Post by Rabbi Neil on May 17, 2019 22:12:57 GMT
Nothing proves the overwhelming religious extremism of the USA than the issue of abortion. Those who say that America is a democracy and that there is a separation of church and state find themselves dumbfounded when, as this week, attempts to limit or end abortion are passed in State legislatures. According to a 2015 Pew Research Forum survey, 83% of American Jews, more than any other religious group, say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Why is that? The answer, it seems, is based firmly in our tradition.
We start with Torah, from the Book of Exodus (21:22-23), where we learn that “when men fight and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other misfortune ensues, the one responsible shall be fined as the woman’s husband may exact from him, the payment to be based on judges’ reckoning. But if other misfortune ensues, the penalty shall be life for life.”
Rashi says that the phrase “no other misfortune” means no fatal injury to the woman following her miscarriage. In other words, the attacker pays compensation for a bodily injury, and no more. This is important because it suggests that the fetus was to be deemed as part of her body, and not a separate entity. As the My Jewish Learning website notes, most other Jewish Bible commentators, including Moses Nachmanides (Ramban), Abraham Ibn Ezra, Meir Leib ben Yechiel Michael (Malbim), Baruch Malawi Epstein (Torah Temimah), Samson Raphael Hirsch, Joseph Hertz, and others, agree with Rashi’s interpretation. The payment is for loss of the fetus as an injury to the mother, not because the fetus itself is a separate entity. If the Bible considered the fetus to have been a life, then the only possible punishment would have been death for the attacker since midah k’neged midah – measure for measure – meant that the taking of a life could punishable only by the taking of the attacker’s life. No Rabbinic commentator mentions infanticide. Moses Maimonides even explicitly wrote that the attacker “must pay the value of the child to the husband and the compensation for injury and pain to the woman.” The interpretation of this verse amongst the greatest Jewish sages has been universal – that it is not a case of murder when an attacker kills an unborn fetus, it is a case of damage to a woman’s body. A fetus is not an independent baby according to the Bible. I truly wish that religious fundamentalists in this country were made to really read that verse properly.
I appreciate that non-Jewish fundamentalists – or forced-birth extremists as I heard them described this week – have not read the Mishnah, but it is worth us exploring. In Mishnah Oholot (7:6) we learn that “If a woman is in hard travail (in other words, if her labor is causing her significant harm), her child must be cut up while it is in her womb and brought out limb by limb, since the life of the mother has priority over the life of the child. But if the greater part of it has already emerged from the womb, it may not be touched, since the claim of one life cannot override the claim of another life.” This theme is addressed further in Talmud (Sanhedrin 72b) in which the rodef, the pursuer, forfeits their own life as soon as they try to kill another person. But if we make that comparison, is the fetus that is threatening to kill the mother during labour not a human being? Talmud clearly says no. In the case where a woman is likely to die in childbirth, our tradition says that she is not pursued by the fetus, but by Heaven itself! It is a natural death that can be prevented, and therefore should be prevented, since the preservation of human life takes precedence almost all the time.
Of course, the Rabbis need to discuss what it means that “the majority” of it has emerged. One commentary (Tosafot Yom Tov) explains that the fetus is not considered a nefesh, a living soul, until it has come out into the air. Rashi says that if the head has emerged, the child has been born. The Mishnah also states that if a pregnant woman is due to be executed, the execution is only delayed if she has started to give birth. The idea, once again, is that the embryo is part of her body and not a being in its own right. Only once it is unaffected by the mother’s state of life is it considered to be a viable human being.
As Rabbi Louis Jacobs z”l notes, though, this does not mean that Judaism gives blanket permission for all abortions. There is clear context here of “threat” to the mother. As Rabbi Jacobs says, “cases of abortion in order to save the life of the mother… are, nowadays, extremely rare, if they occur at all.” (What Does Judaism Say About…? pp.3-4). They do exist, of course, and he sadly reveals his white, male privilege here, but that is perhaps for another time. Rabbi Jacobs continues, “Although feticide is not homicide, the whole tenor of the Talmudic discussions on the subject suggests that it is, nonetheless, a serious offense and it follows, therefore, that it is only to be undertaken for the weightiest reasons. The codifiers are divided on what would be considered weighty reasons for terminating a pregnancy. Many of them permit abortion when the birth of the child would cause the mother to lose her sanity.” That is an extraordinary statement. The obvious exceptions of deformation, or indeed in the case of rape or prohibited union, are also made. But it is the subjective permission to allow abortion should the birth lead to the mother losing her sanity that is so extremely interesting, and important today.
