It’s only nine verses from the first calling to the first crisis. The twelfth chapter of Genesis begins. God says “lech l’cha – go forth”. God promises Abraham prosperity, and progeny. God establishes a covenant between them. And in the very next verse, we read, “there was a famine in the land and it was severe.” The irony! God promised Abraham’s descendants this land and the first thing we learn about it is that there’s a famine. So Abraham and Sarah set out for Egypt, their exile, and the crises just keep coming from there. Insecurity, infertility, infidelity. Some covenant Abraham receives – a life of trials and hardship. From the words lech l’cha, his life is a journey from hard place to hard place. From our very first moments as a people, we are called to the hard places. The mission of a Jew is to walk towards what is difficult, what is real, what is human – not to shy away from it. The other mythologies of the ancient world were about Gods and heroes – about perfection or the fall from it. But the Torah is a story about people who struggle with the messy stuff of life. The religious project calls us to the hard places.
In 1957, Howard Moody got called to a hard place. He was in his first year as senior minister at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. A friend had referred a woman to him who was pregnant and seeking an abortion. She was a single mother of three. The only abortionist he could find for her was out in New Jersey, someone protected by the mob. When they arrived together, they were turned away because they did not know the correct password.
The experience was terrifying and shook Moody to his core. In those days, abortion was outlawed almost everywhere in America, and women who did seek the service put their lives at grave risk. Moody saw that “the thousands of women dying from unsafe abortions in the U.S.… were disproportionately poor women of color.”[i] He was particularly distressed by the trend where women with money and connections were able to get a “friendly physician or psychologist to deem a pregnancy life-threatening—the only circumstance in which abortion was legal.”[ii] This was before there was a strongly articulated religious movement against abortion. In fact, in his 1973 book, Moody devotes little space to the morality of the procedure. For him it was a matter of justice, a call to the hard place where women were in real need.
Moody started to meet with other clergy – ministers, priests, and also a number of rabbis. In 1967 they took out an ad in the New York Times, announcing the Clergy Consultation Service. Initially 21 Jewish and Christian clergy offered to counsel women and help them find access to safe abortion services if it was needed. Within six years, their numbers had grown to a network of over 1,400 clergy people, an underground railroad all over the country to help women who needed illegal abortions find them. By the time Roe v. Wade was handed down, it is estimated that the Clergy Consultation Service had helped as many as a half a million women.
I am in awe of these brave clergy people. These men and women defied the law to do what they knew was right. After college, before rabbinical school, I worked for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, an advocacy organization that had grown directly out of the Clergy Consultation Service. I was so deeply proud and inspired by this lineage. In that work, I would speak often about hard truths, including the stories of the men and women of the CCS. Sometimes, people found the discussions shocking, or taboo. Sometimes, people wanted me to stop telling these stories because it made them uncomfortable. But I tried to emulate these brave men and women – and to hear the call to the hard places.
In the last few years, I have found myself telling these stories less and less. I was recently in a meeting where an organizer noted that Jewish Organizations have not been showing up as much as they had historically in the work of reproductive rights. It made me worry that it wasn’t just me who was avoiding telling these stories. Maybe it was lots of us. Even though Jews had traditionally been leaders in this movement, apparently, we are not at the table any more. Maybe we were taking this issue for granted, since 83% of Jews are think abortion should be legal in at least some cases.[iii] Maybe we have been prioritizing other issues. But in the meantime, we let other people of faith hijack the narrative and claim that there is only one religious understanding of abortion.
I’ve noticed lately that on so many issues we talk a lot about what we believe, but that we don’t talk very much about why we believe. We don’t talk about where our passions are rooted in our own stories. And when we fail to do this, our passions come out as sound bites, and we continue to talk past each other.
So with that in mind, tonight I want to share with you why I identify as pro-choice. Before I do, let me offer a few caveats: First, this is not an attempt to tell you what you should believe. I want to share with you why this is important to me – why I care. Some of you may agree with me. Others of you may not. Some of you may have deeply held beliefs about the morality or immorality of abortion. I hope we will have opportunities in the coming weeks for you to share with me why you care. I am not trying to convince you of anything. Rather, I want to open up a conversation by sharing some of my truth.
Second caveat, I recognize that this is a difficult subject, and it may touch on a lot of emotions for people. I want to give space for that, and even to allow people to leave if they need to. The challenges of reproductive loss and infertility are real for so many people in this room, and I cannot go any further without naming that.
But I want to talk about it BECAUSE it is hard. I want to talk about it because talking about the hard things is what we are here to do. Maybe it will make us uncomfortable, but the stories of our ancestors implore us not to walk away from the hard things in life, but rather to lean into them.
