A woman once called the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, where I work, looking for some rabbinic counseling. She had had an abortion the previous week, at six weeks of pregnancy.
Her comment when speaking to the rabbi at the Religious Coalition was that, while it had always been her custom to light the Shabbat candles every Friday night, on that previous Friday night she didn’t, because she didn’t feel “clean enough.”
As a rabbi, that story is particularly poignant for me. For the reality is, Judaism has always allowed for the possibility that abortion may, in some circumstances, not only be the best choice for a woman to make, it may be the only possible choice for her to make. The Mishnah says, in Oholot 7.6:
“If a woman has [life-threatening] difficulty in childbirth, one dismembers the embryo within her, limb by limb, because her life takes precedence over its life. Once its head has emerged, it may not be touched, for we do not set aside one life for another.”
Rabbinic commentators from the Middle Ages and into modern times agree that therapeutic abortion is not only warranted, it is actually mandated in Jewish law in cases where the mother’s life is at stake.
For, while the fetus is considered potential life — precious and sacred — it is not of equal status with the actual life of the woman, and therefore fetal life cannot take precedence over the existing life of the mother. As Rabbi Moses Sofer, a 19th century scholar, wrote, “No woman is required to build up the world by destroying herself.”
Before Roe
As Jews, we applaud the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, because the result is that women’s lives have been saved. And in Judaism, there is no higher value than pikuach nefesh, saving a life.
Those of us born after 1973 have no memory of what life was like before abortion was legalized.
According to fact sheets from Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights, in 1965, abortion was so unsafe that 17 percent of all deaths due to pregnancy and childbirth resulted from illegal abortion. It is estimated that illegal abortion led to between 5,000 and 10,000 deaths per year.
Today, a first trimester abortion is safer for a woman than a full-term pregnancy and childbirth, and legal abortion has been associated with a decrease in maternal mortality. In 1985 alone, according to one estimate, legal abortion prevented 1,500 maternal deaths.
Roe v. Wade came under attack almost from the moment it was decided. Today, 32 years later, Roe v. Wade is in real danger of being overturned, or so seriously undermined as to be de facto non-existent.
In 1992, the Supreme Court decided, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, that states could impose restrictions on access to abortion, as long as these restrictions did not pose an “undue burden” on women’s rights to reproductive freedom.
This has opened the flood gates to all kinds of restrictive and even punitive laws, including waiting periods; informed consent laws where women are made to listen to false and misleading information on abortion designed to discourage the woman from making this choice; and parental consent and parental notification laws, designed to make it extremely difficult for a minor to obtain an abortion.
The latest, and in some ways most egregious, of challenges to Roe is the so-called “Partial Birth Abortion Ban,” which has been declared unconstitutional, but which will come before the Supreme Court again.
The rhetoric surrounding debate on this law would have us believe that thousands of women, up to the final moments of pregnancy, are deciding on a whim to terminate their pregnancies and are obtaining abortions. In fact, 88 percent of abortions occur in the first 12-13 weeks of pregnancy.
According to the National Abortion Federation, “women have access to abortion in the third trimester only in extreme circumstances. Fewer than two percent of abortions are performed 21 weeks or after, and they are extremely rare after 26 weeks of pregnancy.
Very few abortions are provided in the third trimester, and they are generally limited to cases of severe fetal abnormalities or situations when the life or health of the pregnant woman is seriously threatened.”
The Supreme Court is only one vote away from overturning Roe, which would be one of the most radical actions taken in the court’s history.
Without Roe, life for American women would be thrown more than 30 years in reverse, returning to the days when women could not fully control the number and spacing of their children. Without Roe, women will be forced to carry fetuses to full term even when those fetuses have no brain, limbs or heart.
Because we are talking about much more than abortion, because we are talking about the social and economic injustices in our society that make abortion necessary and so often make it inaccessible to those who need it, for this reason I believe we are commanded by God, the prophets and our own moral consciences to stand up and speak out to ensure justice and freedom of choice for all.
It is our obligation as Jews, committed to social justice, partners with God in perfecting our world, to do all in our power to keep Roe the law of the land.
We must speak out, we must vote, we must march, picket and protest. We must let our lawmakers know that we will not allow them to turn back the clock on women’s rights.
Rabbi Bonnie Margulis of Madison is director of clergy programming at the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
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