Sept. 26 Yom Kippur Sept

SUPREME COURT

different, I may have had to carry that fetus to term, deliver, and watch it die. I don’t know that we would have gone on to have more children if we’d had to endure that. It was traumatic enough as it was. People don’t understand how often this happens, who actually needs to terminate and how changing the laws even with exceptions they approve of is cruel.”

A 2018 article in the Forward by Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, a writer and a rabbi’s wife, aggregated anonymous accounts she had gathered from Orthodox Jewish women of why they had an abortion: Some had been raped, some were in abusive relationships, some had life-threatening pregnancies, some fetuses would not have survived long after childbirth, some women were contemplating suicide.

The article was circulating among Orthodox women after the decision, which Keats-Jaskoll says was typical. “It gets shared every time abortion comes up,” she says.

The proliferation of such stories illustrates the gap between the Orthodox establishment and Orthodox women, who are infuriated when they see organizational officials decry “abortion on demand,” a phrase Agudath Israel used in its statement.

“Most cases where a woman needs an abortion are devastating and necessary,” says Sara Hurwitz, president of Maharat, the first institution to ordain Orthodox women as clergy. She called the Dobbs decision an “unconscionable infringement on the religious freedom of Orthodox Jews” in an op-ed for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she co-authored after a draft opinion leaked in May. “It’s not like a decision that is ever taken lightly. And I think that the assumption that women are just having abortions for the sake of having abortions is not true.”

Keats-Jaskoll, who is Israel-based and busy engaging online with American Orthodox Jews who support the Roe reversal, says just seeing the phrase “abortion on demand” makes her livid.

“Abortion on demand. What does that mean?” she says. “They don’t know. They don’t know what they’re talking about. This is what happens when people who have no idea what they’re talking about pick up a cause and start to vomit from their mouths.”

She blames the politically rightward drift among American Orthodox Jews, which she says was distorting what had once been nuanced, deeply researched, and considered opinions on matters of Jewish living.

“I think they want to be identified, you know, as right wing,” she says. “They want to be identified with the more religious, and in America religious is Christian. Christianity holds very different views on abortion.”

Bleich’s proposal of a fund to get Orthodox women to liberal states was unviable, says Keats-Jaskoll, Hurwitz, and Scheininger. Bleich proposed a “stipend to be limited to women who produce a statement signed by a recognized posek attesting to the halachic propriety of the procedure.”

Scheininger says the burden of proving need would be overwhelming. “Having them go and perhaps show financial need and gain access, in some cases to financial documents that they may not have or may not have access to, if their spouses have control over that or if their father, their parents have control over it,” says Scheininger. “And to then ask for money and then to make those travel arrangements and to get to that state. You know, you’re talking about so many levels for a woman who’s already living trauma.”

Hurwitz says a system that only accommodated Jewish women was inherently inadequate.

“I think the Jewish community may have more means to support and help people who need abortions, but I think I’m worried about the whole system and the people who are really going to suffer because it’s not financially feasible,” she says.

Bleich says he did not believe his proposal would ever be needed; prosecutors were reasonable, he says, even in a state like Georgia where there is no mental health exception.

“I don’t think any district attorney, even in Georgia, would bring a cause of action against the doctor who claimed that his patient’s life was threatened because of a mental condition,” he says.

Scheininger, who like Bleich, teaches in a law school, says that was wishful thinking.

“If there’s a law on the books, then the prosecutors are going to prosecute,” she says.

“If there’s a law on the books, then the prosecutors are going to prosecute.”

Going on now! Come shop our

Largest local selection of contemporary furniture

301 West 21st Street, Norfolk | 757.623.3100 | decorumfurniture.com

$100off

a purchase of $1,500 $200off

a purchase of $2,500 $300off

a purchase of $3,500