There are counter-opinions in Judaism, and we cannot ignore them. While Judaism teaches that the fetus is part of a woman’s body, it also clearly teaches that we do not have autonomy over our bodies. Traditional prohibitions against suicide or against forms of self-harm such as cutting or tattooing the body show that our bodies are considered sacred gifts on loan to God and we may not damage them in any way. If a fetus is part of a woman’s body, and we are not allowed to damage our bodies, an argument could be made for banning all abortion on this premise alone. To do so would be a mistake in my opinion, though, for two reasons. Firstly, Talmud (Yevamot 69b) tells us that before 40 days the fetus is “mere water.” In other words, in the first six weeks one could not even make a case for it being a part of the woman’s body if one wanted to since our tradition says it is mere liquid until then! Afterwards, though, despite it being part of her body, her mental health is almost as important as her physical health. If her mental health is threatened, she may, according to a number of commentators, abort the fetus. That is not a universal opinion at all, but it is still a valid and repeated opinion from our tradition. And no-one can determine the woman’s mental health other than the woman herself. That, interestingly enough, brings us all to the issue of female autonomy. Jewish men of the past have made terrible assessments about women’s mental health, particularly accusing them of being possessed by dybbuks when they were clearly having a mental breakdown or were rebelling against the oppressive social order of the time. The only person who can be trusted to make an assessment about a woman’s mental health are trained mental health professionals under the absolute direction of the woman herself.
Forced birth extremists in this country today, including those who pay for advertising billboards along the I-25, say that “Abortion stops a beating heart” as though a beating heart is what determines life. It is interesting that I never see those people saying that turning off a life support machine stops a beating heart. Apparently, a beating heart only defines the right to life at the beginning of life and not at the end. Such individuals call themselves Pro-Life, although I would think that if they were truly Pro-Life then they would be fighting as vociferously to stop the removal of life support systems as they do to end abortion. It’s almost as though there’s something else going on here. Similarly, they call themselves Pro-Life even though they regularly vote for politicians who support the death penalty, who reduce environmental protection, who wage war on foreign nations, who increase public access to weapons of mass murder, who tear immigrant children from their parents before locking them in cages and, of course, who create a justice system which financially profits off incarcerating people of colour. Apparently, Pro-Life doesn’t actually mean pro the living, only pro the not yet living. If that were the case, though, then we would have to take seriously the Monty Python spoof of “Every sperm is sacred” because that is, after all, potential life. In other words, masturbation would have to be termed as murder. That is obviously nonsensical, so when taken to its logical conclusion, Pro-Life is a totally empty term.
I’m not convinced that it’s about being Pro-Choice either, even though recent studies in New Mexico show that the overwhelming majority of those who oppose abortion nonetheless do support the right of a woman to choose what happens to her own body. The Pro-Choice argument is “It’s my body so I have the autonomy to do with it whatever I like.” The problem with this line of argument is that those who oppose abortion do so precisely because they don’t think that the fetus is part of the woman’s body. They think that it is an independent being living inside the woman’s body. The woman has lost her independence because now her body is being shared, even if that independence were forced upon her violently and against her will. And it is actually the case of rape that crucially exposes what the argument is really about – about the woman being a vessel carrying a separate life inside of her. It’s not about her right, it’s about her being. Pregnancy, in the eyes of those who oppose abortion, is not a living relationship or, as I see it, the development and then separation of a part of a living being. In their eyes, pregnancy turns a woman into a container. It denies her being and turns her into doing.
In her essay entitled “Self-Determination: The End of a Utopia?”, ecofeminist Maria Mies explores this thought process. She relates that in the past “while freedom, equality and autonomy was postulated as universal human rights for all, entire categories of human beings were de facto excluded from these human rights.” (Ecofeminism (2014), p.223) We know that countless people today have become aware of that injustice and therefore have become deeply suspicious of claims to individual autonomy that exclude the rights of others. This is why, without realizing the staggering irony, it is the conservatives today who compare abortion to the past evils of slavery, eugenics and even of Nazi genocide. They defend the last claim because of the unfortunate relationship that Margaret Sanger, the creator of Planned Parenthood, had with eugenics. This is widely acknowledged to be true, although the strength of her connection to the eugenics movement is fiercely debated. These forced birth extremists, then, are trying to ensure that autonomy does not come at the cost of what they see as vulnerable human life, and that ethics cannot be framed around which individuals have more right to life than others, which the eugenics movement clearly proposed. Therefore, saying, “It’s my body and my choice” falls on deaf ears because the conservatives believe that they are holding the moral line protecting the liberals from what human beings have definitely done in the past – expand our own autonomy at the expense of the Other, whom Maria Mies defines as “nature, other human beings” or the so-called “’lower’ parts of the self.’” (p.223)
It was Mies who helped me understand the larger perspective on the issue of abortion. She writes that “the… liberals and progressives say that the embryo is nothing but a cluster of cells, a thing, a piece of property. The conservatives say that the embryo is a fully-fledged legal person who much above all be protected from the woman. Both regard the embryo as something alien to and separate from the pregnant woman…. As soon as [the] symbiosis, [the] living relation, is technically dissected, these parts enter into an antagonistic relation. One part will combat the other: there is a subject-object relationship.” (p.226)
If Mies is right, which I believe she is, both sides in today’s abortion debate are making terrible mistakes that only entrench each other’s views. The fight for body autonomy is seen by conservatives as callous, even murderous. The fight for the right of the fetus while ignoring the needs of the mother is seen by liberals as patriarchal and oppressive. Both are talking about the fetus as separate from the woman. When liberal women say that “it’s my body and I have the right to do with it what I want,” what they are actually saying sounds profoundly biblical,but not because she is the container ship captain who gets to chart te course of the vessel, but because there is no baby, not yet, anyway. The fetus is part of the woman’s body. Until it leaves her body, it is a part of her. What conservatives hear when they are told that a woman has the right over her own body, though, is “it’s my home, and I can do what I like to anyone who lives inside it,” which we all know isn’t true - we cannot abuse those who live in our home. But the womb is not a home and the fetus is not a separate entity. We know this quite simply because if it were removed from the womb, it would instantly die. The fetus exists in relationship to the woman, it is a part of her. It is not a child inside the woman, it is not a baby within a human being.
Because of advances in modern technology, I could see an argument for someone saying that birth is not the determinant of being but that viability outside of the womb should be. That would actually accord with the perspective of the fetus being part of the mother until it gains independence. So, I could see why someone might make an argument for saying that late-term abortions are problematic in a philosophical perspective. Except that such abortions only occur because of extreme circumstances, like potential harm to the mother or the inevitable non-viability of the baby once it is born. Both of those are covered under many Jewish opinions as being valid reasons for abortion.
After Frances Bacon popularized the scientific method as a means of viewing the world as a machine, white male science tended to break everything down into constituent parts. It severed essential links between living beings. It saw life as consisting of totally autonomous beings. It is only with the growth of ecology, which involves a noted return to many traditional patterns of thought regarding our relationship with nature, that we see that this perspective is not only wrong but dangerous. The abortion debate is one between two totally differing schools of thought. One is three hundred years old, is the result of a distinct shift in human thought that separated us from nature in order to subdue it, and that school of thought says that the fetus is independent of the mother because it has a beating heart. The other, a perspective which, not coincidentally, arose as feminism finally established a foothold within academia, says that the fetus and the woman cannot be distinguished, regardless of beating heart, a small brain, or anything else. This is an argument of white, male, pre-modern scientism against inclusive, non-oppressive, ungendered ecologism. It’s not just a war on women, it’s actually bigger than that. It’s a war on a way of thinking that tries to unburden us of the chains of modern scientism that has led to unparalleled destruction of life and oppression of women, people of color and of the poor. It is a white, patriarchal war to try to halt the liberation of the oppressed from patriarchy. So, it definitely is a war on women, but it is also much more. It is a war to hold onto a thought pattern that casted off connectivity in nature as being primitive, almost savage. It is a war to fight those who have exposed Baconian science as being a patriarchal view of the world that has caused unparalleled suffering to the majority on life on earth to benefit the rich, white few through so-called “progress.” It is a war waged by a side that pretends to be compassionate, that pretends to take the side of the masses oppressed by liberalism, but really that reinforces oppression and subjugation wherever possible.
To conclude, then. The debate about abortion in this country should not be a debate about the right of women to bodily autonomy versus the right of the unborn child. It should be a debate about whether or not the fetus is part of the woman before it is born. If that is established, as it clearly is in Jewish tradition and in basic common sense because the fetus cannot exist outside of the woman, then there is no question that abortion should be permitted in cases where there is a risk of physical or mental harm to the woman. And I deliberately say woman and not mother because she is not the mother until the baby has left her body. Calling her a mother while the baby is still inside her separates her from the baby in a way of thinking that has advanced human society technologically but only by ignoring the connectivity of all life and only by oppressing those who fall outside white, male society. The abortion debate is profoundly about Othering – Othering the fetus from the woman. Torah understood that it was false to do that, Rabbinic commentators understood that it was false to do that, common sense demonstrates that it is false to do that. We must help others understand that it is false to do that.
I believe that we must also help others understand that the Catholic Church’s doctrine that rejects abortion is derived solely from a specific reading of Scripture that suggests a separation between male and female, and between humanity and nature. We must work towards ending discussions of whether or not we are pro-life or pro-choice. This is not about autonomy but about philosophy, about when life begins. To suggest that it begins at conception, or when a heart starts beating, is not compassionate towards life, it is a dispassionate attempt to separate a part of the woman’s body from her. Judaism is neither pro-life nor pro-choice. Judaism says that the fetus is part of the woman until it is viable outside her, and that although none of us have autonomy over our own bodies, in the case of risk of harm to our bodies or to our minds, we may surgically change the state of the woman’s body.
The war on women must not be separated from the war against nature, against the poor or against people of color. It is a war where one side deliberately tries to shatter the connections of life and of society while the other tries to repair them. It is a war where both sides think that they believe in respect for the dignity of life, but one actually is merely trying to assert its control and usurpation of all life. This is not a war to save the lives of babies, it is a war to save the soul of humanity and, indeed, to save the planet on which we live. This weekend, many forced birth extremists in this country celebrate winning a couple of battles. Humanity, and the rest of life on earth, cannot survive them winning the war. This Shabbat we rest, next week we need to start changing our strategy to undo the patriarchal scientism that separates life from life, rich from poor, white from black, male from female, woman from fetus, and we will do so in order to protect all life. May our rest this Shabbat bring us strength to face the conflict ahead, time to reflect on our strategy, and a taste of the peace of the world to come, and let us say, Amen.
We start with Torah, from the Book of Exodus (21:22-23), where we learn that “when men fight and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other misfortune ensues, the one responsible shall be fined as the woman’s husband may exact from him, the payment to be based on judges’ reckoning. But if other misfortune ensues, the penalty shall be life for life.”
Rashi says that the phrase “no other misfortune” means no fatal injury to the woman following her miscarriage. In other words, the attacker pays compensation for a bodily injury, and no more. This is important because it suggests that the fetus was to be deemed as part of her body, and not a separate entity. As the My Jewish Learning website notes, most other Jewish Bible commentators, including Moses Nachmanides (Ramban), Abraham Ibn Ezra, Meir Leib ben Yechiel Michael (Malbim), Baruch Malawi Epstein (Torah Temimah), Samson Raphael Hirsch, Joseph Hertz, and others, agree with Rashi’s interpretation. The payment is for loss of the fetus as an injury to the mother, not because the fetus itself is a separate entity. If the Bible considered the fetus to have been a life, then the only possible punishment would have been death for the attacker since midah k’neged midah – measure for measure – meant that the taking of a life could punishable only by the taking of the attacker’s life. No Rabbinic commentator mentions infanticide. Moses Maimonides even explicitly wrote that the attacker “must pay the value of the child to the husband and the compensation for injury and pain to the woman.” The interpretation of this verse amongst the greatest Jewish sages has been universal – that it is not a case of murder when an attacker kills an unborn fetus, it is a case of damage to a woman’s body. A fetus is not an independent baby according to the Bible. I truly wish that religious fundamentalists in this country were made to really read that verse properly.
I appreciate that non-Jewish fundamentalists – or forced-birth extremists as I heard them described this week – have not read the Mishnah, but it is worth us exploring. In Mishnah Oholot (7:6) we learn that “If a woman is in hard travail (in other words, if her labor is causing her significant harm), her child must be cut up while it is in her womb and brought out limb by limb, since the life of the mother has priority over the life of the child. But if the greater part of it has already emerged from the womb, it may not be touched, since the claim of one life cannot override the claim of another life.” This theme is addressed further in Talmud (Sanhedrin 72b) in which the rodef, the pursuer, forfeits their own life as soon as they try to kill another person. But if we make that comparison, is the fetus that is threatening to kill the mother during labour not a human being? Talmud clearly says no. In the case where a woman is likely to die in childbirth, our tradition says that she is not pursued by the fetus, but by Heaven itself! It is a natural death that can be prevented, and therefore should be prevented, since the preservation of human life takes precedence almost all the time.
Of course, the Rabbis need to discuss what it means that “the majority” of it has emerged. One commentary (Tosafot Yom Tov) explains that the fetus is not considered a nefesh, a living soul, until it has come out into the air. Rashi says that if the head has emerged, the child has been born. The Mishnah also states that if a pregnant woman is due to be executed, the execution is only delayed if she has started to give birth. The idea, once again, is that the embryo is part of her body and not a being in its own right. Only once it is unaffected by the mother’s state of life is it considered to be a viable human being.
As Rabbi Louis Jacobs z”l notes, though, this does not mean that Judaism gives blanket permission for all abortions. There is clear context here of “threat” to the mother. As Rabbi Jacobs says, “cases of abortion in order to save the life of the mother… are, nowadays, extremely rare, if they occur at all.” (What Does Judaism Say About…? pp.3-4). They do exist, of course, and he sadly reveals his white, male privilege here, but that is perhaps for another time. Rabbi Jacobs continues, “Although feticide is not homicide, the whole tenor of the Talmudic discussions on the subject suggests that it is, nonetheless, a serious offense and it follows, therefore, that it is only to be undertaken for the weightiest reasons. The codifiers are divided on what would be considered weighty reasons for terminating a pregnancy. Many of them permit abortion when the birth of the child would cause the mother to lose her sanity.” That is an extraordinary statement. The obvious exceptions of deformation, or indeed in the case of rape or prohibited union, are also made. But it is the subjective permission to allow abortion should the birth lead to the mother losing her sanity that is so extremely interesting, and important today.
There are counter-opinions in Judaism, and we cannot ignore them. While Judaism teaches that the fetus is part of a woman’s body, it also clearly teaches that we do not have autonomy over our bodies. Traditional prohibitions against suicide or against forms of self-harm such as cutting or tattooing the body show that our bodies are considered sacred gifts on loan to God and we may not damage them in any way. If a fetus is part of a woman’s body, and we are not allowed to damage our bodies, an argument could be made for banning all abortion on this premise alone. To do so would be a mistake in my opinion, though, for two reasons. Firstly, Talmud (Yevamot 69b) tells us that before 40 days the fetus is “mere water.” In other words, in the first six weeks one could not even make a case for it being a part of the woman’s body if one wanted to since our tradition says it is mere liquid until then! Afterwards, though, despite it being part of her body, her mental health is almost as important as her physical health. If her mental health is threatened, she may, according to a number of commentators, abort the fetus. That is not a universal opinion at all, but it is still a valid and repeated opinion from our tradition. And no-one can determine the woman’s mental health other than the woman herself. That, interestingly enough, brings us all to the issue of female autonomy. Jewish men of the past have made terrible assessments about women’s mental health, particularly accusing them of being possessed by dybbuks when they were clearly having a mental breakdown or were rebelling against the oppressive social order of the time. The only person who can be trusted to make an assessment about a woman’s mental health are trained mental health professionals under the absolute direction of the woman herself.
Forced birth extremists in this country today, including those who pay for advertising billboards along the I-25, say that “Abortion stops a beating heart” as though a beating heart is what determines life. It is interesting that I never see those people saying that turning off a life support machine stops a beating heart. Apparently, a beating heart only defines the right to life at the beginning of life and not at the end. Such individuals call themselves Pro-Life, although I would think that if they were truly Pro-Life then they would be fighting as vociferously to stop the removal of life support systems as they do to end abortion. It’s almost as though there’s something else going on here. Similarly, they call themselves Pro-Life even though they regularly vote for politicians who support the death penalty, who reduce environmental protection, who wage war on foreign nations, who increase public access to weapons of mass murder, who tear immigrant children from their parents before locking them in cages and, of course, who create a justice system which financially profits off incarcerating people of colour. Apparently, Pro-Life doesn’t actually mean pro the living, only pro the not yet living. If that were the case, though, then we would have to take seriously the Monty Python spoof of “Every sperm is sacred” because that is, after all, potential life. In other words, masturbation would have to be termed as murder. That is obviously nonsensical, so when taken to its logical conclusion, Pro-Life is a totally empty term.
