In Halakhah, Abortion Is Prohibited—but Not Considered Murder

In America, debates over abortion tend to boil down to “pro-life” or “pro-choice” positions—defined more often than not by religious principles. But traditional Jewish sources take an approach that doesn’t quite fit either term, as Shlomo Brody explains:

Procreation, [in the Jewish view], represents a definitive commandment and is paradigmatic of a general attitude of promoting life. The notion that having an abortion is simply a woman’s [moral] prerogative, based on [an idea of individual moral] autonomy, is entirely absent from traditional Jewish sources. [Furthermore], Jewish law grants moral status to a fetus. For this reason, one is permitted to violate the Sabbath to save its life, even as it would not be permitted in the case of animals, which have a lower moral status. . . .

While Jewish law may grant moral status to this future human being, this does not mean that it equates feticide with murder. If feticide is prohibited, but is not homicide, then what is it? Historically, many halakhic authorities viewed feticide as a lower-level form of manslaughter that is permitted only when it will save the mother’s life. . . .This includes cases of direct physiological danger as well as mental imbalance [that could render a mother] suicidal. Otherwise, abortion remains a very severe offense. . . .

Yet [some] scholars like Jacob Emden (1697-1776) and Ben-Zion Uziel (1890-1953) significantly lowered the severity of the prohibition on abortion, even as they firmly maintained that it is generally forbidden. Some asserted that abortion falls under the general prohibition of battery, while others include it within a general rabbinic proscription of preventing the creation of life. These lenient assessments clearly allow for a broader range of dispensations, including cases in which the pregnancy might aggravate preexisting medical conditions that are not life-threatening. Most famously, [the 20th-century] rabbis Eliezer Waldenberg and Shaul Yisraeli permitted aborting a fetus diagnosed with Tay-Sachs in order to prevent the future suffering of this child and the mental anguish of its parents. Others strongly opposed this ruling. . . .

These significant disagreements create a greater amount of nuance than in other religious traditions that assert that life begins at conception and only allow abortions when the mother’s life is threatened. This is a perfectly cogent position, but not the Jewish one.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Abortion, Halakhah, Judaism, Religion & Holidays, U.S. Politics

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF