opinion
Don’t Use Judaism as a Weapon
in the Abortion Debate
BY JONATHAN S. TOBIN
PEDRE / E+
T he Supreme Court’s decision
to overturn the Roe v. Wade
abortion ruling has set off a political
firestorm. Pro-choice forces are
enraged at what they believe is
the taking away of a right and what
some even claim is the enslavement
of women. The pro-life movement
is thankful after a half-century of
activism on behalf of what sometimes
seemed to be a lost cause, but no
less determined to defend restrictions
or bans on abortions whenever they
can prevail in state capitals.

Amid the deluge of hyperbole,
furious predictions of political fallout and public
protests, what is generally lost amid the noise is
that polls have always shown that most Americans
have demonstrated a fair amount of moral ambiv-
alence about the issue.

Clear majorities have always been found to
oppose complete bans on abortion as well as the
overturning of Roe, which many have assumed
would lead to that outcome. But it is equally true
that there has always been broad support for lim-
its on legal abortion. As with many other issues of
public debate, how you ask the question largely
determines the way the polls turn out.

The fact that many Americans remain in the
middle on the abortion debate has been obscured
if not altogether lost. It is in that context that the
way that some in the Jewish community have
sought to frame the issue as one in which Jews are
obligated to support abortion under virtually all cir-
cumstances is both misleading as well as an unfor-
tunate contribution to an already divisive debate.

There is no disputing that traditional Judaism
approaches the issue of abortion very diff erently
from the Catholic Church, or the various evangel-
ical and conservative Christian denominations,
that are unalterably opposed to it almost without
exception. In Jewish religious law, the life of the
mother must always take priority over that of the
unborn child. That provides a religious justifi cation
for procedures that deal with medical anomalies
and life-threatening conditions. Some also inter-
pret the notion that the well-being of the mother
must be protected so as to justify a more liberal
attitude towards terminating pregnancies.

It is also true that sources in the Talmud do not
consider a fetus a full person deserving of legal
protections but as a part of its mother until birth.

In the fi rst 40 days of gestation, it has an even
lesser status.

That is interpreted by liberal Jewish denomina-
tions (not to mention non-religious organizations
and secular Jews who would otherwise scoff at
the idea of looking to the rabbis of the talmudic
period for guidance on any issue, let alone for
insights on biology) as proof that Judaism regards
the disposition of a fetus as purely a matter of per-
sonal autonomy and thus inherently “pro-choice”
in the context of the contemporary abortion
debate. Yet at the same time, fetuscide is not explicitly
permitted by the same Jewish sources. On the
contrary, the idea that individuals have an unfet-
tered right to do as they like with their bodies is
alien to Judaism, since the body is considered a
vessel that is the property of God. Some Jewish
sources regard abortion as impermissible outside
of some limited circumstances because of the
prohibition of “shedding the blood of man within
man.” Since Judaism forbids tattoos, self-harm
and suicide, the notion that it supports the “our
bodies, ourselves” approach is, at best, debat-
able. That is why Orthodox organizations have
opposed laws legalizing abortion virtually up until
birth with no restrictions, as is the case with laws
passed in New York and other deep blue states,
while still also opposing any law that bans all late-
term abortions without providing an exception for
saving the mother’s life.

The idea that Jews are obligated
by their faith to support laws that
permit it without any restrictions
— the position many liberal Jewish
groups are now taking in conformity
with that of the Democratic Party —
is simply untrue.

Still, most Jews, even those who
do not regard abortion as simply
a matter of choice, do not favor
banning it in the earliest stages
of pregnancy, let alone in cases
of rape, incest or genuine medical
emergencies. The 1992 Supreme Court decision
in Planned Parenthood v. Casey,
which essentially upheld Roe and
was also overturned by Dobbs, itself instituted a
fetal viability test that allowed states to implement
restrictions based on the viability of the fetus,
thereby implying that aborting a viable fetus was
a form of infanticide.

With that in mind — and talmudic precepts
and modern declarations of personal autonomy
notwithstanding — the arguments about abor-
tion must necessarily be infl uenced by scientifi c
advances. In 1973, when Roe was decided, there were
no sonograms showing fetal life and movement.

Modern medical care now means that fetal via-
bility outside of the womb is possible as early as
21 to 23 weeks into the pregnancy with the real
possibility that this fi gure will continue to shrink.

That doesn’t change the fact that in the last
half-century, many Americans have come to
believe that terminating a pregnancy is an abso-
lute right under virtually any circumstances. They
regard arguments about the constitutionality of
the original Roe decision as irrelevant and dismiss
any and all talk of fetuses being unborn children
regardless of what science (a term that is liberally
invoked as determinative when it comes to vac-
cine mandates or climate change when it is more
to their liking) has taught us about the subject.

Yet wherever one comes down on the issue, it
is unacceptable for anyone to be treating this as
some kind of religious culture war in which Jews
are required to be fully engaged as combatants
because of their faith. JE
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.

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