I’m not convinced that it’s about being Pro-Choice either, even though recent studies in New Mexico show that the overwhelming majority of those who oppose abortion nonetheless do support the right of a woman to choose what happens to her own body. The Pro-Choice argument is “It’s my body so I have the autonomy to do with it whatever I like.” The problem with this line of argument is that those who oppose abortion do so precisely because they don’t think that the fetus is part of the woman’s body. They think that it is an independent being living inside the woman’s body. The woman has lost her independence because now her body is being shared, even if that independence were forced upon her violently and against her will. And it is actually the case of rape that crucially exposes what the argument is really about – about the woman being a vessel carrying a separate life inside of her. It’s not about her right, it’s about her being. Pregnancy, in the eyes of those who oppose abortion, is not a living relationship or, as I see it, the development and then separation of a part of a living being. In their eyes, pregnancy turns a woman into a container. It denies her being and turns her into doing.
In her essay entitled “Self-Determination: The End of a Utopia?”, ecofeminist Maria Mies explores this thought process. She relates that in the past “while freedom, equality and autonomy was postulated as universal human rights for all, entire categories of human beings were de facto excluded from these human rights.” (Ecofeminism (2014), p.223) We know that countless people today have become aware of that injustice and therefore have become deeply suspicious of claims to individual autonomy that exclude the rights of others. This is why, without realizing the staggering irony, it is the conservatives today who compare abortion to the past evils of slavery, eugenics and even of Nazi genocide. They defend the last claim because of the unfortunate relationship that Margaret Sanger, the creator of Planned Parenthood, had with eugenics. This is widely acknowledged to be true, although the strength of her connection to the eugenics movement is fiercely debated. These forced birth extremists, then, are trying to ensure that autonomy does not come at the cost of what they see as vulnerable human life, and that ethics cannot be framed around which individuals have more right to life than others, which the eugenics movement clearly proposed. Therefore, saying, “It’s my body and my choice” falls on deaf ears because the conservatives believe that they are holding the moral line protecting the liberals from what human beings have definitely done in the past – expand our own autonomy at the expense of the Other, whom Maria Mies defines as “nature, other human beings” or the so-called “’lower’ parts of the self.’” (p.223)
It was Mies who helped me understand the larger perspective on the issue of abortion. She writes that “the… liberals and progressives say that the embryo is nothing but a cluster of cells, a thing, a piece of property. The conservatives say that the embryo is a fully-fledged legal person who much above all be protected from the woman. Both regard the embryo as something alien to and separate from the pregnant woman…. As soon as [the] symbiosis, [the] living relation, is technically dissected, these parts enter into an antagonistic relation. One part will combat the other: there is a subject-object relationship.” (p.226)
If Mies is right, which I believe she is, both sides in today’s abortion debate are making terrible mistakes that only entrench each other’s views. The fight for body autonomy is seen by conservatives as callous, even murderous. The fight for the right of the fetus while ignoring the needs of the mother is seen by liberals as patriarchal and oppressive. Both are talking about the fetus as separate from the woman. When liberal women say that “it’s my body and I have the right to do with it what I want,” what they are actually saying sounds profoundly biblical,but not because she is the container ship captain who gets to chart te course of the vessel, but because there is no baby, not yet, anyway. The fetus is part of the woman’s body. Until it leaves her body, it is a part of her. What conservatives hear when they are told that a woman has the right over her own body, though, is “it’s my home, and I can do what I like to anyone who lives inside it,” which we all know isn’t true - we cannot abuse those who live in our home. But the womb is not a home and the fetus is not a separate entity. We know this quite simply because if it were removed from the womb, it would instantly die. The fetus exists in relationship to the woman, it is a part of her. It is not a child inside the woman, it is not a baby within a human being.
Because of advances in modern technology, I could see an argument for someone saying that birth is not the determinant of being but that viability outside of the womb should be. That would actually accord with the perspective of the fetus being part of the mother until it gains independence. So, I could see why someone might make an argument for saying that late-term abortions are problematic in a philosophical perspective. Except that such abortions only occur because of extreme circumstances, like potential harm to the mother or the inevitable non-viability of the baby once it is born. Both of those are covered under many Jewish opinions as being valid reasons for abortion.
After Frances Bacon popularized the scientific method as a means of viewing the world as a machine, white male science tended to break everything down into constituent parts. It severed essential links between living beings. It saw life as consisting of totally autonomous beings. It is only with the growth of ecology, which involves a noted return to many traditional patterns of thought regarding our relationship with nature, that we see that this perspective is not only wrong but dangerous. The abortion debate is one between two totally differing schools of thought. One is three hundred years old, is the result of a distinct shift in human thought that separated us from nature in order to subdue it, and that school of thought says that the fetus is independent of the mother because it has a beating heart. The other, a perspective which, not coincidentally, arose as feminism finally established a foothold within academia, says that the fetus and the woman cannot be distinguished, regardless of beating heart, a small brain, or anything else. This is an argument of white, male, pre-modern scientism against inclusive, non-oppressive, ungendered ecologism. It’s not just a war on women, it’s actually bigger than that. It’s a war on a way of thinking that tries to unburden us of the chains of modern scientism that has led to unparalleled destruction of life and oppression of women, people of color and of the poor. It is a white, patriarchal war to try to halt the liberation of the oppressed from patriarchy. So, it definitely is a war on women, but it is also much more. It is a war to hold onto a thought pattern that casted off connectivity in nature as being primitive, almost savage. It is a war to fight those who have exposed Baconian science as being a patriarchal view of the world that has caused unparalleled suffering to the majority on life on earth to benefit the rich, white few through so-called “progress.” It is a war waged by a side that pretends to be compassionate, that pretends to take the side of the masses oppressed by liberalism, but really that reinforces oppression and subjugation wherever possible.
To conclude, then. The debate about abortion in this country should not be a debate about the right of women to bodily autonomy versus the right of the unborn child. It should be a debate about whether or not the fetus is part of the woman before it is born. If that is established, as it clearly is in Jewish tradition and in basic common sense because the fetus cannot exist outside of the woman, then there is no question that abortion should be permitted in cases where there is a risk of physical or mental harm to the woman. And I deliberately say woman and not mother because she is not the mother until the baby has left her body. Calling her a mother while the baby is still inside her separates her from the baby in a way of thinking that has advanced human society technologically but only by ignoring the connectivity of all life and only by oppressing those who fall outside white, male society. The abortion debate is profoundly about Othering – Othering the fetus from the woman. Torah understood that it was false to do that, Rabbinic commentators understood that it was false to do that, common sense demonstrates that it is false to do that. We must help others understand that it is false to do that.
I believe that we must also help others understand that the Catholic Church’s doctrine that rejects abortion is derived solely from a specific reading of Scripture that suggests a separation between male and female, and between humanity and nature. We must work towards ending discussions of whether or not we are pro-life or pro-choice. This is not about autonomy but about philosophy, about when life begins. To suggest that it begins at conception, or when a heart starts beating, is not compassionate towards life, it is a dispassionate attempt to separate a part of the woman’s body from her. Judaism is neither pro-life nor pro-choice. Judaism says that the fetus is part of the woman until it is viable outside her, and that although none of us have autonomy over our own bodies, in the case of risk of harm to our bodies or to our minds, we may surgically change the state of the woman’s body.
The war on women must not be separated from the war against nature, against the poor or against people of color. It is a war where one side deliberately tries to shatter the connections of life and of society while the other tries to repair them. It is a war where both sides think that they believe in respect for the dignity of life, but one actually is merely trying to assert its control and usurpation of all life. This is not a war to save the lives of babies, it is a war to save the soul of humanity and, indeed, to save the planet on which we live. This weekend, many forced birth extremists in this country celebrate winning a couple of battles. Humanity, and the rest of life on earth, cannot survive them winning the war. This Shabbat we rest, next week we need to start changing our strategy to undo the patriarchal scientism that separates life from life, rich from poor, white from black, male from female, woman from fetus, and we will do so in order to protect all life. May our rest this Shabbat bring us strength to face the conflict ahead, time to reflect on our strategy, and a taste of the peace of the world to come, and let us say, Amen.
