Reform rabbi's abortion "blessing" is a curse for Jews of any sane outlook
In the United States legal realities may clash with traditional moral codes like the Bible. That doesn't mean that one supplants the other
In June the Supreme Court released a shockwave that was felt across the political spectrum. Dobbs v. Jackson eliminated the federal guarantee of abortion rights that had been created through Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Few could watch this development apathetically. I have held for years the opinion that having a religious outlook isn’t necessary in order to be pro-life. I may be Jewish and regularly attend services and Torah lessons, but that isn’t why I’ve opposed abortion. Most of my motivation comes from knowing that the modern abortion movement is a critical element of a misanthropic population control agenda. The pro-choice side chooses to do the opposite, seeking to promote the cause of abortion rights not through persuasive argument but by usurping ideas that have nothing to do with theirs. Consider the recent piece in Insider regarding Rachael Pass, a rabbi of the Reformed Jewish denomination in which she claims that her abortion was “deeply Jewish”.
So to cut to the chase, there is nothing “deeply Jewish” about aborting a pregnancy. The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has constructed a theoretical argument giving heft to the cause of “reproductive justice”. It includes the absurd argument that the right to choose is covered under the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment by extrapolating that because there are certain scenarios where abortion is excusable in Judaism that it is an inalienable right. The arguments they make are of those seeking to reach a conclusion and use whatever stepping stone is necessary to get there, even by moving them from their proper place. A competing argument is presented by the Jewish Pro-Life Foundation and the Coalition for Jewish Values in their amicus curiae brief in Dobbs. They cite rabbinic opinions holding that abortion is a grave transgression even for non-Jews including the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s advice to a woman advising her that “this constitutes deliberate murder of a creature who is as yet unable to protect himself from those who seek to murder him”. The brief also notes the exceptional case of endangerment to the life of the mother as being the sole reason that Judaism permits an abortion.
As I’ve said before, I don’t think it is necessary to use a religious argument to be pro-life. I also, having gone to public school and the university, have heard and understood the pro-choice arguments and can process their reasoning. It’s not simple to stand in the way of women that often are endangered economically, medically, or psychologically by an unplanned pregnancy. I’ve met many who were born in homes with single mothers that were constantly crushed by the world around them without a father present. Growing up in the 1990s the pro-choice mantra was always that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare”, which sounded very practical even for someone who didn’t agree.
But Pass’s abortion is not described in the article as one made under any type of duress. On the contrary, she hums a religious liturgy while downing two pills of the abortion drug misoprostol. Then she went to the mikvah (a ritual bath). Finally she ate bread and honey, a treat usually reserved for the Rosh Hashannah (Jewish New Year) holiday, because that was when she conceived. All of this is a totally perverted abuse of the Jewish tradition for her own personal satisfaction.
I think that what’s so grating about this story is the fact that Pass uses her religious background in order to justify a hedonistic lifestyle in order to bring a more mystical virtue to it. As someone who is a believing Jew, I do admit that I also have beliefs that don’t line up with the Orthodox Judaism that I practice. To use religious arguments in order to justify drug legalization or non-interventionism would be absurd. What Pass does is egregiously misrepresent Judaism by hijacking it in order to garnish her own personal choices. Her attitude can be summed up as: Not only am I not immoral, I’m laying claim to a new morality that you cannot touch at the risk of being labeled intolerant.
The true face of abortion
There are plenty of articles that look at Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood and their eugenics based view of humanity. She didn’t see her cause as a means to empower women as much as culling the herd of lesser breeds of human. As quoted in her book The Pivot of Civilization: “We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” In every passage of the book relating to lower caste women, Sanger looks at the task of raising new children as a tragic burden:
Whereas the great majority of mothers realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth.
The vile words of Sanger are meant to condemn the souls of children born in poverty, of unfavoured races, with mental or physical defects, or in family social stigmas, all together to a fate of never existing to begin with. I think this design should strike revulsion among Americans of any background. But we know this from our own history - one of the best ways to destroy a Jewish community was through the children: Pharaoh commanded Jewish midwives to kill the male infants, Jewish boys in Imperial Russia were conscripted at age seven to military cadet schools as cantonists in order to stamp out tradition at a young age. Needless to say the youngest Jews were summarily murdered in the Holocaust because they couldn’t be put to work in labour camps. By convincing us that abortion isn’t just permitted, but rather it’s a Jewish virtue. . . we may be getting lured into subjecting ourselves to a slower but no less sinister extermination.
Reform Judaism has long been a denomination that grants tremendous creative license to its rabbis and adherents. This is why the such beliefs as Rachael Pass’s are able to fester and even flourish, and not just on the topic of abortion. In 2020 she wrote an article in the progressive Jewish women’s blog site Hey Alma! for the festival of Tu Bishvat by focusing on the Canaanite deity Asherah that features prominently in the Book of Kings and the books of other Hebrew prophets. She concludes the article by encouraging the reader to spend their holiday “channeling our ancient Asherah goddess power”. Even though Pass had supported a practiced that was deemed to be wicked idolatry by Jewish sages going well over 2,500 years, apparently no one at Hebrew Union College’s rabbinic program thought this was a problem.
I’m happy to live in a nation like the United States that at least by law guarantees the right of its citizens to express controversial forms of speech, even ones that are obscene and delusional like Rachael Pass’s. But that doesn’t negate the damage that she does by representing textbook heresy against the Torah as “very Jewish” and her deliberate killing of her unborn child as “a blessing” in press interviews. Against all of the passages that she cites in stating her misguided promotion of abortion, I think this one trumps them all:
“This day, I call upon the heaven and the earth as witnesses [that I have warned] you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. You shall choose life, so that you and your offspring will live.” (Deut 30:19)