This would be a timely and valuable question for us to offer our Roundtable to explore, I thought, and wrote to the authors. Delighted at my interest, they told me about the research project they were building on, which talks to Jewish women making decisions about whether and how to avail themselves of new technologies which might let them determine if a fetus was likely to be born with a debilitating disease which disproportionately affects Ashkenazi Jews. Their deliberations bespoke a rich set of questions and reference points as "biblical" as anything the Texan Evangelicals proffered. More people need to hear such religious arguments around - and sometimes for - abortion, I said, and the profound traditions they draw from. Before long we'd inveigled one of our long-time instructors on the Hebrew Bible into joining us to provide such background: the event was on!
The actual discussion was even more relevant and satisfying than I dared hope. And I think we did something important in bringing together the painful deliberations of women making difficult decisions and the traditions which have been helping make such decisions over centuries. In Jewish tradition, my faculty colleague quipped, abortion is neither banned nor on demand. A source she quoted said the view might be described as "abortion is not OK unless..." with a remarkable world of cases and considerations available for challenges old and new. Rabbinics could be understood, she said, as knowing G-d as the source of the ground rules, even as the ground keeps changing. Would that our holier than thou "pro life" politicians had even a smidgen of the seriousness and humility, the spiritual depth or the compassionate humanity of the ancient rabbis and the traditions they established.
