Is Iran Here? On Progressivism and Sane Liberalism (Column 483)
Sometimes I get the feeling that the State of Israel is behaving like Iran. The takeover by fanatical religious elements stuck in the Middle Ages and their success in imposing their distorted values on the general public worries me more than once. But then I pinch myself and put things in proportion. It isn’t objectively true. There are very problematic decisions and actions, but this isn’t Iran. It’s primitiveness and bullying, but not Nazism. Tactically, too, one must be careful with comparisons to Iran (an extension of Godwin’s Law), since if every step I dislike is “Iran,” then at the next cry of “Wolf! Wolf!” no one will believe me. That’s what consoles me when I see hysterical liberals crying “Wolf! Wolf!” every time someone moves their cheese. Thus, for example, desperate howls about the destruction of democracy every time a right-winger says something banal only harm the just struggles against Bibi’s corruption and against religious coercion.
A few days ago I read a characteristically hysterical article featuring desperate wails over the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow each state to make its own decisions about abortions. Forget the bikini, the author (Liat Ron) cries; we have before us something even more important: abortions (a woman’s right over her body). If a cardinal topic like a woman’s right to be photographed in a bikini is dwarfed by this looming issue, admit it—it’s truly intriguing. We must get into the weeds to understand the threat facing us from our great friend across the sea (the new Iran): the United States.
Background[1]
In our great friend’s country it’s customary for the president to appoint the justices (unlike in our ultimate democracy, where they appoint themselves, or at least insist on their right to do so). Therefore, every president tries to leave his mark on the Supreme Court and appoint justices in his image. This influence remains even after his term ends, since a president leaves after eight years at most, while justices serve until retirement. Naturally, a Republican president tries to appoint conservative justices and a Democratic president appoints liberal (progressive) ones. That’s how things run there, and it’s part of a reasonable democratic mechanism accepted there. I’ve already gotten used to every conservative appointment eliciting howls from the liberal side (and vice versa, though that’s heard less—at least here). For them, the direction the Court can go is single and exclusive. Any slight move in the other direction (to the sitra achra, the “other side”) is nothing less than a catastrophe. Apocalypse Now. This discourse intensified greatly during Donald Trump’s tenure, who truly was a loathsome creature that behaved and spoke in appalling ways in various contexts. It’s no wonder that when he managed to appoint several more conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, an apocalyptic outcry arose. It’s very easy to hang everything on Trump in order to portray this entire move as an existential threat. Iranization of America.
You may be surprised, but the banner of the struggle and its main focal point is abortion. Here in our holy land, no one even chirps about this; it’s arranged quietly according to rules that don’t really exist, and each person does what is right in their own eyes. For example, the committees that the law requires one to go through to approve abortions are a dead letter, a rubber stamp. They approve every request automatically. You can ask Oren, the site’s editor, who tried his hand at petitions to the High Court in this area and, to my regret, suffered resounding failures (in my view, entirely predictable). But in our great friend’s country there are devout Christians who are less delicate than our local “dosim” (religious zealots), and they are not ashamed to try to prohibit murder under the protection of law—what is euphemistically called an “abortion.” What passes here by quiet and wondrous consensus is there a subject of a political struggle brimming with passions and strong-arm tactics (well, by the halakhic principle of rodef we learned that preventing murder justifies the use of force).
In the past, abortion was considered murder and was forbidden in every civilized country. Then, in 1973, in the famous Roe v. Wade case, the U.S. Supreme Court made a precedent-setting decision to legalize abortions. Through their own interpretation of the 14th Amendment, they determined that this is a protected federal constitutional right, and therefore no state can forbid it in its own constitution. A remarkably “enlightened” step, of course—at least if you ask every Democratic voter and your average liberal. And then, in 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court already consisted of a conservative majority, we were informed of its new decision overturning the Roe v. Wade interpretation by a six-to-three majority. They held that this is not a constitutional right (Roe v. Wade was a mistake from the outset), and that each state is free to decide whether to forbid abortions within its borders or not. Note well: they did not forbid abortions, but merely determined that states may address this in their constitutions.
No need to tell you what insane carnival has opened there (and here as well). The internet is boiling, the street is roiling, and I allow myself to assume that mass clashes of unimaginable intensity are to be expected. This could reach civil war. The hysteria is global, and even in the small appendage of our great friend (that is, in our province) you can see desperate, hysterical expressions of this—such as this, for example (one of many).
Abortion Is Murder
The moral problem of abortion is not my topic here, but this background is necessary for what I will write later. I already wrote my view on abortions in Column 73. To me, it is plain murder, and therefore the demand to permit abortions is, in my eyes, akin to a demand to permit murder. The foolish arguments about a “woman’s right over her body,” which every idiot (male and female) repeats with religious devotion, are, of course, utter nonsense. This “argument” consists of two components (and I doubt many of those who raise it are truly aware of them): 1) A woman has a right over her own body. 2) A fetus is part of the woman’s body (and the assumption is that it is not a person, of course). I fully accept premise 1, but by itself it is insufficient to justify murder. I have full rights over my house, but that does not mean I may murder anyone who happens to be inside it. Premise 2 is highly problematic, and it’s no wonder that, in the “debates” held on this issue, the focus is on premise 1. Keep this important demagogic rule in hand: if you wish to argue a weak claim, focus on your strongest premise and conceal the weak one (not to say the absurd one).
