Peace Begins in the Womb

Hebrew version of this post. גרסה עברית של הפוסט הזה https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mhA4RNVJiQ6HZB_slD3EqrAIPTXUJdMe/view?usp=sharing

Shalom. Peace. We long for peace in the midst of war. People who long for peace in the midst of war can make peace right now at home and in our local communities.  We can stop waging war against our own future, We can make peace with our pre-born children.

The word abortion obfuscates a barbaric reality that happens thousands of times per day in a hidden war on the unborn. Babies are tortured to death without pain medication by starving, poisoning, dismembering limb by limb, inducing labor and then passively allowing them to die, or murdering them outright by pushing steel scissors into their neck and sucking out their brains, or keeping them alive for optimal organ removal and sale. Let's keep in mind for this discussion that as modern science now confirms, pre-born babies feel pain very early in their development.

Abortion Procedures What You Need to Know

Partial-Birth Abortion Procedure With Real Instruments

FOIA Documents Confirm Investigation of Aborted Baby Organ Harvesting at University of Pittsburgh

Leading Physician Confirms Unborn Children Feel Excruciating Pain During Abortions

Fact Sheet: Science of Fetal Pain

This gruesome truth conveniently omitted or repudiated in abortion discussions alleviates moral discomfort for anyone who considers such activity defensible. More importantly, medical interventions that save both mother and baby are now readily available. Gently removing a baby from the mother rather than torturing that precious human life in the womb is ethical and safer for the mother. If the baby is viable, intensive care saves the baby. If the baby is not viable, the baby is given palliative care and a dignified burial. This approach respects both the baby and the baby's Creator, and saves many innocent lives.

Concluding Pregnancy Ethically

Jews in Israel now face the existential threat of a multi-front war, but a war has been waging against Israel's most vulnerable since 1977, when abortion was legalized. An estimated 40,000 Jewish souls per year in the Jewish state scream out to their Heavenly Father as their fragile bodies are painfully destroyed. Abortion access in Israel has expanded consistently over the decades, with 41 termination committees serving in private and public hospitals. See Abortion in Israel. Israel now has the dubious dishonor of having one of the most liberal abortion laws of all countries in the world, which is a sad commentary for a state founded as a sanctuary for Jews fleeing the atrocities in Europe.

In 2022, Israel’s Health Ministry made significant changes to its abortion law. Now, outpatient medical centers distribute drugs for home abortions. Termination committees, which for years were maintained for religious cover even as most government-subsidized abortion requests were granted, are being shuttered. Private, self-funded abortion continues in war-torn Israel and the IDF provides multiple “termination services” for its enlisted personnel. Jews in Israel can stop this war immediately and save many innocent lives. The Jewish Pro-Life Foundation is bringing our education and support to the Jewish state with an Israeli based website and digital marketing campaign. 

Jewish Pro-Life Foundation in Israel.    https://jewishprolifefoundation.co.il

As US cancels Roe v. Wade, Israel loosens abortion regulations making it even easier than before

Indeed, diaspora Jews face threats, too. Vicious attacks on Jews in the media and in academia are reminiscent of Nazi era rhetoric. Mobs of bloodthirsty ideologues attack Jews in the streets with impunity and call for Jewish genocide. Claims by outspoken Jewish abortion advocates that abortion is a Jewish value and a religious right/rite exacerbate the anti-Jew activity. These lies are widely circulated by the liberal media and through political action, influencing legislation and inciting Jew hatred and anti-Zionist sentiment from the left and the right. Jewish abortion activists can cease their false claims immediately. This will stop inciting more anti-semitism and save innocent lives.

Combine these elements with certain unsustainable demographic realities and the result is heartbreaking. We aid and abet our enemies each time we destroy a Jewish baby in the womb. Our enemies reproduce rapidly while our generational posterity declines with each baby's demise. When a Jewish baby in the womb is destroyed, we deprive that Jewish life an entire lifetime of Torah living and blessing, as well as the opportunity to be counted as a Jew. Diaspora Jews can stop attacking our own pre-born children immediately and save many innocent lives.

Religious Jews who think that large families compensate for this demographic disparity fail to realize that their numbers can be decimated anytime. Rampant and increasingly virulent anti-semitism in America and abroad can lead to ruinous episodes. The chance of another October 7th increases when another Jewish baby dies and another Jew-hater gains political influence. Religious Jews can speak out in defense of innocent human life now. They can promote pregnancy care support, adoption, and life saving medical interventions for stressed women and families, and save many innocent lives.

Abortion leniencies perpetuate Jewish self-extermination for reasons that are clearly prohibited in Jewish law, such as family honor, a young woman's future prospects, a worrisome test result, gestational age, or avoidance of criminal behavior. These excuses override sacred prohibitions against child sacrifice in the Torah and disregard references to precious, sentient living human pre-born life in Tanakh. They ignore compassionate life-saving alternatives such as open adoption, outstanding and plentiful pregnancy care centers and resources and excellent medical treatments that are ethical alternatives to baby murder. 

Current easy access to abortion pills makes self-prescribed at-home abortion preferable to the uncomfortable disclosures that accompany permission seeking. Jewish women may know little of the history of RU-486, the abortion pill. It was invented by a subsidiary of the same German company that manufactured Zyklon B gas used to exterminate Jews. They also may not know of the danger of self-medicated abortion or the life-saving possibilities of Abortion Pill Reversal. 

Company That Made Zyklon B for Nazi Holocaust Made RU 486 for Abortions 

Fact Sheet: Risks and Complications of Chemical Abortion

Allowing the torture of babies based on a medieval ignorance of pre-born human development and a corresponding rejection of modern scientific evidence of the status of babies in the womb clearly defies reality. The opinion lacks moral integrity because it will not acknowledge the torture of human beings for an unholy, human reasoned purpose. This mindset occurs only by dehumanizing the pre-born baby, an historically repeated occurrence applied to Jews when we are dehumanized in order to justify our mass murder. See the Endowment for Human Development for evidence of the miracle of human growth from the moment of conception.

A pre-born baby who gets a death sentence during the first 40 days gestation suffers an injustice at the hands of a phony arbitrary ruling. It has no scientific foundation, but it creates an illusion and a desired effect that chills human flourishing. The 40-day mark clearly defies all Torah and Tanakh references to the sanctity of human life principles so intrinsic to Judaism. This is an opinion that resists applying sound medical and scientific evidence. Reasons for doing so include lack of pre-born gestational education, lack of skill to address trauma after abortion that may arise upon hearing the truth, pandering to pro-abortion donors, safeguarding jobs, and the certainty of alienating family, friends, and professional peers, many of whom have abortion histories and who strongly support the abortion industry. Rather than a lifeless nonentity, the developing baby in the first 40 days after conception is one of the most remarkable phases of human development as the Creative Intelligence orchestrates the development of a human body through rapid cell multiplication.

Permitting the torture of babies conceived during rape and incest fails to consider the innocence of the child. In Jewish law, no one gets the death penalty for someone else's crime. Fathers shall not be put to death because of sons, nor shall sons be put to death because of fathers; each man shall be put to death for his own transgression. Deuteronomy 24:16. While rape and incest are tragedies, destroying an innocent child is a greater tragedy that can be avoided with life-saving adoption offered by a mother who respects her child’s life to a mother who wants to love that child as her own. Decades of research show that abortion methods are very dangerous and lead to a variety of serious infertility and health problems. Women who complete the pregnancy to term and choose adoption have much better outcomes than women who abandon their children to the abortionist even though they are often pressured to abort by perpetrators of the rape or incest. See the Charlotte Lozier Institute and the Elliot Institute and AAPLOG for research studies.

Permission to destroy a pre-born baby because of an unfavorable prenatal diagnostic test result is often justified as merciful for a baby who is expected to die after a short or long term illness. Medical personnel frame the baby's painful demise as compassionate care and a relief for parents who are unable to cope with their child's impending sickness and death. Who but God can know the future? Many of these babies grow up to lead useful lives, and parents love and support their children. People who favor abortion in this case might change their thinking if they were forcibly tortured to death without pain medication because of an imperfect result on a medical or disability test! Nowhere in Torah or Tanakh is the permission given to kill an imperfect human being. See Rabbi David Bleich on this issue from his Halachkic Problems Vol 1. Data clearly shows that false positives and fear-driven abortion have become normative in modern medical practice. See False Positive DNA-Tech Testing is Leading to More Abortions. The vast number of false positive results found with these tests, along with insufficient practical and emotional support for a natural, dignified process to occur, leads to much unnecessary loss of life and heartache.

Inadequate education on abortion enables Jews to favor it, whether that lackluster education is received in a yeshiva or a temple adult education class. These lessons focus on esoteric legal arguments rather than teach students how to connect immoral abortion practices with moral guidelines in Torah. This narrow approach lacks a spirit of Jewish love and mercy and community responsibility. It omits a comprehensive treatment of all the evil, immoral abortion practices and policies that ought to inform it. 

Finally, we must consider the regret and trauma that women and men often feel after having an abortion experience, whether soon after or in the distant future. After abortion regret shows up as chronic sleep disorders and nightmares, clinical depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and substance abuse disorders. These long-term problems respond best to healing programs that include a spiritual element to address the underlying guilt and regret. 

Learn about Tikvat Rachel, our Teshuvah-based healing program

Jews tend to follow the leader on serious moral questions rather than engage in self-study. Leaders decline to teach moral concepts in favor of unholy leniencies on abortion or say nothing at all. This has given us a neurotic, morally confused Jewish majority that calls for peace in the war against the Jews but wages war on Jewish children in the womb. Jewish abortion activists can make peace immediately with our children in the womb and save thousands of innocent lives now.

Cecily Routman

May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and good life upon us and upon all Israel. Amen.