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Ben Shapiro Wrote It. Thanks, Ben.
I’ve been thinking about writing a post on abortion from a purely Orthodox Jewish point of view for a long time. What many Jews alive today and many others outside our faith believe to be the Jewish position on this issue has always been a fallacy. I did a review of the purely Orthodox positions from the highest Orthodox authorities quite some time ago. I also visited the Temple Mount ten years ago and saw the mikvahs that surrounded the entire Mount. The conclusion that Judaism is not only not pro-choice but in all probability the deep background source for the Catholic teaching on this issue was inescapable. For a modern Jew, this is a very inconvenient fact. The vast majority of modern Jews are very pro-choice. To present the original position would create a firestorm of protest from inside Judaism so I’ve been hesitant to write the piece. Now I need not hesitate. Ben Shapiro in his explosive direct style has simply pushed forward and breached the issue.
the baseline halacha – with exceptions, of course – is that abortion is forbidden unless the mother’s life is in danger. The clear consensus of the rishonim (medieval authorities) is that abortion is a Biblical prohibition, the only question being about which scriptural prohibition is implicated. This is the position of the greatest rabbis of the 20th century, from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (who considered abortion murder) to Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach (who agreed) to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (who also agreed, stating in 1975, “to me it is something vulgar, this clamor of the liberals that abortion be permitted”) to Rabbi Ovadiya Yosef (who said that abortion is Biblically prohibited past three months and at least rabbinically prohibited before then).
Now, rabbis do argue on the level of exceptions permitted. Even rabbis considered more “lenient” on abortion agree that it is prohibited ipso facto; they merely consider more exceptions acceptable. But there is not a single Jewish opinion that supports the mainstream pro-choice position on abortion, which states that an abortion is a matter between a woman and her doctor, and should be available for any reason. Zero halakhists have ever backed such an idea. As in, NONE. EVER. Not “virtually none.” NONE.
Ben has confirmed my observations about the real Jewish position on abortion. Abortion is forbidden because it is taking life. That is the fundamental position. The major exception is in the case that the life of the mother is threatened. This exception is literally justified by the argument from self-defense. The mother is defending her own life and thus has the right to even kill the child if that is what is necessary for her survival. It should be immediately evident that modern medicine has made this exception almost totally irrelevant or at least very very rare. One can barely imagine one out of every ten thousand abortions performed today that could possibly claim this exception as justification.
There is only one issue from the Jewish perspective that Ben has not addressed in his article. For the first 40 days of the pregnancy, as the human eye can not even detect an aborted developing embryo, the Rabbi’s simply accepted this period as indeterminant. As life could not be proved to have existed in the first place, there could be no proof that it had been artificially interrupted. Once again with modern medicine and modern science, the period of indeterminacy is far shorter and the confirmation of life far more determinate. Thus this exception would also be much less relevant if applied in the modern world.
Undoubtedly, many Jews and non-Jews will be shocked by this information. However, a close examination of the Temple Mount should remove the surprise element. The mikvahs surrounding the Temple Mount, over 2,000 years old, are constructed following halachic law perfectly. We can only assume that the attitude towards the “laws of family purity” have changed little in the intervening 2,000 years. These laws provide a structure which monitors a woman’s ovulation cycle and thus is a window into exactly when conception takes place. This elaborate structure confirms Judaism’s commitment to prenatal life and the central role it played in the Jewish faith. We can then easily see that Christianity, in specific the Catholic Church, was following a foundation that had already been laid down when it developed its doctrines on this issue.
I am sure many Christians will be pleasantly surprised by this report. On the other hand, many Jews will accuse me and Ben of everything under the sun. They will try to avoid the truth at all cost. I am prepared to take the heat. However, I’m not sure when I would have breached the discussion without Ben sticking his neck out first.
Well done Ben. Thanks.
Mikvahs – Ancient Mikvahs (ritual baths) in Jerusalem
Good Shabbos.
Regards,
Jim
Published in General
It’s funny; I just assumed that Judaism prohibited abortion, all along. When I read your line about most people believing a fallacy, I was thinking that you were going to argue that it was generally permissible.
A very enlightening post. Thank you, James.
Amen!
Thanks, James. And Ben, because that Wade a masterful piece of rhetoric.
Thanks for sharing Jim. I am Catholic. I have had discussions with a Jewish friend that besides for a few things Jews and Catholics believe in many of the same ideas. Now what is murder and what isn’t is also shared.
Talmud:
Meh. People on the left have developed so many techniques for dealing with inconvenient facts – applying “hate labels” (e.g., racist, sexist, homophobic) so as to place them outside acceptable speech, shouting them down, or just ignoring them – that they will hardly be inconvenienced by one more.
Maybe I should mention that I know very little about the Talmud! There may be serious textual, translational, or interpretive issues here.
All I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence is that this indicates that there appears to have been an ancient rabbinical tradition of viewing human life as beginning at conception based on the Tanakh.
At the time that Christ was walking the earth, one of the most purchased botanicals was this salvia that allowed for contraception. The big problem with the plant was that it ws so popular in Mediterranean areas that it was hard to obtain – merchants always ran out of it.
Now it might be that abortion is prohibited by the orthodox Jewish faith, but even going back two thousand years, contraception was not.
And there’s that. And that Psalm. # 139, isn’t it?
Pleased, Jim, but not surprised.
I can’t claim any familiarity with any of the Jewish scholarship sources the author cites, but I do know the Old and New Testaments, and I’ve never seen anything prohibiting abortion, unless you count the commandment against killing, but that clearly meant not to gratuitously kill another adult member of the Tribe, since Jehovah and all the OT heroes do a lot of killing. It’s not a topic scripture deals with specifically.
There’s only one aspect of quotidian life that Jesus discussed at length: marriage, and the fact that divorce was to be permissible only in one circumstance: if the wife committed adultery. He was so strict about it being an unbreakable covenant that the disciples wondered aloud whether it wouldn’t be better to remain single! And he followed it up with a shout-out to eunuchs! Seems funny to me that the church caved very early on that, while getting in such a twist about abortion.
Thank you, Jim. I knew it was prohibited, but your elaboration and Ben’s are very helpful.
Correct. This is from Fred Rosner, a physician expert in medical ethics in Judaism and on Maimonides’ medical writings:
[continued]
Despite all this, the halacha on abortion is, I think, more or less as Ben Shapiro stated.
Many thanks, Jim!
OnLC,
Jewish Law is not at all like Roman Law. Often the underlying principle is discernable only from the ritual procedure itself. The fact that Jewish Law doesn’t hold an accidental abortion liable is irrelevant to the question of whether Jewish Law holds the fetus to be a human life. The Kohan is a Jewish Priest. If the Kohen comes in contact with the abortion before 40 days after conception than the Kohan does not become ritually impure. Contact with any human corpse makes the Kohen ritually impure. The watery fluid is mentioned because at 40 days the human eye can only see watery fluid and not the developing embryo. Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope in 1677. We are discussing Rabbinic rulings from 2,000 years previous. What is really of interest is what the ruling is if the Kohen comes in contact with the embryo after the 40 days (obviously the embryo can be seen). The Kohen is ritually impure and must undergo full ritual purification and be restrained from performing his duties in the Temple. I would present this as far more conclusive proof that Jewish Law holds the developing fetus to be a human life rather than punishments imposed or not imposed for accidental external acts.
Again the 40 days is about indeterminacy. There is no way to see a developing embryo at that stage. Once it becomes a determined fact that an embryo exists then this is confirmation that a human life existed and has resulted in a human death. Once this is established there really is only one argument that is employed and that is the argument of self-defense. A woman has the right to defend her own life even to point of ending the pregnancy. However, this event would only constitute a pretext to end the pregnancy very very rarely with modern medicine.
Neither of the two exceptions, indeterminacy or self-defense, would justify anything like the “abortion-right” of the current law. In fact, with these two exceptions under Jewish Law 99.999…% of the modern abortions that take place would not. With all due respect to Dr. Rosner, I doubt he cares much about original Jewish Law on this subject. He is looking for any loophole that will give him the result he knows will be very very popular. This is exactly what I meant when I said they would do anything to avoid the inconvenient truth.
Regards,
Jim
@ontheleftcoast, I doubt anybody else is still reading. But I don’t think anybody in the ancient world worried bout abortion. If contraception had failed, and/or an unwanted baby was born, they just chucked it outside the city walls on the garbage dump to die. Mary Beard records that the Romans did this. And Ezekiel 16:4-6 suggests the Hebrews did too, at least with unwanted female infants. Here Yahweh compares Jerusalem to a female infant cast out to die, unwashed, placenta still attached, “polluted in thine own blood”–the lowest of the low, which He magnanimously saved from death. The writer wouldn’t have used that image if it weren’t familiar to his audience.
That’s a sign that some few did care, isn’t it?
There are also the words of the Hippocratic Oath.
In which one specifically swears not to use abortfacient pessaries and which doesn’t explicitly cover oral drugs or surgical means. Our earliest example of the oath is from the late third century CE.
Interesting response!
I imagine those other methods were known to Hippocrates. That does appear to count against the Hippocratic Oath as an anti-abortion document.
They were.
Maybe.
Wikipedia:
Not to mention the little detail of swearing by pagan deities, which if taken seriously is a problem for Christian, Jewish and Muslim physicians. Non-idolatrous versions of the oath were written and used.
I like that “one party of medical practitioners… the other party…” bit. Of course physicians would never use ethical pretexts to eliminate competing practitioners, would they?