Last week, a Missouri court ruled against a group of clergymen, among them five rabbis, who sought to challenge the state law banning all abortions “except in cases of medical emergency.” The suit claimed that the law, which went into effect in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, undermines religious freedom and the separation of church and state.

Besides this lawsuit, there have been numerous cases of liberal Jewish groups filing amicus briefs in various attempts to overturn state-level abortion bans. In particular, they have raised the fact that rabbinic law since ancient times has mandated abortion in certain circumstances. Michael A. Helfand takes a close and objective look at these arguments, as well as other interventions in legal battles concerning abortion by American Jewish groups, noting how attitudes have changed following both Dobbs and evolving understandings of religious liberty.

Jewish law’s approach to abortion resists categorization as either pro-choice or pro-life. Instead, Jewish law . . . disapproves of abortion generally, but still endorses—and even requires—abortion when it promotes the health and “well-being” of the mother, broadly construed.

These unique features of Jewish law, especially the requirement of abortion when the mother’s well-being is at stake, has for some time generated significant religious-liberty advocacy on the part of Jewish organizations. A view of the history, as told through amicus-brief filings over the past 50 years, highlights how shifts in the Supreme Court’s abortion doctrine have generated changes within Jewish religious liberty advocacy. Indeed, in the pre-Dobbs era, religious exemptions found a home within some traditionalist Jewish groups, while progressive Jewish groups discounted their constitutional validity.

By contrast, in the post-Dobbs era, the roles appear to have reversed, with progressive Jewish groups advancing claims for religious exemptions, while the advocacy of some traditional Jewish groups has become more muted. And yet others, given the poor fit between Jewish law and litigation over the right to abortion, have intentionally and explicitly chosen to avoid the fray.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.