By this reasoning, I can permit the murder of a baby at the moment of birth, since I see no significant difference between that baby and the fetus that baby was a moment earlier. That too is not a person. True, it is no longer inside the woman’s body, but in two days it will be in her house, and as we recall she has full rights over her house. And what of a child with a severe intellectual disability who is completely dependent on the parents? May one also murder such a child on the pretext that the parents have rights over their home and property (and therefore need not support the child, and may even kill him)? How can you explain to me that a fetus is not a person, but a newborn a second after birth is, and so is a severely disabled child? A fetus at least has the potential to become a fully fledged person; a severely disabled individual may not even have that. For fear of a public uproar I will not enter here into the question of how one can determine whether a Jew, a Gypsy, or a witch is a human being (though in my opinion this is not demagoguery at all—it is an excellent question for supporters of abortion).
I don’t know on what basis anyone can determine that a fetus is not a person, and up to which exact stage this can be said. True, a drop of semen or even a fertilized egg is not yet a person, but at later stages I fail to see how one can draw a convincing line for when the fetus becomes a person. As long as it depends on its mother? It seems to me that’s true until about age ten. Here lies a terrible slippery slope. When they talk about individual freedom and privacy, liberals draw the line far beyond what’s reasonable. In every governmental step they see an immediate threat to us and foresee horrific invasions of privacy, and therefore seek to forbid everything. Yet here, when it’s a prohibition of murder (not merely an invasion of privacy), somehow no one is troubled by future consequences and the fear that people are being murdered.
But it’s much more than that. In Column 429 I distinguished between two types of slippery-slope arguments: (A) forbidding the permitted for fear we’ll arrive at permitting the forbidden; (B) a situation with a wide gray zone and a very unclear line, where there is a fear that by the act itself we are already crossing a prohibition. In our case both types apply. Abortions should be forbidden in every case—both because of the fear that we might cross the (unclear) line that defines life and thus fail in the prohibition of murder, and beyond that, it’s very likely that even in abortions done “legally” we are actually murdering (because the fetus is already a person). When the prohibition in question is murder, I cannot understand how people allow themselves to draw an arbitrary line and ignore these considerations.
In Column 73 I explained that the linkage made between the prohibition of abortion and religious faith (Christian or Jewish) is mere demagoguery. As far as I’m concerned, the religious-halakhic problem can be solved (I’ll perform the abortion via “change,” via indirect causation—grama—or with my left hand). I’m speaking on the moral plane, not the religious one. Precisely there I cannot see any reasonable consideration that justifies murder. In halakhic religious thinking one can perhaps limit the prohibition and set some line (which the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed to us?), but morally I do not see how any such line can be justified. The linkage between these planes is made by secular supporters of abortion, for whom it is very convenient to present this murder as an act devoid of moral ramifications, some sort of religious craziness. It’s a great pity the public at large buys this sham. I believe I once mentioned the nice story about a friend of a friend who interviewed for medical school; seeing the kippah on his head, they asked what he would do if he encountered a case requiring an artificial abortion. He answered them cleverly, in keeping with their foolishness: I’ll manage the religious prohibition (I’ll sell the knife to a gentile), but with the moral prohibition I have no idea what can be done (he essentially asked them implicitly: what will you do with it? Are secular people not supposed to be troubled by such a dilemma?).
Extreme Cases
I’m not ignoring difficult situations of pregnancy due to rape, or pregnancies of young girls, and the like, but not every abortion is done under such extreme circumstances. The waving about of claims that rape victims are being forced to give birth is, again, classic liberal demagoguery. I accept that killing a fetus is not the same as murdering a person. Although to me it is murder, there is a hierarchy between the cases. From that perspective there may be room to permit an abortion in extreme cases, as something “overridden” (dechuya, like permitting aborting a fetus to save the mother’s life). But most supporters of abortion see it as “permitted” (hutra), that is, in their eyes it is an act devoid of moral significance for which there is no logic in state intervention or supervision. Beyond that, because we’re dealing with the prohibition of murder, in my opinion there is definitely room to forbid abortions even in such extreme cases, and to provide for the baby who will be born in an institution established by society. The fact that we have no solution or do not wish to invest the resources and effort does not necessarily permit us to murder these children.
But as noted, I’m not dealing here with those extreme cases. Regarding extremes, the different U.S. states will be able to consider them and set standards for when abortion is forbidden and when not. Moreover, one can also criticize the U.S. Supreme Court for not setting a framework for its permission—i.e., that in such cases there truly is a constitutional right to abort. But from there to claims against the very determination that leaves the freedom to the states to legislate a general abortion law—the distance is great.
The right to abort is perceived by most of the public as a fundamental right, to the point that most public voices oppose any limitations the law might impose. It’s not merely permission for extreme cases, but a total absence of regulation. The state should even fund it as part of the medical care it provides its citizens. In the view of many supporters of abortion, the committees should be abolished and every woman, in any situation, should be allowed to abort. So please don’t tell me tales about rape victims and hardship. They are fighting for the right to murder freely: 007.
The Meaning of the Ruling
Note that the ruling did not ban abortions. It only granted the freedom to forbid or to permit. That is, the demand (which to the screamers there seems self-evident) is to prevent states from forbidding murder and from protecting helpless fetuses from being murdered by their parents. Liberals stand, very loudly, on their right to a dictatorship over anyone who thinks differently. When the Court dares to release the dictatorship and allow people to decide for themselves, an outcry erupts about a terrible violation of individual rights. Since when does freedom violate individual rights? Does every individual have a right for liberals to dictate to him what to do and whether he may or may not murder?
These protests are linked to parallel protests regarding LGBT rights. This linkage is made both by liberals and by conservatives (religious), but it is mistaken. The LGBT struggle I very much understand and even identify with, even if I don’t always like its style—its forcefulness and silencing (this is probably the reason for the perceived similarity between the struggles). The reason is that there it involves state coercion over people in matters that concern only themselves. As a liberal, I am not willing for the state to interfere with what consenting adults do in their private domain. But abortion is not an action a woman does in her private domain (inside her body), and therefore it is not a matter of liberalism. It is the murder of another being. She can declare until tomorrow that it’s her right, that it’s her body, and that she wants to be photographed in a bikini, but there is a long way from that to a right to murder another person. The state is not supposed to allow anyone who wishes to do so to murder another person.
