Christian-v-Jewish Take on Abortion
A dialog between a person of Jewish fath and a person of Christian faith on the topic of abortion and the ruling by the SCOTUS.
The following dialog is between a Christian and a Jew and it helps to explain why those within the Jewish community do not believe that life begins in the womb. I cannot claim that all within the Jewish faith believe this, but you will see a defense of that position from a Jewish friend in this conversation.
Jewish Position:
This explains well why the football coach/prayer decision is so problematic for Jews. Combine this with the overturning of Roe (which is also a Christian viewpoint that goes against Jewish practice), and you have a non-Jewish majority on the court imposing a specific religious view by the Government. That is unconstitutional.
CENTRAL CONFERENCE OF AMERICAN RABBIS STATEMENT ON PUBLIC PRAYER BY PUBLIC SCHOOL OFFICIALS
June 29, 2022
The Central Conference of American Rabbis is deeply concerned by this week’s Supreme Court ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. The Court ruled in favor of public high school football coach, Joseph Kennedy, who engaged in public prayer while on duty and “invited” students to join him.
Reform rabbis are long on record in support of the free exercise of religion, a First Amendment right which has enabled Judaism and a host of religions to thrive on American soil. At the same time, we have consistently opposed the establishment of religion by the state, equally guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Members of the CCAR have often counseled young people in the communities we serve who have been “invited” to participate in Christian prayer at public schools, often in connection with athletics. For decades, young people in our communities have told us that “invitations” like Coach Kennedy’s are coercive, and that when they decline to participate, student athletes face consequences—from their coaches, from their peers, or both. Those consequences have ranged from reduction in playing time, to social isolation, to anger, and even to violence. CCAR rabbis have frequently and successfully intervened with public school officials to end these coercive practices, which were prohibited until this week’s ruling. Whenever a state employee leads a public prayer, inviting students to participate, they are establishing a state religion, contrary to our Constitution’s First Amendment.
Public schools should be free of an established state religion. With the recent Supreme Court decision, representatives of minority religions, including CCAR rabbis, have lost a tool that our Constitution had provided to keep our students safe in public schools. Reform rabbis will not rest in our advocacy for our young people and will continue to support them when they bravely stand up to religious coercion in their public schools.
Rabbi Lewis Kamrass, President
Rabbi Hara E. Person, Chief Executive
Central Conference of American Rabbis
Christian Response:
Can you explain how Christians differ from Jews on the topic of death of the innocent? Recall the judgements against Israel for offering their children to false “gods” in the past? Abortion in America elevated to the most convenient form of “birth control” and has been a false god of convenience to mitigate bad sex decisions between consenting adults. Even in the statistically small cases of rape and incest, killing the pre-born baby would still not justify the taking of yet another innocent life.
Only in the extremely rare case where the mother’s life is in danger would there be a moral choice to make in relationship to who lives and who dies. But perhaps more importantly, you live in CA which will likely become an “Abortion Mecca” for those traveling from other states for their procedure. Large corporations are choosing to fund such travel and procedures because it keeps their worker costs lower. So effectively they are offering “Kill your unborn child and we will pay for that
Note that this gives you more career freedom and we don’t have to worry about increased medical and benefit costs and time off costs as you contend with burden of added children in your family.” Few it seems are looking sensibly at the issue of life and death and are forgetting how precious life is to our Creator.
The SCOTUS ruling has simply corrected a bad unconstitutional ruling of fifty years ago and puts the topic back to individual states where they have to contend with the range of complex issues in detail and in close proximity to voters and the voter’s opinions on these important issues. This is how a functioning constitutional republic operates and the ruling put the actual decision to take the life of another back into individual state jurisdictions.
Jewish Response:
The simple answer is that Judaism doesn't consider it a life until the first breath is taken. Before that, in Jewish law, it is part of the mother's body and her life is paramount. So there is no "death of the innocent" question.
As such, forcing an abortion ban is the state imposing a particular Christian view of when life begins on those who do not believe it.
There may not be a right to an abortion, but banning abortion completely is unconstitutional under the freedom from government imposed religion.
LINK: https://rac.org/blog/abortion-and-reproductive-justice-jewish-perspective
A study by the Pew Research Center found that 83 percent of American Jews say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.1 American Jews’ widespread support for permissive abortion laws finds grounding in Jewish tradition’s approach to pregnancy and its end. Though the Torah makes no specific reference to any process resembling a modern abortion, the following passage from Parashat Mishpatim provides our tradition’s earliest guidance on the termination of a pregnancy:
When individuals fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible shall be fined according as the woman’s husband may exact, the payment to be based on reckoning. But if other damage ensues, the penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. (Exodus 21:22–25)
The passage contrasts two scenarios in which two men are fighting and accidentally strike a nearby pregnant woman. The permutations differ only in who or what is harmed. In the first, only the fetus is lost, and the punishment is a monetary fine, paid to the woman’s husband. In the second, the woman herself is harmed or killed. There, the punishment is retributive: an eye for an eye and a nefesh—literally, “soul,” but in this case meaning a human life possessing personhood—for a nefesh. From this, we may derive the principle that a woman has the full status of a person, nefesh, while the fetus—though valued—has a lesser status.
The Mishnah expands this understanding of differential value by stating that if a woman’s life is threatened in childbirth, the fetus inside her can be destroyed, even to the point of “taking it out limb from limb, for her life comes before the fetus’s life.”2 Through the graphic language of this text, the Mishnaic author leaves no ambiguity as to whose life takes precedence. This text sets the standard from which all other halachah (Jewish law) on abortion flows. Later commentators debate in great detail the implications of this text, particularly the breadth or narrowness of the definition of a threat to the life of the woman.3 Some are more permissive of a range of emotional as well as physical impacts that could justify an abortion, while others understand the instances of permissibility with excruciating parsimony. Still, from the outset, Judaism can imagine some instances when an abortion would be permitted and even required.4
Furthermore, the Gemara concludes that prior to forty days, a fetus is not a person but rather is considered “mere water.”5 The debate about abortion in America hinges on questions related to what constitutes personhood and when life begins. But these are religious and spiritual questions, about which people of faith and conviction can disagree.
The Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that abortion is protected under the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which guarantees a right to privacy, including a right to private medical procedures. For American Jews, the protection of access to abortion could also be understood under the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion clause. Because Jewish law permits abortion under certain circumstances as a morally acceptable choice, or even in some cases a halachic requirement, any law that limits a woman’s right to choose might limit a Jewish woman’s ability to make a decision in accordance with her religious beliefs. When people of faith seek to adopt laws asserting when life begins, they endeavor to enshrine their own religious understanding in law. In civic discourse, the fact that Judaism understands these issues differently can be a powerful antidote to the pervasive sense that religious voices are only to be found on one side of this debate.
Judaism is unequivocally “pro-life” in that it values life in all its forms, both actualized and potential. But where that term has come to mean “anti-abortion,” then it is clear that Judaism allows for abortion under at least some circumstances and therefore calls us to advocate for civil laws that protect a woman’s right to access abortion services.
These texts and their subsequent interpretations are a vital resource for all of us who seek to affirm Jewish support for the choice to terminate a pregnancy and to advocate from a Jewish perspective for laws that protect reproductive choice. And we are called to go further; the law is only one facet of a full and holistic justice. Even as Parashat Mishpatim guides us to a choice-oriented understanding of abortion law, it also leaves us with the injustice of a silenced story.
The text in Exodus 21 begins with an act of violence perpetrated against a pregnant woman, and yet this woman is all but absent from subsequent conversation about this passage. Across the centuries, almost all of the voices of Jewish interpretation, and even many modern commentators, fail to acknowledge her story. The interpreters miss the opportunity to see her as subject, rather than object. To see the woman in this text as merely a hypothetical in a legal case study is to deny that cases such as these were very real to the people who experienced them. To reach a full sense of justice in our understanding of abortion, we must pair mishpatim (laws) with sipurim (stories). …
Christian Response:
King David provided a good perspective of how we are known by our Creator from the formation in the womb.
Psalm 139:13-18 — 1599 Geneva Bible
13 For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.
14 I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wondrously made: marvelous are thy works, and my soul knoweth it well.
15 My bones are not hid from thee, though I was made in a secret place, and fashioned beneath in the earth.
16 Thine eyes did see me, when I was without form: for in thy book were all things written, which in continuance were fashioned, when there was none of them before.
17 How dear therefore are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!
18 If I should count them, they are more than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.
I acknowledge what you have submitted as evidence of "life" but I would submit the following:
Exodus 21 lays some of the groundwork for the laws of retribution, in which punishment is tailored to fit the crime.
Exodus 21:22–23 gives this rule:
“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 life for life.” The passage goes on to say that, in general, penalties should be “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise” (verses 24–25). The punishment, in other words, should fit the crime.
Medical science says that life begins at conception (see Moore, Keith, Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology, Saunders, 2008, p. 2; Sadler, T., Langman’s Medical Embryology, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 10th ed., 2006, p. 11; and Krieger, Morris, The Human Reproductive System, Sterling Pub., 1969, p. 88).
God planned for Jeremiah to be a prophet before he was even conceived: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations” (Jeremiah 1:5). The statement I knew you indicates that God regarded Jeremiah as an individual well before he was born.
Evidence points to life being precious in the womb according to our Creator.
Jewish Response:
You are not Jewish. You are interpreting scripture readings through a Christian view. I am Jewish. I quoted views from the leaders of my movement of Judaism.
Freedom from government imposed religion means the government cannot impose (via a ban) a particular Christian view on someone -- that is government establishment of religion. Christians are free not to get abortions; Christian doctors are free not to perform abortions.
Further, even the government does not consider an embryo a person. I can't register it for a social security number. I can't claim it as a dependent on my tax return. It doesn't count as a person in the carpool lane. There is ample evidence that the government doesn't consider an embryo a person until it is born -- emphasizing the fact this is a religious view being imposed.
Feel free to practice your religion. But don't tell me what my religion says (and I won't tell you what Christianity says). Most importantly, don't coerce the government to impose your religious views on me.
Christian Response:
Setting aside my preference for protecting the biblical definition of a unique life, I would submit that this is a strict constitutional reading of the poorly conceived ruling from 1973. It has not prevented abortions on a national level, but rather it has pushed the question back into the states where it is rightfully decided using democratic principles of positions, evidence, debate, and voting.
Jewish Response:
Please read what I wrote. There may not be a right to an abortion (although overturning Roe places a number of other similar decisions in question -- including interracial marriage -- so they really should have found a better way to resolve the issue.
However, even if something isn't explicitly a right, that doesn't mean it can be banned. All of the things covered by the underlying basis for Roe -- abortion, contraception, gay marriage, interracial marriage -- have major religions that permit them. There may not be a right to them, but the government cannot ban them either. Banning them is the government imposing a particular religious view, which is clearly prohibited in the Constitution.
In short: They may not be a right, but they cannot be banned. They exist in that grey area of rights reserved to individuals (which, by the way, is explicitly a right in the Constitution). 10th Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
These are rights reserved to the people, as part of their freedom of religious expression, and the government cannot impose bans because that is the government imposing a particular religious viewpoint. That's the argument that should have been used back in 1973.
Christian Response:
I am reading what you offered to better understand your position.
Thank you for sharing.