and also serves as a platform to:
- Introduce Birth Freedom Israel's work
- Engage women who want to join efforts to reshape the birthing landscape in Israel
- Educate participants about their rights during childbirth
- Spark bottom-up activism and dialogue
We invite you to be part of this movement – open your home, host a conversation, and help us spark change. Contact us to get started.
Previous projects
Testimonials, such as these two, are the reason we do what we do:
"They just broke my water, without informing me and held me so that I wouldn't resist… I felt like I had been raped."
"I asked to be covered several times because I was exposed and they just ignored me."
Here are some of the survey’s results:
One out of five women described her birth experience as bad, terrible, or traumatic.
About 64% said that their privacy was violated.
24% reported offensive verbal communication, disrespectful treatment, and/or neglect by the medical staff.
33% felt pressured to agree to a medical procedure.
About 50% of respondents felt that someone else was making the decisions regarding their own birth.
40% reported not feeling safe to express their concerns and wishes, fearing that it may influence the quality of care.
48% of the women who underwent a caesarean section said that they did not receive an explanation of the risks involved before being asked to sign a consent form.
Surveys
To follow our 2022 survey that asked women who gave birth in the past five years about their experience, we conducted another one in May 2023 (both in Hebrew and Arabic) targeting those who gave birth in a hospital since May 2022. Over 1,200 women responded.
Our Inter-Organizational Forum – “The Parliament”
In August of 2021, we founded the forum of birth-related organizations with the objective of creating an open communication channel that will allow personal acquaintance, sharing of ideas, and cooperation.
Thus far, we’ve organized a joint campaign for changing the midwifery staffing ratio to a one-to-one ratio (a midwife for every woman) and written the Parliament’s Vision Statement about women’s rights throughout the childbirth process, with numerous organizations and prominent individuals signing it. It is our hope that this document will serve as a widely accepted basis for many future initiatives and changes, a sort of constitution.
Read the inter-organizational vision statement (in Hebrew) here.
Translations of Our List of Women’s Rights in Childbirth to Relevant Languages
Our diverse volunteers translated the list of rights that need to be ensureds into the following languages: English, Arabic, French, Amharic, Russian, and Israeli sign language. All translations, in PDF form and video, are available on our website.
Read and watch the translations here and watch the multilingual birth-rights page here.
A 60-page Testimonials-Based Report
(2014 – 2017)
Our helpline volunteers received almost 700 calls since its inception some 9 years ago. In the past year, we have been working diligently to create this extensive, in-depth report. Complete with data, information chapters, and recommendations, it provides a way to monitor our and the country’s progress. It is our intention to create an annual report from 2023 on.
Read the report (in Hebrew) here.
Report Submitted to the UN
In May 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Dr. Dubravka Simonovic, issued a call for submissions in order to collect information from countries, organizations, and researchers worldwide about the phenomenon of obstetric violence.
As early as 2015, the UN published an official statement acknowledging this phenomenon, using the term ‘disrespect and abuse during childbirth’. Five years later, the term ‘violence’ was used, and it was mentioned that the submitted reports would serve as a basis for a comprehensive report that would be presented by Dr. Simonovic at the 74th session of the UN General Assembly.
In the report that we submitted in response, we referred to background data in the medical system regarding childbirth and reproductive healthcare, data regarding interventions and lack of transparency,
initial data from testimonials that has reached our Helpline for the Birthing Woman, initial data taken from the survey conducted with the Keren Briah organization about women’s preferences in birth, data about ‘zero separation’ between mothers and newborns, postpartum depression and postpartum PTSD in Israel, the working conditions of the medical staff, secondary trauma, information regarding the Patient Rights Act-1996, the absence of the phenomenon of obstetric violence from public discourse, the limitations of existing rights enforcement mechanisms, barriers to filing complaints, and, finally, operative recommendations.
Read our report to the UN here.
It [the decision] affects these women’s ability to tell their life story, and more specifically – their birth story. This is not a small matter, but a limitation of their ability to choose regarding a pivotal/momentous, sometimes one-time event, in the life of a woman.
We won the appeal but are still battling the MOH’s attempt to now over-regulate those birth centers. Read the Supreme Court verdict (in Hebrew) here.
Our Supreme Court Appeal and Win –
“Zchuti Laledet”
In March of 2017, the Ministry of Health (MOH) issued an order against freestanding natural birth centers operating outside of hospitals, an order which is in opposition to the standard policy in most Western countries, and violates the rights of women who are interested in a natural birth outside of a hospital.
After a struggle of four and a half years, a revolutionary legal precedent was set over a 75-page verdict.
Thus wrote Justice of the Supreme Court, Dafna Barak Erez, in her verdict:
“The decision of the Ministry of Health not to allow women to birth in a natural birthing center brings about, essentially, a narrowing down of possibilities for the pregnant woman in every aspect relating to the process of birth, having a real impact on the possibility of controlling a process happening in her own body.
An Awareness-Raising Conference for Members of the Media and the Public
Members of the press are no different than members of the public. They are just as unaware. To raise public awareness we need more exposure on TV, radio, newspapers, and online media. We, therefore, planned a large-scale conference for as many journalists and editors as possible.
In March 2023, we offered a full-day Zoom conference, packed with short lectures on topics such as birth economics, legal issues around birth, birth and trauma, obstetric violence, and more. The conference was attended by more than 100 people and all talks are available on our website and YouTube channel.
Listen to all talks (in Hebrew) here.
From the media
May 14, 2023
Human Rights in Childbirth - Opinion by Hayuta Goren
The Jerusalem Post
A country that enshrines civil equality and also proudly holds the title for the highest birth rate of all OECD countries – must treat its women with the utmost respect. By Hayuta Goren
November 27, 2022
Giving Birth is a Basic Human Right that Shouldn't be Violated
The Jerusalem Post
The process of giving birth belongs to the woman and should be controlled by her, not the doctors. By Hayuta Goren