GOD VS. "INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE":

Pro-choice Judaism (Rabbi Avi Shafran, 11/05/03, Jewish World Review)

[A]braham Foxman, the ADL's national director, contends that [partial birth abortion] legislation "wrongly intrudes on an individual's most personal decisions" and that "the government should not interfere in matters of individual conscience." This, despite the fact that the ADL is hardly shy about exposing and combating personal decisions born of individual conscience that cause harm to others. [...]

Most reasonable people would agree that a woman has no right to choose to kill her newborn, even if it was born prematurely and even if it is still connected by its umbilical cord to the placenta within her body. Whence, then, her right to choose to kill that same being as it floats in a bag of amniotic fluid a mere moment earlier?

According to Jewish law, there is in fact such a right, at least at times, when the mother's life and the child's life cannot both be preserved. But that is a matter of weighing adult life against fetal life (potential life, almost-life, call it what you will), not a matter of "personal choice." And moving the discussion from the realm of "choice" to that of "lives" — how to value them and what to do when two clash - is precisely what the pro-abortion movement seeks at all costs to avoid.

But it is — or should be — the national discussion, at least for a culture that claims to value life. Contorting the abortion issue into one of a woman's "right to choose," as has been done for fully three decades, predicates it on the contention that a fetus's life has no inherent worth at all. [...]

As is happens, there is in fact a choice pertinent to the abortion issue, and it happens to come right from the Jewish tradition, from the Jewish Bible's book of Deuteronomy.

"I have placed before you," the Creator informs us through Moses, "life and death, the blessing and the curse."

"Choose life," the verse continues, "so that you and your seed will live."

Even more untenable that anti-life Judaism is the apparently not insignificant portion of Judaism that eschews God. Instead of worrying about the imagined effect of Mel Gibson movies, Mr. Foxman might want to focus on the damage Jews like himself are doing to the moral stature of Judaism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 7, 2003 7:10 AM