The Only Moral Position On Abortion
By Irwin N. Graulich (03/11/04)
Disregard Roe v. Wade. There is only one intelligent, moral position on abortion and it happens to be in The Old Testament. Unfortunately, there is small problem articulating this law since over 95% of Jews and non-Jews are totally ignorant of it.
Ask anyone familiar with The Hebrew Bible and you will receive a similar response to the abortion question as you would from a constitutional scholar. The followers of left of center ideologies will attest to the interpretation that the Bible and the Constitution are pro-choice and protect human rights. At the same time, right of center ideologies will swear to the fact that both great documents hold the pro-life position and protect children. Legal scholars, clergy and activists can all come to the same and opposing conclusions on both sides.
How can so many well-educated people simply contradict each other? The Old Testament actually holds that both sides are profoundly wrong and that pro-choice and pro-life are both radical, extremist positions. (Whenever I make this statement at the outset of one of my lectures on this subject, everyone in the audience seems to have utter contempt for me...until the conclusion.)
Therefore, a full explanation is necessary. According to most Americans, there are only 2 sides to this issue:
1) Pro-choice...means a woman can do whatever she wants with her body. Naturally, this includes tattooing, piercing, haircuts, face lifts, rhinoplasty, wart/hair removal, or fetus removal. This position equates the status of the unborn fetus to skin, hair or excess cartilage. Intellectual honesty demands that we confront the moral consequences of our positions.
Yet, I have never met a single pro-choice individual, other than an activist (who will generally say anything), who truly places a fetus and a wart in the same category. It is important for pro-choice people to confront the issue, "Is destroying an unborn fetus the moral equivalent of getting a haircut and blow dry?"
2) Pro-life...means the fetus is a full life, and therefore, destroying it is murder. Staunch pro-lifers consider abortion the equivalent of the horrific crimes of Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh and even the Nazis, making abortion doctors and their nurses, mass murderers. This position places pro-lifers into a more difficult and frightening category. If they sincerely hold to this belief, they are knowingly permitting mass murder to occur on a daily basis, and are even accomplices to murder.
Imagine if someone were to go into an elementary school every day and murder 20 children because their parents are having financial difficulties while raising them. There is not an American anywhere who would not attempt to physically intervene, even at the risk of their own lives. The fact that there are so few attempts on the lives of abortion doctors, proves that the pro-life crowd is intellectually dishonest and does not truly believe their own rhetoric.
That abortion has become legal is not a valid excuse, because if murdering a group in America became legal today, decent masses of individuals would physically stop it from occurring. The fact that abortion has attained legal status in a religious, Judeo-Christian nation only proves that the vast majority of its adherents do not consider it murder.
What pro-choice and pro-life advocates have failed to realize is that their positions make them either accessories to murder, or accomplices to a meaningless beauty salon activity or cosmetic surgery procedure. Now that we see the inherent foolishness of both positions, we need to understand The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible for an astonishing revelation on this Solomonic issue.
In Exodus, Chapter 21, verses 22-23, it states, "If men shall fight, and they collide with a pregnant woman, and she miscarries, but the woman lives, the punishment on the men is financial, as determined by judges. But if the woman dies, there should be capital punishment." Watch the brilliance and wisdom of these two sentences.
These verses clearly illustrate two important concepts on this issue. First, that the fetus is not a full life, since if it were, capital punishment would be called for, as is mentioned in the very next sentence. We are also shown that the fetus is not a worthless piece of tissue like excess nasal cartilage, since financial remuneration is required by the culprits. In addition, there are later references to the health of the mother taking precedence to the unborn.
So how do we interpret this biblical posture and how does it totally resolve the issue? This astounding centrist position is equally distant between pro-choice and pro-life. It simply states that abortion is not murder...and is not nothing! The only way to enforce these seemingly contradictory positions is simply to allow an immoral act, while at the same time to discourage it strongly.
The Jewish Biblical position is to create a meaningful societal stigma so that anyone involved in an abortion knows there are grave moral consequences; that if you have an abortion you are eliminating potential life and there may be guilt for a very long time. A society that has few or no abortions is a more moral society.
Our own rhetoric should teach us something. When a pregnant mother feels movement or kicking, we ask, "Is the baby kicking?" Has anyone in the history of humanity asked, "Is the fetus kicking?" Yet when a woman wishes to get rid of it, we always use the terminology of "removing the fetus."
A majority of Americans seem to want abortion to be legal, yet do not want to simply dispose of developing life. This is truly the great dilemma. Abortion presents all of us with a tragic moral choice and in America we sometimes try to solve moral issues with laws. Lawyers are not always the answer as adultery would seem to prove.
There are very few people, if any, who are pro-adultery, yet no one would seriously consider putting a law on the books prohibiting it. What we prefer, is to create a moral society with great Judeo-Christian values that produces a powerful stigma to discourage married people from taking part in that "Fatal Attraction."
Instead of more laws and more lawsuits, we might consider going as far as establishing a fund to pay people not to have an abortion and putting the baby up for adoption. There are millions of couples with fertility issues who would cherish the gift of a baby. Can such a system be abused with baby selling? Of course, like anything else and therefore it must be monitored carefully.
Abortion is not exclusively a woman's rights issue. It is a societal issue. For 40 years, women have been duped by successful men and their attorneys that abortions should be allowed, so that men who are not married or who have affairs, are not saddled with paternal lawsuits. Let us all listen to the Torah and keep those irresponsible, despicable men on the hook by discouraging a mere $1,000 abortion.
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