Jewish Misrepresentatives
by Rabbi Avi Shafran
A number of Jewish groups are campaigning to ensure that only someone favoring an unfettered right to abortion fill Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s Supreme Court seat. It is an effort offensive not only to many non-Jewish Americans but to many Jewish ones as well.
Some of the campaigners are explicit about their goal. Others use code phrases like “constitutional rights” and “fundamental freedoms” (the National Council of Jewish Women) and “respect for … societal realities” (United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism), or assert the need for a “voice of moderation” and a “consensus candidate” (Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism).
What all the jargon amounts to, though, is a rhetorical shot across President Bush’s bow, a warning of the ire he will face from the inveighers should he dare nominate someone who might conceivably side with those sitting justices who feel that Roe v. Wade was a flawed decision.
Reasonable people can disagree now about whether Roe was wise or wrongheaded, and even about whether our country is a better place as a result of the more than 1 million abortions performed here yearly — the vast majority for reasons of convenience — or whether there is reason to allow states to try to reduce that number.
Some may even take the position that an attempt to stack the judicial deck in order to preclude the objective consideration of so important an issue as abortion — to prevent the weighing of different approaches by excluding even the most qualified judicial candidates — is somehow a democratic approach. I don’t, but some may.
What most offends, though, is the implication of the words “Jewish” and “Judaism” in the titles of more than 20 of the campaigning organizations because there is simply no way in any world of internal logic to assert, as has been done, some Jewish ideal called “a woman’s right to choose” to terminate a pregnancy.
Abortion is expressly forbidden by Jewish religious law, or halacha. There are different opinions about the nature and gravity of the prohibition of killing a fetus, but no accepted halachic authority views feticide as a matter of personal “choice.”
And so, what some Orthodox groups (like, prominently, Agudath Israel of America) promote is the regulation of abortion through laws that prohibit the unjustifiable killing of fetuses while protecting the right to abortion in exceptional cases. That not only most approximates Judaism’s stance but reflects the feelings of a majority of the American people.
Agudath Israel has never supported any legislation that would totally ban abortion, or that would provide a fetus the status of a born child, which could jeopardize the right to abortion in those rare cases where Judaism might require it. We did, though, and do, support the Partial Birth Abortion Law, which was recently declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court and may well end up before the highest court in the land.
What that law forbids is any overt act (most commonly, the piercing of the brain) intended to kill an infant whose “entire … head is outside the body of the mother or, in the case of breech presentation, [when] any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother.”
Halacha would consider such a child fully born, and thus its killing murder, forbidden even to save its mother’s life (although, as it happens, even the Partial Birth Abortion Law includes an exception where the life of the mother is endangered).
When Jewish groups, blatantly or subtly, suggest that Roe is somehow consonant with the Jewish religious heritage, they sow misinformation. And when they oppose measures like the Partial Birth Abortion Law, they abet infanticide.
(cont.)
I’m glad that Rabbi Shafran has set the record straight about what authentic, normative, traditional (i.e. orthodox) Judaism has to say on abortion.