Let me define what I mean by pro-choice. I think that the choice to end a pregnancy is one of the most difficult decisions a woman could ever have to make. But I trust a woman to make it for herself, her body, and her family. I am also pro-life. I want every baby that is born into this world to be wanted and loved and cared for. I want children to be able to thrive. And I trust women to know the circumstances that will result in this kind of life.
With that said, I pro-choice for three reasons. The first is religious freedom. My understanding of Jewish law is that there are certain circumstances under which a woman would be permitted, perhaps even encouraged to seek an abortion. Jewish law is unequivocal that if a woman’s life is in danger, her life takes precedence over the fetus, up until the moment of birth. What concerns me about American laws that limit access to abortion services is that they limit a Jewish woman like my wife’s ability to practice her religious obligations. The debate about when life begins is theological – it is not legal or scientific. Judaism understands fetal life as a potential life, valuable but not granted full human status until birth. When people legislate their religious understanding, they impose their beliefs on us. For me, this is a first amendment issue.
But perhaps more pressingly, this is a justice issue. Just like in Rev. Moody’s day, laws that limit access to reproductive health services disproportionately affect poor women and women of color. If Roe v. Wade gets overturned and states began outlawing abortion, we would find that women of means would still be able to access these services. The poor and the marginalized would be forced to seek more dangerous, more deadly versions of what is otherwise an incredibly safe procedure. My Judaism teaches me that we are commanded to protect the vulnerable – the widow and the orphan, and my belief in reproductive justice stems from this calling.
But more than either of these reasons, I am pro-choice because my mother and my grandmother taught me to be. They taught me to be because in in the early 1950’s, when my grandmother was just 19 or 20 years old, she found herself with an unplanned and treacherous pregnancy. She has given me permission to share her story with you tonight. She and my grandfather were living in Connecticut while he studied at college. They had not intended to start a family until he graduated. And around the time that she accidentally got pregnant, she also contracted German Measles – a illness that is incredibly hazardous to the fetus in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Her doctor who was worried that the child would be at great risk for Congenital Rubella Syndrome which can have devastating results in newborns. He and all of his colleagues urged her to seek an abortion, even though it was illegal. My grandparents were young, scared, and far away from their families. But they also had means. They ended up in Boston. There they found a doctor who helped them find certainty. Even almost 70 years later, my grandmother can still hear him saying, “If you were my daughter, I would not let you carry this pregnancy to term.” He got her into the hospital, where they wrote on her chart that she had a miscarriage to hide the illegal act. My grandmother remembers being terrified – of the procedure, of the illegality, of the thought that she might never be able to have children afterwards. But she went through with the procedure. She says looking back that while there was immense fear and sadness, she never once regretted her decision. She did what was right for her. She consulted her doctor, her husband, her God, and she made a responsible choice – even though it meant breaking the law. I am pro-choice because women like my grandmother deserve to make that choice with dignity.
“Nearly one in four women in the United States will have an abortion by age 45.”[iv] For many, it is a difficult and painful decision. I wanted to share these stories with you tonight because I wanted you to know why I am so fired up these days – why the stakes of national conversations feel so personal and so terrifying. And I also share this because I want this to be something we can talk about. I want us to remove the taboo from something a quarter of women will experience. And I want us to talk about it in here, in our sacred space. But these choices are human, and because they are human they are holy. I want to tell you these stories because I want you and your daughters to know that my office is a safe space for these conversations. That I am trained by the Religious Coalition in all-options counseling. That all of our clergy’s doors are open. And I tell you this because I want you to hold me to the highest possible standard. I want you to challenge me to be as brave as the women and men of the Clergy Consultation Service, to speak out publicly against injustice and oppression. I want you to know where I stand so you can stand with me for the challenges we will face. We do not have to agree, but I hope we can find faith in going to hard places together. I hope we can find courage in sharing our stories, in telling each other why we care.
Those of us who care passionately about this issue cannot afford to be silent. We cannot let others speak for us and convince the country that all people of faith are anti-choice. We cannot be afraid to speak of what is hard and painful. Like Abraham and Sarah, we are God’s covenantal partners in embracing the difficulties that life will offer and giving strength and support to each other through them. We are called to go where people are in pain and suffering and to bring comfort and relief. We are called to where there is injustice and bring a vision of a world made whole. On this shabbat I pray we all head the call of lech l’cha -- the call to the hard places.
[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/how-the-clergy-innovated-abortion-services/484517/
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] https://forward.com/opinion/393168/why-are-jews-so-pro-choice/
[iv] https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2017/abortion-common-experience-us-women-despite-dramatic-declines-rates