In my teen years, it was my friends having abortions. In my 30s and now 40s, it’s still my friends. My friend who had to get a dilation and curettage surgery (D&C). My sister-in-law with an ectopic pregnancy. My good friend whose fetus carried Tay-Sachs. The day school mom with children with special needs, who thought she was menopausal, and does not have the resources for another child. The couple from rabbinical school whose fetus’s brain stopped developing, and the pain of strangers touching her stomach and asking when the baby is due. These are not statistics; they are people I know and love. And even if you don’t know it, they are people you know and love as well. And they all exercised the profoundly human and Jewish right to make choices about when, how, and under what circumstances to have children.
This week’s Torah portion, Vayera, reminds us that fertility and the complexities of reproduction have been central concerns for thousands of years. After decades of trying, after surrogacy almost ruining her family, Sarah laughs in disbelief when she finally hears she will get to be a mother. Sarah is mocked, and Hagar is victimized. Hagar is forced into childbearing, perhaps against her will. These stories show us that society has long monitored, critiqued, and controlled women’s fertility — and continues to do so. So often, the judgment is passed in the name of religious beliefs. But is that really what our tradition tells us?
Find more resources on Vayera.
Exodus teaches that if a pregnant woman is harmed and miscarries, it is a financial matter; if she herself is harmed, it is a life for a life, a wound for a wound (Exodus 21:22–25), making it clear that a fetus has value but is not a life. The Mishnah and Talmud repeatedly make clear that the life, health, and agency of the pregnant woman take precedence over the fetus. (Mishnah Ohalot 7:6, Yevamot 69) Jewish law does not consider the fetus a separate full life until birth. My favorite text on women’s agency over the choice to have children or not comes from Yevamot 65b, where Judith, the wife of Rabbi Hiyya, has suffered in childbirth and no longer wants to have children. She goes to see the mara d’atra — the ruling judge of that town — who happens to be her husband. She dresses up so that he will not recognize her and asks if women are halakhically obligated to try to have children. He responds that women are not. Judith promptly drinks a potion that renders her sterile. Many texts speak to the ways in which danger to mental health can also be a danger to one’s life. These texts and so many others reveal a radical truth: Jewish tradition has long recognized that the life, body, and moral autonomy of the pregnant person must be protected. Possibility does not outweigh actuality; the living always come first.
Last year, our congregation hosted a program where women and men shared their abortion stories. One woman spoke of being sexually assaulted by her partner; having the abortion gave her the strength to leave the relationship. Another shared her experience as a freshman in college in the late 1960s, having an illegal abortion, and then decades later having a legal abortion while divorcing her husband — illustrating the difference between those experiences and why we need to keep abortion legal. A woman who was raped at age 11, never even having had her period, shared how the abortion saved her life, and the stigma that surrounds women, while men often bear little to no consequences. Men shared their own stories too. One wrote a letter to his newborn son reflecting on the pregnancy that was terminated due to a severe genetic condition that threatened his mother’s life; another recounted how his wife almost died from hemorrhaging when a hospital refused an abortion under strict state laws.
These stories bring the Torah and halakhah to life: Abortion is not political or partisan, it is a profoundly personal, moral, and often life-saving choice. The loss of access to reproductive healthcare, the rollback of abortion rights, and laws that endanger women are not hypothetical scenarios; they are putting our neighbors’, our friends’, our sisters’, our daughters’ lives in danger. Just as women’s entry into the workforce and the women’s liberation movement were inseparable from bodily autonomy, so too, reproductive freedom is inseparable from justice, equality, and dignity.
Vayera shows the pain of involuntary childlessness as well as the pain of involuntary pregnancy; it shows the way women are valued by their ability and willingness to produce offspring; and it shows society’s judgment, our judgments, of one another. Vayera shows the pain, heartache, and yes, the laughter that surround issues of conception.
Our congregation and our coalition partners on the abortion stories program wanted to come out with our abortion stories; to talk openly about “women’s issues” which are so often kept secret or silenced. We wanted to give voice to the other side of the religious perspective on reproductive health issues — that it’s a woman’s choice, that her life comes first, and that we should do all we can to honor her as the living image of God.
Abortion should not be partisan; abortion is personal. Trusting women to make the decisions that best safeguard their lives, bodies, and families is not only a matter of law, policy, or politics — it’s a matter of justice, compassion, and, yes, faith.
Rabbi Rachel Greengrass has served Temple Beth Am in Miami, FL, since 2008. She holds several leadership roles in the Jewish community, including being chair of the CCAR Peace and Justice Committee, a Rabbis Without Borders Fellow, a CLI fellow, a Hartman Rabbinic Fellow, a past President of the Rabbinical Association of Greater Miami, and founder of RAC-FL and iLGBTQ. She was a recipient of the T’ruah Rabbinic Human Rights Hero Award in 2021.nd Orthodox Rabbi at Brown RISD Hillel.