Florida Abortion Ban Provokes Conflict Between Jewish Leaders Over Religious Rights

• Florida recently passed a six-week abortion ban that some Jews argued would restrict their religious freedom, while several others that spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation said that abortion is not a religious right in Judaism.
• Florida Rabbi Dan Levin wrote an op-ed for the Palm Beach Post that “Jewish tradition” has indicated that abortion is a right for “millennia” and pointed to the book of Exodus in the Bible, claiming that Jews did not “see a fetus as having equal status with an extant human being.”
• “In Judaism, abortion is absolutely prohibited, we have a strong biblical tradition from Genesis nine which actually has a verse that says ‘he who spills the blood of man within me shall have his blood spilled’ and our sages interpret that as the unborn child of the mother,” Cecily Routman, president of the Jewish Pro-Life Foundation, told the DCNF.

A six-week abortion ban passed the Florida legislature earlier this week despite some Jewish groups protesting that the new law would violate their religious rights, but not everyone agrees, according to several Jewish experts that spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The bill bans abortion in the Sunshine State after six weeks and is backed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, but several Jewish rabbis argued that it restricts their religious right to the procedure, according to the Palm Beach Post. Several Jewish legal and pro-life experts that spoke with the DNCF denied this claim, however, arguing that the new law does not contradict the Jewish faith. (RELATED: Pope Francis Compares Abortion Doctors To Hitmen In New Disney+ Special)

“There is no religious liberty right to human sacrifice or abortion,” Howard Slugh, an attorney and co-founder of Jews for Religious Liberty told the DNCF. “It is only the boogeyman version of religious liberty that the left imagined when they wanted to scare people out of supporting religious liberty that could possibly have been so perverse. That was never the law before and it’s not the law now.”

“In Judaism, abortion is absolutely prohibited, we have a strong biblical tradition from Genesis nine which actually has a verse that says ‘he who spills the blood of man within me shall have his blood spilled’ and our sages interpret that as the unborn child of the mother,” Cecily Routman, president of the Jewish Pro-Life Foundation, told the DCNF. “Judaism does have an exception to the prohibition on the abortion to save the physical life of the mother [but] this was intended to be used during medieval times when a woman has five children and is dying from a breached birth, and now the expansion of this exception has gone to the place were Jewish people want to use abortion for reasons beyond saving the life of the mother. [S]o they say that Judaism allows abortion in order to justify or find religious authority to say this six-week abortion ban violates their rights when it actually aligns beautifully with Judaism.”

Florida’s bill provides limited exceptions for cases of rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother up until 15 weeks of pregnancy, after that point, the woman requesting the abortion to provide documentation showing that she was raped or that she had a life-threatening condition. The law has been called one of the strictest abortion bans in the country since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 and several Jewish leaders accused the bill of potential harm to women, saying it would “rob them of their religious liberty,” according to the Palm Beach Post.

Rabbi Dan Levin at Temple Beth El in Boca Raton, Florida, argued in an op-ed for the Palm Beach Post that “Jewish tradition” has been dealing with abortion for “millennia” and that the book of Exodus in the Bible explains that Jews did not “see a fetus as having equal status with an extant human being.”

“Throughout the centuries, our sages have consistently taught that the health and safety of the mother is the paramount concern until the moment of childbirth,” Levin said. “State laws that prohibit the right to terminate a pregnancy with no regard to the health and safety of the mother violate Jewish law. A Jewish person who is denied the right to an abortion to preserve her health is kept from what Florida’s constitution guarantees as the free exercise of her religious conscience.”

Tal Fortgang, a fellow at the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, told the DCNF that while overly broad restriction to abortion could “theoretically violate Jews’ religious obligations” that did not mean that Florida’s law does so.

“[J]ust because the Florida regulation does not perfectly align with normative Jewish law does not mean that the Florida law categorically violates Jews’ right to practice their religion. Florida is not obligated to conform its regulation of contentious issues to the views of minority groups — all that dictum about how Judaism is unclear on the status of a pre-born baby notwithstanding — so there is no argument for a facial (wholesale) challenge to the Florida law.”

Slugh also pointed out that even assuming a person attempting to gain an abortion for religious reasons is “sincere,” Florida still has the right to “enforce its law if doing so is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest.” He noted that the state has a vested interest in protecting life and since “there is no half measure that allows for abortion and also saves these lives,” Florida’s ban does meet the standard to protect its interests.

Routman explained to the DCNF that arguments in favor of abortion in the Jewish community are often from the “Reformed Jewish movement, which is part of a broad network of the abortion lobby.” Reformed Jews, Routman claimed, have been pushing “propaganda” from the abortion lobby that Jews have a religious right to abortion but that those views do not represent traditional interpretations of Judaism.

Levin did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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