Should a Jewish American woman want to get an abortion, she should — by and very large — be able to have one.
The US states with the greatest Jewish populations — New York (duh) and California — will, I feel safe in saying, never ban abortion, no matter how much the Supreme Court allows them to do so.
Of course, Jews don’t live only on the coasts. My mother grew up in Ohio, for example, which has outlawed abortion after a foetal heartbeat can be detected, which is usually around six weeks, before many women know they’re even pregnant, and it doesn’t matter if that particular foetus was conceived during rape or incest. In Ohio, it still has more rights than the woman carrying it.
But in the vast main, Jewish American women live in pro-choice states. And this makes sense, because Judaism is a pro-choice religion.
After the Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade on 24 June, multiple Jewish American organisations and rabbis issued condemnatory statements, not just in defence of women’s rights — although there were plenty of those — but also in outrage at how the ruling went against Jewish teachings, and therefore contradicted their religious liberty. Rabbi Ed Feinstein, of Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles, said that Judaic tradition states that the life of the mother must always “take precedence” over the foetus, and Rabbi Mara Nathan of Temple Beth-El in San Antonio, Texas, said that, until birth, the baby is considered to be part of the woman, and it is up to her to make her own choices.
“The idea that life begins at conception is a philosophical idea, and the source for that idea is a religious source: Catholic and evangelical interpretation of the scripture. It’s another example of where a particular religion’s perception of the world has taken hold of American culture,” said Rabbi Feinstein. It is no coincidence that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was Jewish, and Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced her on the Supreme Court and duly reversed Ginsburg’s pro-choice stance, is a devout Catholic.
My favourite movies about abortion were written by and starred Jewish American women: Dirty Dancing (as discussed in last month’s column) and, more recently, 2014’s Obvious Child, written by Gillian Robespierre and starring Jenny Slate, and they are both emphatically Jewish American movies, in that the Jewishness of the character is stressed throughout. Maybe it’s partly for that reason that I felt no compunction whatsoever about getting an abortion in my early 20s. The idea that this might be an emotional or fraught decision never crossed my mind: I knew I was pregnant, by someone even less prepared to look after a child than me, and so I went to a clinic.
Say what you like about some of the more extreme elements of Judaism, but we Jews have a strikingly practical approach to life. There’s no woo-woo nonsense about when life begins, and who you’ll be next time around — what matters is how you live your life on Earth now. And my life on Earth was going to be disastrously undone by a baby at that moment, so I didn’t have it.
I grew up in New York, but when I look at America now, I see an unrecognisably fanatical religious country. One in which a group of unelected judges obsesses over what was written in a centuries-old text, and insistently apply it to the modern-day in ways that suit its ideology. I see a country in which a foetus has more rights than a woman, and an unborn child is protected in ways born children aren’t, because the right to own a gun is considered more important than the right to go to school without fear of being murdered. This is what happens when American evangelism shacks up with American individualism, and the result is a country that this American Jewish feminist can’t ever imagine living in again.
