USA TODAY International Edition
Judaism seeks voice in abortion debate
For some of religion’s leaders, biblical judgments don’t apply
When Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed into law in May one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans, she invoked her faith.
“To the bill’s many supporters, this legislation stands as a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious and that every life is a sacred gift from God,” Ivey said in a statement.
This is a familiar argument for the Republican Party when it comes to abortion access. In January, Kirk Cox, speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, cited biblical scripture when he came out against a proposed bill that would lift late-term abortion restrictions.
“You knit me together in my mother’s womb,” he said, quoting Psalm 139. “You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born.”
But for many leaders in the Jewish faith, such interpretations are problematic and even insulting.
“It makes me apoplectic,” says Danya Ruttenberg, a Chicago-based rabbi who has written about Jews’
“This is a big deal for us. We’re very clear about a woman’s right to choose. And we’re very clear about the separation between church and state.”
interpretation of abortion. “Most of the proof texts that they’re bringing in for this are ridiculous. They’re using my sacred text to justify taking away my rights in a way that is just so calculated and craven.”
Across the country, as a wave of antiabortion legislation reinvigorates the fight over reproductive rights, Jewish religious leaders, activists and women are speaking out in favor of a woman’s right to choose, buoyed by their faith.
It’s not just that the U.S. shouldn’t be deriving law from poetic language, Ruttenberg said. It’s that the Jewish tradition has a distinctly different reading of the same texts. While conservative Christians use the Bible to argue that a fetus represents a human life, which makes abortion murder, Jews don’t believe fetuses have souls and, therefore, terminating a pregnancy is no crime.
Left out of the debate
While some Orthodox rabbis have denounced abortion, within Jewish communities there’s considerable support for keeping it legal. Studies from the Pew Research Center show that Jews overwhelmingly (83%) support abortion rights. The National Counsel on Jewish Women, a 126-year-old organization that helped establish some of the first birth control clinics across the country, considers reproductive rights a cornerstone issue and has publicly condemned the strict abortion bans recently handed down in Alabama and Mississippi.
Republicans have been pushing for decades to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that recognized a woman’s right to an abortion. Now, with two Supreme Court appointments from President Donald Trump giving the court a conservative bent, the law seems more at risk than ever before.
It’s common in this debate to hear the Christian perspective. But what often is left out of the conversation is how Jews, who read the Hebrew Bible – referred to in Christian circles as the Old Testament – argue that their tradition condones abortion. If the mother’s life is at stake, it even insists on it.
“This is a big deal for us,” Ruttenberg says. “We’re very clear about a woman’s right to choose. And we’re very clear about the separation between church and state.”
Policy and faith
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., likes to joke that she took tikkun olam so seriously, she wound up in politics.
Within the Jewish tradition, tikkun olam – Hebrew for “repair the world” – is a sort of call to action, a concept defined by acts of kindness and service that help heal the world.
“I have always served and looked at policy through a distinctly Jewish lens,” Wasserman Schultz says. “And so for me, when I’m thinking about a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices, the Jewish tradition that I’ve always been taught holds that existing life should take precedence over potential life, and a woman’s life and her pain should take precedence over a fetus.”
The strongest argument in the Hebrew Bible for permitting abortion comes from Exodus, Chapter 21, Verse 22-23: “If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take a life for a life.”
In this passage, “gives birth prematurely” could mean the woman miscarries and the fetus dies. Because there’s no expectation that the person who caused the miscarriage is liable for murder, Jewish scholars argue, this proves a fetus is not considered a separate person or soul.
The Talmud, a two-part Jewish text comprising centuries worth of thought, debate and discussion, also is helpful when discussing abortion. The Talmud explains that for the first 40 days of a woman’s pregnancy, the fetus is considered “mere fluid” and considered part of the mother until birth. The baby is considered a nefesh – Hebrew for “soul” or “spirit” – once its head has emerged, and not before.
Wasserman Schultz references pikuach nefesh, the principle in Jewish law that the preservation of a human life overrides nearly all other religious considerations, which also allows a woman to seek an abortion, especially if her own life is in danger.
“You can use that same principle to show that women, more than anyone else, understand their bodies and what medical decisions are right for them,” Wasserman Schultz says.
One woman’s story
For at least one Jewish activist, the debate rings especially true. She didn’t necessarily want an abortion – she felt she had no other choice.
It was 1967, and Nancy Litz didn’t want to be pregnant.
Six years before Roe vs. Wade, Litz, then a freshman in college, believed terminating her pregnancy was a necessity. Her father had recently died, and her mother was at what Litz described as “a horribly traumatic point in her own life.” She never considered what she did destroying a human life.
“I don’t believe that clump of cells, while it was potential life, was actual life,” Litz says. “And it certainly wasn’t more important to me than the lives of the people I already knew and loved.”
Through a friend, Litz connected with a doctor, a man she says told her he was compelled to perform the illegal procedure because he had daughters of his own who were college age and he wouldn’t want them opting for a dangerous, back-alley operation.
Fifty-two years later, Litz, 71, lives in St. Louis and owns a small business. She has two grown daughters and is a volunteer with the National Counsel of Jewish Women.
“The right word is shame,” Litz said. “What I heard were women telling stories about having an abortion and the suffering with giant regrets and self-condemnation, and I couldn’t help but thinking ... how much of that was genuinely the feelings that they had about the procedure, and how much of it was layered onto them by messages from specific faith traditions telling them that what they had done was terrible?”
Litz says she often is praised privately by other women who have had abortions, women who say they could never share publicly the way she does.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” she says. “Why can’t we, as people of faith who have different specific beliefs about the significance of terminating a pregnancy, be equally free to express our truth?”
“When I’m thinking about a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices, the Jewish tradition that I’ve always been taught holds that existing life should take precedence over potential life, and a woman’s life and her pain should take precedence over a fetus.” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz