Rabbis for Life

Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l

"Not only are Jews prohibited from having an abortion (except in the most extreme circumstances), but they are prohibited from assisting non-Jews from having an abortion too. According to halacha, abortion is prohibited for non-Jews; it’s actually a capital crime. A Jewish doctor may not perform an abortion even if it would result in antipathy towards Jews." (Igros Moshe, Choshen Mishpat 2:73:8) 

 In responsum 69, Rav Moshe not only categorizes abortion as bloodshed; he takes the rare step of unequivocally warning against relying on an erroneous heter for aborting Down Syndrome babies. 

Read Rav. Feinstein's comments on abortion in Israel here.

Rabbi J. David Bleich

Contemporary Halakhic Problems, Vol.1

"A Jew is governed by such reverence for life that he trembles lest he tamper unmindfully with the greatest of all divine gifts, the bestowal or withholding of which is the prerogative of God alone. Although he be master over all within the world, there remain areas where man must fear to tread, acknowledging the limits of his sovereignty and the limitations of his understanding. In the unborn child lies the mystery and enigma of existence. Confronted by the miracle of life itself, man can only draw back in silence before the wonder of the Lord."

Rav Elazar Shach  zt”l 

Rav Shach on Chumash Parashas Va’eschanan p. 215. 

“The only relevant factor is prolonging life. Even if the quality of life will be reduced and there will be what appears to be unnecessary suffering, life is paramount. We find that our master, Moshe, asked to remain alive even. As a bird! What value can life as a bird have - he cannot fulfill mitzvah as a bird! Yet, one who knows that everything that HaShem created was created for His glory, and that each creature adds to the glory of Heaven in this world, knows the true value of each second of life, in whatever state!  Read Rav Shach here.

Rabbi Moshe Avraham Halperin

Director of the Science and Technology Torah Law Institute 

“In Judaism, there is no difference between morality and Torah law,” Rabbi Halperin explained. “What others call morality is how Jews serve God. This especially includes difficult life and death decisions, what we call the sanctity of life. Life is holy, the holiest thing in the world, because it is through life that we serve God. “Therefore, no person can be the master over life; not his own and certainly not someone else’s. Life belongs to God and He is the only one who decides over when it begins and when it ends. So even a person who is in a vegetative state, his soul being in the world increases the Glory of Heaven that is in the world. “Morality that is not based in the Torah is selective, placing Man at the top, in the decision making role. A person can destroy his own property or tell someone else to destroy it because it is his property to do with as he chooses. In selective morality, if a man chooses to end his life, since it is his life, he is within his right to do so. “But if you believe that the essence of life is the soul that was placed there by God, and that belongs to him, is part of him, then taking life is the worst crime possible. “It is absolutely forbidden under any condition to remove someone from life-saving measures, even if he is suffering, even if he requests it. Similarly, it is forbidden to withhold normal treatment, or food and water and medicine, that will extend his life. These things are murder, plain and simple. You can pray for his suffering to end but you cannot actively end it. “If a person has a chance to live after resuscitation or CPR, even if he will be disabled, then every effort must be made to lengthen his life. But if there is no chance for him to return to life, if he will for sure never return to consciousness, then there is no necessity to resuscitate the person.”

In the case of many people and limited resources, of course the doctors must choose who they have the greatest chance of saving. But the doctor may not make a judgment between the value of two lives. It is not his place to do so.” Read.

Rabbi Yosef Berger

Rabbi of King David’s Tomb on Mount Zion. "Shortening life in any way is most assuredly a sin and delays the final redemption." He quotes the last verse in Psalms to illustrate how every moment of life is a unique opportunity to praise the Creator. "God breathed life in Man,” Rabbi Berger said. “The purpose of life is to praise God. Anything that lessens life, reduces God’s praises and delays the Redemption. Euthanasia denies the inherent sanctity of life, denying that life comes from God. The Children of Israel were supposed to be enslaved in Egypt for 400 years but were actually in Egypt for much less.

The Bible describes that the Children of Israel multiplied greatly. It was this increase of life, this love of life, that shortened the exile in Egypt. Pharaoh tried to lengthen the exile by throwing the male babies into the Nile, offsetting the Israelite’s fertility, thereby lessening the power of life and increasing the exile.

There is a very simple rule: anything that increases life is from God and brings the Messiah closer. Anything that increases death is precisely the opposite and delays the Messiah. Killing children was a pagan ritual, most notably burning children alive for Ba’al. When Pharoah ordered the Israelite children thrown into the Nile, it was only the boys since this was a more ‘worthy’ sacrifice to the Egyptian gods. The natural order is for the parents to protect their children, which is why Moses refused Pharoah’s offer to leave Egypt so long as the children and elderly stayed behind. Sacrificing the children and elderly in the name of survival is a trait of the godless and doing so certainly delays the Redemption."  Read.

Rabbi Mayer Stembler

Federation of Jewish Communities 

of Ukraine. “The Torah sanctifies life, which means we cannot take lightly the taking of the life of a fetus, who holds the potential of decades of human life,” Stambler said in a statement. Aborting a fetus, if not performed to save the mother’s life, could be tantamount to murder — a view, he said that “has been the position of the rabbis of Poland throughout history and is the position of anyone who cares about the authentic Jewish tradition.” Read

Rabbi Moses ben Maimon zt”l

(Maimonides or Rambam)

Guide for the Perplexed 1:31

"Men like the opinions to which they have been accustomed from their youth; they defend them, and shun contrary views: and this is one of the things that prevents men from finding truth, for they cling to the opinions of habit."

Mishneh Torah 

The definition of murder according to the Noahide Laws includes a person who kills "even one unborn in the womb of its mother," and adds that such a person is liable for the death penalty.

Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks zt”l 

Former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain

To be a Jew is to be willing to challenge the prevailing consensus. Power allows us to rule over others without their consent. As the Greek historian Thucydides put it: "The strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must." Judaism is a sustained critique of power. That is the conclusion I have reached after a lifetime of studying our sacred texts. It is about how a nation can be formed on the basis of shared commitment and collective responsibility. It is about how to construct a society that honors the human person as the image and likeness of God. It is about a vision, never fully realized but never abandoned, of a world based on justice and compassion, in which "They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord  as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9)

"The Hebrew Bible is the first document to see time as an arena of change. Tomorrow need not be the same as yesterday…. The abolition of slavery, the recognition of human rights, the construction of a society of equal dignity — these have taken centuries, millennia. But they happened only because people learned to see inequalities and injustices as something other than inevitable.

Think Jewish, 2018

Rabbi Jack Abramowitz

“The Torah does not permit abortion on demand…The Torah not only prohibits abortion for Jews, it is universally prohibited under the seven Noahide laws under the general category of murder.”

“The Talmud in Yevamos (63b) says that Moshiach won’t come until all the souls that are waiting to be born have been born (based on Isaiah 57:16), so intentional refusal to procreate holds up the redemption.” Read

Rabbi Norman Lamm zt”l

Ret Chancellor of Yeshiva University

“The freedom of parents to crush prenatal life, which now seems to be in vogue, will eventually lead to utter destruction,” Rabbi Norman Lamm stated in 1970, “because it is only a small leap of logic from feoticide to infanticide, to getting rid of infants who may not fulfill our ideals of mental and physical health, or, eventually, ethnic and genetic respectability.”

Rabbi Lamm reiterated those themes in a sermon from 1976: “Never, never, must we allow this desacralization of life — whether in the form of benevolent euthanasia or free and easy abortions … or any of the other manifestations of this fundamental antagonism to life — to influence us.” Read.

Rabbi Shimon Cowen

The Theory and Practice of Universal Ethics — The Noahide Laws

“The opposition of Noahide law to the abortion of an unborn life, except in very special circumstances, embodies one of the deepest norms of human society, the protection of life.” 

In other words, Torah forbids abortion on demand, whether by a Jew or non-Jew. The ‘pragmatic’ consideration that if we insist on this, another purported ‘religious’ position, which does not allow the exceptions provided by Noahide law, could also prevail, in fact panders to moral relativism. It supports the extension of this global mass phenomenon of killing, both morally wrong itself and with all kinds of further corrosive consequences for society.  So too, it is spurious to allow a person a so-called "civil liberty" to abort. There is no such liberty to kill, in the sights of Noahide law. Read

Rabbi  Pinchas Teitz zt”l

Shedding innocent blood in Jewish life is so reprehensible that at times even those not responsible for the act of murder who hear of such an incident must dissociate themselves from it. This is expressed by the recitation of the elders of the city in whose proximity a dead man is found. In the eglo arufo ceremony that the Torah mandates, they must wash their hands, saying: "Our hands did not shed this blood," even though there is no reason to assume that they were directly involved in the death. How, then, are we to respond with less than shock to the killing of 100,000 fetuses through abortion in

Israel, year after year? This is certainly a sin against Torah . .. It is a crime against Jewry, against mankind, and even against the Land itself - for the Torah clearly warns that the Land, in its sensitivity to corruption, can tolerate no bloodshed. The Midrash relates that in ancient Egypt, a tiny Jewish child, born prematurely, tumbled into the

mortar from which the bricks were made. The Angel Gavriel scooped up the brick encasing the infant's form

and presented it before the Almighty as an accusation against the cruelty of Pharaoh's slave-labor. This

evoked the Almighty's mercy and the Jews were redeemed. For the sake of the security of our people in Eretz

Yisroel, we cannot permit the sanction of a practice that mirrors the brutality of ancient Egypt. Read

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, founder of Yeshiva Har Bracha in Israel. "...it is clear that a Jew may not kill a fetus, as there is a general principle that anything forbidden to non-Jews is forbidden to Jews as well. The purpose of the Torah is to sanctify the Jewish people and to demand much of them when it comes to mitzvot, so it is inconceivable that something forbidden to non-Jews would be permissible for Jews (Sanhedrin 59a). Thus, once we know that a non-Jews may not kill a fetus, it follows that Jews may not, either."  Read The Prohibition of Abortion for Jews and Non-Jews. 

 (Rabbi Eliezer Papo)

The Pele Yo'es zt”l

Advice to someone who wishes his sons to become Talmidei Hakhamim (Torah Scholars). "You should not wait till they are born and start growing up. Rather, both father and mother should pray constantly to G-d for this, before the pregnancy, during the pregnancy and after the child is born. They should make donations to Talmidei Hakhamim and request them to pray for their children. During the pregnancy, the mother should make every effort to hear the study of Torah, and after the child is born, she should take him to places of Torah study." We learn this from the mother of Ribbi Yehoshua Ben Hananya, who during her pregnancy, would go from one Beth Midrash (study hall), to another, to hear words of Torah and ask the Hakhamim to pray that her son would be very wise. 

Rabbenu Bahya zt”l 

There are three stages in a man's life: (a) in the womb, (b) in this world 

and (c) in the world to come.

When the child is in the mother's womb all his needs are met. If it were up to him, he would remain there forever. When he leaves the womb it is because he has no choice in the matter. In truth, whatever takes place in the womb is wondrous and beyond our comprehension, such as how the infant exists in that environment, and what it is that forces him, at the appropriate time, to emerge from there. Just as the understanding of the workings of this phenomenon is hidden from us, so too the work of G-d, in general, is hidden from our comprehension and is wondrous. The fact that we cannot comprehend it should not prevent us, however, from appreciating and seeing the hand of G-d and the wonders of His creation, every day, as we go about our daily lives.

 Parashath Tazria