When does life begin asks
the old joke. A Catholic priest replies,
“Life begins with conception. That’s why
abortion is forbidden. It is murder.” A Protestant Minister disagrees and says,
“Life begins at birth; therefore under some circumstances abortion may be
permitted.” A Rabbi responds: “You are
both wrong. Life begins when your last
child graduates from college and the dog dies.
That is when life really begins!” Often, the abortion debate has been framed by a
question that asks, “When does life begin?”
“When does life begin” is the wrong question. Of course, a fetus is living. The question is whether it’s a person, an
independent human being.
The
outbreak of the Zika virus shines a bright light bringing in great relief a
difference between Judaism and Catholicism (and perhaps other streams of
Christianity) when it comes to the theological concept of when the fetus is
ensouled and becomes a human being.
The New
York Times reported on February 13, 2016:
As the Zika virus
spreads in Latin America, Catholic leaders are warning women against using
contraceptives or having abortions (despite the) of the risk of birth defects.
After a period of
saying little, bishops in Latin America are beginning to speak up and reassert
the church’s opposition to birth control and abortion…
“Contraceptives are
not a solution,” said
Bishop Leonardo Ulrich Steiner, the secretary general of the
National Council of Bishops of Brazil, and an auxiliary bishop of Brasília, in
an interview. “There is not a single change in the church’s position.”
Cardinal Odilo Scherer of São Paulo said recently
that mothers must accept babies born with microcephaly “as a mission,” and that
abortion was out of the question. However, he appeared to open a door to using condoms, saying that is
“personal choice” because a new life has not yet been formed.
The papal encyclical
Humanae Vitae, issued by Pope Paul VI in 1968, said that artificial
contraception was forbidden because sexual intercourse must always be open to
procreation.
The Church believes
that life begins with conception. Abortion
is muder. When a decision is made to
save the mother or the fetus, church doctrine teaches to save the mother since
she has already been baptized and saved.
The fetus has not and will be doomed if it is aborted without the
possibility of being baptized.
We Jews understand
the status of the fetus completely differently. Although the fetus represents
potential life, throughout rabbinic literature, we find that the fetus isn’t a separate
person in the judicial sense, but a limb of the mother (yerech emo). In fact until
forty days after conception, the fertilized egg is considered as “mere fluid.”
The
proof text in the Torah that the fetus isn’t a person is found in Exodus
21:22-3. “When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a
miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible shall be
fined according as the woman’s husband may extract from him, the payment to be
based upon reckoning….” If the miscarriage was considered murder, the man
pushing the woman would be culpable of a capital offence. The Talmuld (Sanhedrin 84b) teaches: “It was
necessary for the Torah to write ‘He who fatally strikes a man (ish) shall be
put to death (Exodus 21:12). For had the Torah written “who kills any person
(nefesh) the murderer shall be put to death (Numbers 35:30), one would have
concluded that capital punishment is applied to one who kills a fetus.”
Not
only are we concerned about the mother’s physical wellbeing, but also concerned
about her mental health. “In a contemporary
responsum, R. Eliezer Walderberg concludes that in principle, an abortion is
permissible as late as the sixth month of pregnancy if tests reveals a Tay
Sachs or Down’s Syndrome afflicted fetus. In justifying an abortion even at
that late date, his concern was not the possibility of a physical threat to the
mother, but rather the mental health of the mother who bears a fatally ill or
deformed child. As R. David Feldman explains ‘(T)he principle that the mother’s
pain ‘comes first,’ however, is the most pervasive of all factors in the consideration
of the abortion question.”[i]
If a
mother wishes to raise a child with the birth defect of microcephaly, we
would support her. However, if she would
choose to abort the fetus because of the mental anguish it would cause her,
Jewish law would also support her.
According to Jewish
Law, the obligation to be fruitful and multiply falls solely on the male.
Consequently, he is forbidden to use a condom as a birth control method. Since the woman doesn’t have the obligation,
certain forms of birth control are permitted.
Nevertheless, I remember when the Aids epidemic started hearing an
orthodox rabbi permit in a sermon the use of condoms for a health measure to
protect the lives of the partner and fetus, but not as a birth control.
Finally we disagree with
the Church about sex. At the conclusion
of Creation, God views everything He has created and saw that it was very good.
That includes sex between two loving partners.
In fact the Torah teaches us that “It is not good for man to be alone.” (
Gen.2:18) So God created Eve to be his partner and not just a hothouse to
incubate his babies. Judaism permits sex without the intent of procreation. Otherwise it would be forbidden to marry a
barren person which it is not. Otherwise
it would be forbidden for a couple too old to have children to marry which it
is not. People are not meant to be alone
and lonely. Making love is the deepest
and most intimate communication two people can have and God saw that as being
very good indeed.
[i] Thinking
about Women inAbortion Controversies by Adena K. Berkowitz A Journal of Philosophy,
Law and Judaism Vol 2: No 2 1991, page 26.
