Apparently feeling jealous that conservative Christians had gotten all the press for complicating assisted fertility technologies with their self-created moral quandaries, Orthodox Jews have now found some idiosyncratic anguish to call their own.

As the New York Times reports, some Jews are concerned that assisted reproduction involving donor eggs (either IVF, surrogate pregnancy, or intra-fallopian gamete transfer) would conflict with the “who is a Jew?” ruling that Jewish identity is transfered through the maternal line.

If the gestational mother is Jewish but the eggs are from a non-Jewish donor, is the kid a Jew or not? Likewise, if a Jewish woman donates eggs to a non-Jewish gestational mother, is that kid Jewish? (The latter is rare, because Jewish women tend not to be egg donors - thus increasing the likelihood of the former problem, where a Jewish woman seeks eggs but can only find a non-Jewish donor.) And, further, if a Jewish couple provides a fertilized egg for a surrogate pregnancy, because the Jewish woman cannot undergo gestation, and the surrogage mother is not Jewish, is that kid - born from an egg from a Jewish woman and raised in that woman’s Jewish household, but gestated by a non-Jew, one of the chosen people, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

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