To present abortion as a personal right and the prohibition against it as the state’s invasion of privacy is, in my view, akin to the past (and to some extent still present) approach here not to intervene in spousal conflicts and in murder threats by one spouse against the other because it’s a private matter that should be resolved within the family. If the state needs to intervene in what happens at home in order to save a woman from a violent husband, or a child from a violent parent who abuses or sexually coerces him/her, then it certainly needs to intervene to prevent murder within the family. And certainly it should not permit it, abolish all regulation, and even fund it. This demand strikes me as utterly unbelievable. Note that I am not protesting here against liberalism, but in the name of liberalism.
Progressive Demagoguery
Having briefly explained my view, the reader may agree or disagree. But I hope he can at least understand my side of the discussion—that is, acknowledge that such a side exists, that my arguments are not absurd and are certainly within the bounds of legitimacy. Alas, when one examines the “discourse” on this subject, two fascinating phenomena appear: (1) an absolute consensus among the non-religious public (at least among those whose voices are heard) regarding the legitimacy of abortion (indeed, most voices call for completely removing the legal restrictions, which, as noted, are a dead letter anyway); (2) the speakers’ deep inner conviction. You can sense it in pictures of women as if something essential to their souls has been violated (for example here). They see this as a profound harm to women and as the application of truly Nazi/Iranian force. That worries me far more than the foolish arguments being raised.
People sometimes raise foolish arguments. Not everyone is a very sharp pencil. Sometimes many people raise foolish arguments—sadly, that too happens quite often. At times even intelligent people raise foolish arguments. All of this is happening in our case. But here something more is happening: all the people whose voices are heard are raising foolish arguments, even though some are manifestly intelligent. They all do so with tremendous intensity and with very persuasive sincerity, and none of them sees even minimal logic in the other side. An absolute consensus on utter nonsense is a very worrying cultish phenomenon. The problem is not only the murder and support for murder, but the view of murder as self-evident and opposition to it as religious darkness. This is a problem of severe brainwashing—a kind of public drugging and cult behavior. Drugging the public is far more worrying than drugging individuals.
When a reasonable, necessary, and in fact very minimalist ruling—such as the one just issued by the U.S. Supreme Court—is portrayed as the Iranization of America and seen as grounds for civil war, it means we are dealing with hysterical, demagogic discourse by a fanatical cult. If I may be allowed a little hysteria as well (equality principle, after all), I am very worried about the Iranization and Nazification of our society as manifested in the Roe v. Wade ruling and in all those who support it.
Progressive Bias
In conclusion, I must say that nothing will help us. Progressives (unlike liberals) are not committed to the law and have never seen themselves as bound by it. Even if the law forbids abortions, they will continue to be performed freely. The law is valid only when it prohibits disobeying an order to evacuate settlements or forbids desecrating the Sabbath. When the law forbids bringing leaven into hospitals (to me, as a liberal, a very problematic law), or forbids abortions, or opening businesses on the Sabbath—it has no validity. There, the violation of the law will be done brazenly and without batting an eyelid. That’s the nature of fanatical religious faith. It does not see the law as something meant to constrain believers on their path.
On the Term “Progressive” and the Phenomenon of Progress
I must say I detest the term “progressive,” which in recent years has returned and taken hold. It was born among the communists and expressed their sense that progress (progress) was on their side and that everyone else was reactionary (anti-progress). Later it was adopted by liberals and essentially fell out of use. Until recent years it always sounded anachronistic to me—a kind of communist discourse that had had its day. In that period it was usually used by communists who had converted their faith to liberalism (I know quite a few such people). In recent years it has come back into use, since liberalism has “advanced” even further and returned to being communist. The sense of absolute justice and the view of forces of light versus darkness that prevailed in the communist era now accompany militant liberalism. Therefore, it has quite justifiably received the label “progressive.” They themselves use it in all seriousness while ignoring its original context, but their conservative critics and sane liberals (like me) use it at most with irony (tinged with a slight sense of disgust).
Progressivism worries conservatives because they see in it a liberal avant-garde. But it worries me precisely because it is a threat to liberalism. As a liberal, I think that the struggle for LGBT rights, for example, is gravely harmed by other struggles that try to annex themselves to it under the demagogic and mistaken heading of liberalism (like the struggle for abortion). Likewise, the struggle against religious coercion is harmed once people understand that without religious coercion we would have murder on demand (already today, with religious coercion, that is the situation), that women’s services will be opened to men who have decided they are women, and much more of the like. These struggles serve conservatives to show how dangerous liberalism is. Therefore, the paramount liberal interest is to smash these grotesque phenomena and scatter them to the winds—and certainly not to give them the stage to speak in the name of liberalism.
The rise of conservatism in recent years (see, for example, Columns 217, 249, 263, 444, and others) is a by-product of progressive phenomena. Sadly, these are its rotten fruits, and as a liberal I protest both against it and against conservatism. One thing is clear: there is no connection between these phenomena and progress in its true sense (= advancement). A sane liberal must oppose these delusional phenomena and struggles just as he opposes conservatism.
The day after writing this column, a decision was made in the Knesset’s Labor and Welfare Committee to ease the procedures of institutionalized murder in Israel. A fitting Zionist response to American wickedness, and further protection of a woman’s right over her body—that is, her right to murder children at will with no oversight. Wonderful—we have become as enlightened as the nations. Needless to say, the media discourse features a uniform Greek chorus raising only the question of why regulation wasn’t abolished entirely and why any limitations remain. There is not a single sane voice, not even one, to be found. A consensus of a brainwashed progressive cult of murderers. Astonishing.
Discussion
What do you think about Judith Thomson’s violinist argument in favor of abortion: a famous violinist is dying, and in order to cleanse the toxins from the violinist’s kidneys, the violinist’s kidneys need to be connected to someone else’s kidneys. You wake up in the hospital with the violinist connected to your body by a tube. It turns out that a group of music lovers kidnapped you to the hospital and connected you to the violinist. The doctor tells you that you need to remain connected to the violinist for a period of nine months so that he can recover, and if you decide to disconnect the violinist before then you will cause his death. The doctor claims that even though it isn’t your fault, you have no right to disconnect the violinist from your body because the violinist has a right to life.
Thomson argued that even though the violinist has a right to life, he has no right to your body, and therefore you are not obligated to allow the violinist to use your body. According to her, this thought experiment proves that a woman also has a right to have an abortion, just as a person has a right to disconnect the violinist from his body. To be sure, one could say that this analogy applies at most to pregnancy resulting from rape and the like, where the woman bears no responsibility whatsoever for the situation that led to the pregnancy. But in any event, one must ask both about the ruling in the analogy and about its relevance to the case it is meant to illustrate.
Correction: Supreme Court justices in the Province of America stay on until 120, not “until retirement.”
(And that is why the honorable Justice Ruth Bader, who did not retire during Obama’s time, croaked at the end of Trump’s term and handed him, on a silver platter, the overwhelming conservative majority,
as the well-known song says, “six-three”
More power to you
Three comments—
1 – The appointment of federal judges, including Supreme Court justices in the U.S., in consultation with the Senate, is anchored in the American Constitution—it is not a custom.
2 – Unlike in Israel, U.S. judges usually serve long past retirement age, sometimes until the day they die.
3 – One of the main arguments heard among Orthodox Jews in the U.S. in favor of Roe v. Wade is that without it, a Jewish woman who is permitted or required by halakhah to obtain an abortion would not be able to do so in certain states if the states are allowed to determine the legality of abortions. These Jews have convinced themselves that this is a winning argument that ends the discussion on the matter. They of course completely ignore the endless range of issues in which states are allowed to legislate laws that may, in certain cases, restrict religious people from fulfilling their religious obligations. For example, states can imprison a person, which presumably would prevent him from fulfilling the mitzvah of conjugal relations. There is no outcry demanding that the Supreme Court interpret the Constitution as forbidding states to imprison criminals. Etc.
In my view the example is irrelevant. Indeed, in the case where the violinist will die if he is disconnected from the machine because of you, it may be that you are forbidden to disconnect him. In this case, by contrast, even if the child is born the mother will not die, and the consideration in favor of aborting him is one of convenience (which, even if it has some place, not in a case where abortion is regarded as murder).
The assumption is that in the violinist example as well, you will not die if you remain connected to him; you will just be rather limited for nine months. It’s inconvenient, but does that justify causing his death?
As for the case itself, I’m doubtful. True, you are not obligated to give him anything even if he is in danger, but you certainly do have an obligation to save him (“Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor”). Therefore he has no right to remain connected, but you have an obligation not to disconnect him. Beyond that, there is a difference between refusing to connect and disconnecting. In my opinion, he has no right to connect, but you do have an obligation not to disconnect him (which overrides your right to disconnect). Of course, if this were about giving up an organ for his benefit, that would probably be a different matter.
But as you wrote, this case at most speaks to abortion in extreme situations. But when a woman conceived by her husband, she brought the fetus into her womb, and therefore she certainly has no right whatsoever to disconnect; consequently, the obligation not to disconnect certainly prevails, because there is no right (to disconnect) opposing it.
This reminds me of the examples raised by R. Moshe Feinstein and the parallel priest in the case of the Siamese twins in Philadelphia, 1976. If someone is climbing a mountain and is holding onto a peg stuck into the mountain, and another person is hanging from his leg and the peg cannot hold both of them—may he kick the other person down? They assumed that certainly he may. But that is when the reality is that both of them will not survive and will go to their deaths. In a situation where both can live on the peg, may I kick him down? Highly unlikely. I have a right to the peg, but I have an obligation to save him. As with a canteen of water that is sufficient for both of them, I certainly have an obligation to give him water so that he will be saved. Only when there is not enough for both did Rabbi Akiva and Ben Azzai disagree.
Thanks for the correction. But I would not use contemptuous terms like “croak.” She was a very impressive personality, even if you disagree with her views (as I do).
By the way, she was well aware of this and nevertheless honestly chose to remain on the bench and not pull a stunt. That should be said to her credit.
1. I didn’t understand the comment. Did I write otherwise?
2. Many thanks for the correction. Gurevitz above you already beat you to it.
3. This is the sort of tendentious and dishonest argument that, in my opinion, is hard to see as justification for collaborating with murder.
From an article by Yuval Elbashan in “Globes,” about two years ago:
But then something changed. Bader Ginsburg began presenting minority opinions that did not become binding rulings but created a reputation for her among radical audiences outside the legal world, who turned her into a true cultural icon. The more radical she was, the more the admiration from those circles intensified, and as that grew it seemed that her minority opinions became more extreme, and she began to act less as a judge and jurist and more as a public leader. The high point came in the 2016 elections, when she broke all the rules of judicial ethics and attacked candidate and president Donald Trump (something she repeated in an interview she gave the BBC in 2017).
This brought the personality cult around her to new heights, but also further distanced her from her colleagues on the Court, who viewed her actions with concern as harming this important institution. The current Chief Justice, John Roberts, said in an interview with “The Atlantic” that his aspiration is for greater harmony in Supreme Court rulings and for every justice to be concerned also with the standing of the Court as an institution: “I think all the justices should be concerned, when they write dissents, about the effect of those dissents on the Court as an institution.” He was hinting at her, and added that “if the Court in the Marshall era had rendered decisions in important cases as this Court has over the last thirty years, we would not have today the kind of Supreme Court we have.” (Marshall served as Chief Justice during the formative years of the U.S. and its legal system, beginning in 1801 for about 34 years, and he in effect established the standing of the Supreme Court.) More than that, he feared that Bader Ginsburg’s breaking of the rules would lead to rule-breaking from the other side and the destruction of the legal system.
It seems that the personality cult outside the legal world is what led Bader Ginsburg to reject the suggestion of President Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders to retire because of her advanced age, so that they could appoint a liberal judge in her place before the Republicans returned to power. To be sure, she herself had announced that she would retire in 2012, nearing age 80, but she reversed herself, continued to issue minority opinions that did not become rulings, and scornfully rejected – to the delight of her admirers, who now elevated her to the rank of a goddess – all those who urged her and argued that the risk she was taking was unnecessary.
1. Just as liberals talk about rape, conservatives talk about the sixth month and beyond, even though 91% of abortions in the U.S. are up to week 13.
2. It’s a bit strange that an absolute majority of people who are not influenced by religion are in favor of abortions. Maybe this is not a failure of the liberals but of the religious.
1. Indeed, there is dishonesty on both sides.
2. Therefore it is better to discuss things on their merits and not through Marxist arguments about influences and agendas.
1 – I apologize if I overdid it. You simply wrote, “With our great friend, it is customary for the president to appoint the judges,” as though this were some sort of custom or non-binding agreement. All in all, I merely noted that this is a practice anchored in the American Constitution, something parallel to our Basic Law: The Judiciary, which determines the composition of the committee for appointing judges.
In your opinion, at what stage is the fetus called a human being? From the moment the egg and sperm unite? If so, as I understand it, in your view IVF would be impossible.
And what if a woman is carrying triplets and in order for them to survive the doctors say one fetus should be killed—then in your view is that okay?
For some reason, you present the issue of abortion as though it were the simplest thing in the world and ignore the complexity of the issue; I don’t understand why you do that.
Just listen to this fool who says that “the fetus interests her less at the moment,” and to the two others in the conversation:
https://103fm.maariv.co.il/programs/media.aspx?ZrqvnVq=IKLMHF&c41t4nzVQ=ELD
Yishai—
1. From the moment it has a heart, so IVF is possible. But if I were to define a united egg and sperm as a person and aborting it as murder—then indeed I would forbid IVF. What is the problem? If it’s murder, then it’s forbidden.
2. When there is a defect that will cause the fetus not to live once it is born, one can discuss treating it as not a person. Or as someone dying. Or as mortally defective. Therefore the same applies to triplets.
As for the claim about complexity—every issue has complexities, and nevertheless there are general foundational assumptions that underlie it, and upon them one adds nuances and boundaries in each specific case. The claim in this column is that the basic assumption, for some reason, is that it is permitted to murder fetuses, rather than that it is forbidden to murder. After that, certainly there are specific cases in which it will be permitted, and one must determine the precise boundary of the time at which it becomes forbidden to murder a fetus. That does not contradict the fact that the basic assumption is simple, and yet is hardly heard.
Bless you!
Excellent column
A small comment:
You wrote that the focus on the plane of the woman’s right, rather than on defining the fetus, is tactical because the woman’s right is a stronger argument. I think that those who argue for a woman’s right over her body, in many cases do not even assume that killing a fetus is not murder; they are simply discussing a different plane—that of individual rights. Even though these are supposedly moral people, in many cases for them morality exists only to enable individuals to realize their rights, and is not something that stands on its own. A morality in which, because of the “abstract” prohibition on murdering a fetus that cannot cry out or resist, a woman would suffer an unwanted pregnancy, is not grasped by parts of secular society.
Similarly, Maimonides wrote at the beginning of The Guide for the Perplexed that after the sin, morality declined from dealing with true and false to dealing with the beautiful and the disgraceful.
You didn’t overdo it. Everything’s fine. Thanks for the correction, but of course I didn’t mean here a mere custom. It’s just a manner of speaking.
In my opinion there is no sharp line, but there is a very large gray area. But I didn’t understand the argument. Why not do IVF?
Of course it is possible. See my article on the separation of Siamese twins (and the note there about fetal reduction).
What is simple is that without a reason there is no permission to kill fetuses. And that really is simple. The various complexities are layered on top of that, and I was not talking about them.
I think this is only carelessness and brainwashing. Morality allows you to realize your rights, but it does not permit you to violate the rights of others. Even progressives agree to that.
It seems to me there is an essential distinction between the example with the peg and the violinist, since there both are holding onto something additional and therefore both have an equal right insofar as it is only inconvenience, whereas with the violinist he enters into his domain, and just as a person is entitled to stand up for his property even if as a result he kills the other person
The peg belongs to the one above, and the second person hangs onto it. There too it belongs to one of them.
A person may stand up for his property, but that is only if the threatened person put himself into that situation. Otherwise, one certainly has to spend money in order to save his fellow from death (“Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor”). True, the person being saved has no right that he be saved, but the saver does have an obligation to do so. And in the Responsa of the Rashba it seems there is even a right, but that is puzzling.
As for progressive demagoguery, I highly recommend reading Noah Feldman’s article. The guy is a genuine genius and an intellectual star who grew up in a religious family in the Boston area and studied at the religious Rambam high school (Maimonides).
Just read and be amazed at how progressives see the woman’s right to abortion as a continuation of the advancement of civil rights, after the abolition of slavery and the abolition of segregation between blacks and whites…
If I understand correctly, an American woman who wants to have an abortion can travel to another state in the U.S. where abortion is permitted. So the restriction is not very severe.
https://www.salon.com/2022/06/25/brett-kavanaugh-voted-to-reverse-roe-v-wade-but-is-fine-with-people-traveling-for-abortions_partner/
The source for the link in my above comment:
https://tamritz.wordpress.com/2022/06/26/%d7%a2%d7%93%d7%99%d7%99%d7%9f-%d7%90%d7%a8%d7%a5-%d7%94%d7%97%d7%95%d7%a4%d7%a9%d7%99%d7%99%d7%9d/
Recommended!
That’s true, but think about a woman of limited means living in central Texas who has no health insurance, or whose insurance is limited to her own state. I’m not saying she should necessarily have an abortion at all, but it’s really not simple.
I’d like to check something:
If in any case the prohibition on aborting a fetus is not absolute, and it depends on the stage of pregnancy and the circumstances, then the principle exists and now all that remains is to discuss its ranges and circumstances. Last night I saw a report on Channel 12 News about the matter; the reporter traveled to meet abortion centers in Texas, where it is now completely forbidden. The interviewees were in deep mourning, and although the interviewer entirely shared their agenda, and ostensibly one could dismiss all this as an extreme feminist agenda, I think that is not so. These women, the doctors and social workers, live among their people, and when a seventy-year-old woman sighs that the wheel is turning backward again, she knows what she is talking about, because she and all the others know the sociological story firsthand. Poor, uneducated women are exactly the ones who will suffer more than anyone if they are left with an unwanted pregnancy that will ruin their lives: dragging them into poverty, lack of education, and other even worse troubles. Theoretically-philosophically, one can include such cases in the list of cases in which the prohibition is “set aside,” as many would agree, and perhaps you too, regarding sexual immorality and rape. So the question is how one sees the scale and what is placed on it. Therefore it is proper to fight for the surrounding framework—education about contraception, access to the “morning-after” pill, early pregnancy tests, and the like. These will contribute more to the problem of murder than a sweeping prohibition, which in the end will ruin the lives of women from a low socioeconomic class. Perhaps in this case it is like those Siamese twins you wrote about, or a multiple pregnancy that has to be reduced. Here the “reduction” is for the sake of the mother’s mental and physical survival.
That is exactly what I am talking about. If women (and men) were fighting for permission (not a right) to abort in extreme cases, I would not have written this. Maybe I would have written that instead of aborting one should help them raise the baby or give it up for adoption or foster care and the like. After all, we are talking about murder. But that is not the subject here.
The problem I was talking about is that we are being presented with a crazy consensus according to which the very existence of committees and restrictions, the very fact that a woman has to give any justification at all, is an injustice that violates her right over her body. And nobody disputes this. Just listen to and read the media. We have completely lost our sensitivity to the fact that this is an injury to the life of a living creature. This is complete “it has been permitted.” Which is exactly what I said: progressivism is a shot in the foot of sane liberalism.
I fear that your words do not give sufficient weight to the psychological price of pregnancy, childbirth, giving up a baby, and all their consequences. The poor woman who received no education and did not know how to be careful is the Siamese twin.
And the price of abortion is light in your eyes? A woman who gets herself into such a situation needs to take all this into account. A Siamese twin who created the situation is the one who needs to sacrifice himself to save the other. Siamese twins are a case where both were forced into it against their will and symmetrically. By the way, I think that the fact that a woman is not careful and does not receive an education to be careful is caused in part by the easy trigger finger regarding abortions. Adults need to bear the consequences of their actions, even if they are poor and uneducated. That does not justify permission for murder.
Okay, now I accept the argument.
Regarding IVF, I saw (in a film about Rabbi Elyashiv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX6JHWmZBTg at 1 hour and 8 minutes) that in the process they fertilize an egg with sperm and then remove one cell that was created (seemingly this is already an embryo) in order to check whether the genes are defective or okay; if the genes are defective, then all the cells are destroyed. Therefore, if you hold that the embryo becomes a person from the moment the egg and sperm unite, then seemingly this process is forbidden (even if they would not destroy the cells when there is a genetic defect, the very act of removing one cell to test it is its destruction).
An abortion in a very early month is incomparable to childbirth and giving up the newborn. Indeed, a woman “needs to take all this into account,” but what if she is ignorant and poor and belongs to a world that did not teach her to beware of such things? I agree with you that the emphasis should be on sex education, but usually those same conservative bodies that oppose abortions are the very ones who oppose sex education, placing contraceptives in high schools, and so on.
This is not a prohibition on IVF but on destroying a fertilized egg. When there are significant defects in the baby, there is room to permit abortion even of a fetus. We are speaking of a continuous scale between a cluster of cells and a person, and the line is not sharp. But there is room for proportional considerations, as I also mentioned in the column.
I didn’t write a column whose purpose was to support conservative bodies. I was talking about abortions. If someone wants to care for such women, then one certainly needs to care for their education and not allow them to murder.
Beyond that, all these phenomena are a result of secular permissiveness that recognizes the legitimacy of free and casual sexual relations. So they cooked up this whole mess in the first place. That does not mean there are no irregularities in the religious world, but the scale of the problem is created by permissiveness. When every 12-year-old child can decide to have sex, it is no wonder that these are the results.
By the way, only this morning I saw a report in “Besheva” about a decision to require sex education in schools. Notice the objectivity of the report. There is not a single negative or critical comment there: https://www.inn.co.il/news/569527
You talked about abortions, but they occur in a real and not theoretical environment, and one must attend to their context. On the matter of permissiveness I agree, except that the problem is usually not among modern 12-year-olds, who are fairly knowledgeable about what can and cannot be done to prevent pregnancy, but in populations where women are especially weakened. I read the article in Besheva, and the issue is indeed presented with commendable objectivity.
I just saw that most Americans are against restricting abortions,
and that all 6 justices who voted in favor were asked about this in the Senate before their appointments (the U.S. judicial appointment process is insane) and they all lied that they would vote against, so their decision now reveals that they lied.
In short, it stinks of lies and deceit.
Chayota,
I think the argument you raised should be discussed at a more general level.
Let me explain—
You argue that there are considerations that permit aborting a fetus, and that the economic and psychological condition of the mother is one of them, since if we forbid abortion the lives of women whose situation is already not good will be ruined. Assuming you are making a moral claim here (that indeed in such a case the destruction of the woman’s life overrides the prohibition on abortion) and not emotional manipulation, there are many arguments on different issues that are equivalent to this one, and in my opinion it is worth deciding generally whether to accept them.
Example—COVID restrictions. In a halakhic book published בעקבות the coronavirus, an article argued that it is forbidden to restrict the public with lockdowns, since although COVID kills, the psychological and economic situation caused by the restrictions also kills, and statistically it kills more people. Rabbi Yaakov Ariel commented on this article that this consideration is incorrect, and one cannot compare a direct cause of death (COVID) to indirect and non-definitive causes (such as economics).
Similar claims are heard regarding saving life on Shabbat: what is defined as danger to life and what is not, and so on. In a world where the effects of psychological and economic conditions on health and death are being investigated, their impact on the boundaries of danger to life should be reconsidered.
What I am claiming is that if we accept your argument, we need to change existing halakhah in a great many laws and hold a serious halakhic discussion about this. At the moment, the situation is that decisors are not interested in giving much weight to such arguments.
This may be relevant in cases of rape, but the ordinary case is perhaps parallel to a situation in which you made a bet with those musicians and said that if you lost you would be connected to the violinist—you could always murder him if you decided it didn’t suit you—and then, to your great surprise, you really did lose and they connected you to him… That is a bit different from the demagogic “thought experiment” you cited, and it better fits a case of consensual unprotected sex (or protected sex with limited reliability and without the morning-after pill).
As far as I know, there are certain permissions connected to this kind of argument. The trivial example is the permission for the husband to travel with the woman giving birth on Shabbat, but also the permission to drive psychologists and social workers on Shabbat to the scenes of terrorist attacks, and so on.
According to halakhah, a woman who is being executed while pregnant is struck opposite the womb. As long as the fetus has not brought out its head, this is not murder. At least from the halakhic perspective.
Turning abortion into murder, and the idea that the fetus is considered a person from the moment of fertilization, is a Christian idea. According to their view, beyond murder there is also the problem of “interfering in God’s governance of the world.” Therefore even growing stem cells is forbidden, even if only that organ is being grown. And there are those who see that too as murder.
From the legal perspective, it does not seem to me that this meets the definition of murder. That leaves only the ethical and philosophical reason, but there one first has to define what a living person is. And that is not so simple.
Not long ago there was a permission for a person suffering from anxiety or shell shock (I don’t remember exactly) to smoke cannabis on Shabbat, even though this is not a matter of danger to bodily life.
I also heard of a permission from Rabbi Elyashiv for a man to drive on Shabbat in order to get to the hospital after his wife gave birth, because the woman needs him. I haven’t seen the responsum, but I heard about it from someone who read it.
Of course, if he were traveling in a car driven by someone else (for example in a taxi), especially by a gentile, there would be no novelty here, since this is a rabbinic prohibition that is set aside for a sick person who is not in danger.
Likewise there are permissions to desecrate Shabbat for a person undergoing apostasy or for a woman who is abducted to live with a gentile (and there it is only a doubtful Torah prohibition), where too this is not necessarily about danger to bodily life.
In fact, already in the Gemara there are very far-reaching permissions for a person seized by ravenous hunger, or for a woman in childbirth, where it is hard for me to see where the danger to life is. At most the attack or collapse will pass and he will recover.
It would also be interesting what the halakhic position is regarding patients in psychiatric hospitals, where the only way to calm them is by an injection on Shabbat.
Not to mention agunot and even women refused a get, for whom strained permissions are sometimes sought, where it is clear that there is no real attempt to examine halakhically whether she is married according to halakhah or not, even though there too there is quite a lot to worry about.
Such halakhic conceptions already exist. Some of them also seem very puzzling to me, but they still exist.
The claim that some position is derived from or influenced by some source is not an argument on the merits (in my opinion it is also incorrect). I explained that I am claiming this precisely on the moral plane and not the halakhic one.
The absurdity in the attitude of Christian countries toward stem cells versus abortions is well known and longstanding, and this good question should be turned toward them.
I explained that precisely because of the difficulty of defining life and personhood, reason says that the casualness with which abortions are treated is intolerable.
Why indeed in extreme situations do we prefer a person’s life over the life of a fetus? Is it because in the end a fetus is still not really a person and is only in preparatory stages, or because of Judith Thomson’s argument in Moshe Rat’s comment, or perhaps some other reason?
The first. That is explicit in the Gemara and Maimonides regarding a pursuing fetus.
Even if we assume, in your opinion, that you are right (which is far from certain), that most Americans are against it—why should they impose their opinion on the majority of residents of a particular state in the U.S. who are in favor of restricting abortions? Maybe tomorrow those Americans will also impose their opinion on the residents of Mexico? What next? Do they also want to force the Russians to put at their head whomever they approve of?
With God’s help, 29 Sivan 5782
In any case, the discussion of abortions is taking place near the anniversary of the passing of Dr. Schussheim, the great fighter for saving fetuses, which falls today, 29 Sivan.
Best regards, Yekutiel Shneur Zahavi
You expressed well the frustration I feel when I talk with people about this issue and they immediately wave around the woman’s right over her body and that ends the discussion. It really and truly frustrates me, and I am trying to understand where it comes from. Why is it really so obvious to them that one is supposed to agree with them and that you have no right to say a word on the matter? Is it because of a reaction against religion, or simply because anything that used to be forbidden must today be the opposite? I really want to understand this, because to the other side it sounds so obvious that there is no other side, and I’m trying to understand what leads to that place.
I don’t know. I assume all the answers are correct. There is also women’s frustration from long years of deprivation and exploitation
I have now added at the end of the column:
A day after writing the column, the Knesset Labor and Welfare Committee decided to ease the procedures for institutionalized murder in Israel:
https://main.knesset.gov.il/News/PressReleases/Pages/press27062022L.aspx
A fitting Zionist response to American wickedness, and another defense of the woman’s right over her body—that is, her right to murder children as she pleases without any oversight. Wonderful, we have become enlightened like the nations. Needless to say, in the media discourse there is a single Greek chorus, raising only the question why the regulation was not abolished entirely and why any restrictions at all were left in place. There is not a single sane voice, not even one, to be found. A consensus of a sect of brainwashed progressive murderers. Amazing.
With God’s help, 29 Sivan 82
Allowing abortions to be performed through the health funds could be for the better, because in the current situation the abortion clinics have a financial interest in encouraging women to abort. The clinics maintain “approval committees” which of course always approve, since that is the interest of the “clinic.”
Transferring the performance to the health funds will indeed lower the cost, but if it also disconnects the interested relationship between the approving committee and the performing body. In an objective committee there is a chance that the woman will receive counseling also about the physical and psychological problems abortion causes a woman, and that the woman will also be offered solutions of help and social support without needing to terminate the pregnancy.
In any case, there is still a religious party in the coalition, namely Ra’am, which may somewhat balance the supporters and female supporters of abortion 🙂
Best regards, Kailas Odelson
I didn’t understand the argument. Don’t health funds have a financial interest?
All these permissions are not relevant to the prohibition of murder.
Would you accept as a defense Yigal Amir’s claim that he suffered very great distress from the fact that Rabin was alive (when his policy caused the death of others), and that the only way to stop it was to murder him (which also does not seem to me very far from what he really thinks of himself)?
Allow me to assume that your answer to that would be negative (and rightly so). So why does “a woman’s right to her psychological well-being” permit murder?
Because Rabin had a face, and the fetus will only have a face after the abortion (and in most cases the woman aborting will not see it, nor will all those who support indiscriminate abortion). That is the whole difference. It does not sound very moral to me.
Here is Rabbi Cherlow’s response
https://www.facebook.com/RabbiCherlow/posts/pfbid0296ntT4MDT2NJYYvNZy8rmKkBQvXhefpuE65WhvR8goUwe1YnS2qfJm3zZ1ZpzaFCl
With God’s help, eve of Rosh Chodesh Tammuz 82
To Chananel – greetings,
A private abortion clinic profits from the existence of an abortion, since the client (or her medical insurance9) pays for the “treatment” at full and profitable price. By contrast, a fund’s service to its clients is provided free or at a highly subsidized price, so the health fund examines every treatment it is required to perform or finance—whether it is essential.
Moreover, the doctor who regularly treats the woman knows that abortion is not a simple matter medically, and it may burden the woman with long-term physical and psychological harm; and if he is a trustworthy doctor, he should inform the woman of this so that she can weigh the “gain of abortion against its loss.” It is also “the woman’s right” to know the risks involved in abortion.
And in any event one really should ensure that in every “medical committee” there also sits a social worker who is not dependent on the medical institution, and who can also propose a rehabilitation and social-support plan that will enable the mother to raise her child under proper conditions and not have an abortion. Even if we say that the fetus is an organ of the mother, it would still be absurd for amputation of the organ to be the preferred option. In normal medicine, every avenue of treatment and rehabilitation is tried in order to avoid amputating an organ.
In my humble opinion, one should recruit not only people who, by virtue of their religious belief, oppose abortions. Even secular medical professionals who champion “the woman’s right over her body” should also insist on the woman’s right to know both the risks involved in abortion and the support options that could spare an abortion. Only when the woman knows the full picture can she make a considered decision.
Best regards, Kailas Odelson
That is too extreme a formulation. Even within murder there are levels, and murdering a fetus is not the same as murdering a person. Therefore there is room for permissions to abort because we are dealing with a fetus. Just as, even though the law of a pursuer does not apply to a fetus, it is nevertheless permissible to kill it in order to save its mother. The reason is that its life is worth less (or not full).
In my opinion the column is not fair. Let me guess—you do not have the slightest idea what really happens in relationships between Jewish women and Arabs, what percentage of them experience violence, etc. Since they have been dealing with this issue for years and years, I assume they know the reality on the ground far, far better than you do. One can of course argue that they exaggerate, generalize, etc., but that should be from familiarity with the data and not from shooting from the hip.
Another point: one should distinguish between statements by various guys who wear Lehava shirts and claim to represent the organization, and the heads of the organization and the people who actually work there.
Forgive me, I meant the new column; I’m copying it there
An article on the subject by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, also known as the rebbe of the abortion-hungry rabble—
http://www.leibowitz.co.il/leibarticles.asp?id=11
On the advantages and risks of transferring the decision from the committees to the health funds, see Dr. Hannah Kashan’s article, “Does Freedom of Choice Benefit the Woman?”, on the Arutz 7 website.
Best regards, K.A.
And on the matter of abortions—
Dr. Hannah Katan recounted after the passing of Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, of blessed memory, that he was asked about a case in which doctors said that the fetus suffered from a severe defect and recommended abortion. Rabbi Lichtenstein ruled, in accordance with his view, that one should not abort except in a case of danger to the mother’s life, but asked for the name of the pregnant woman and her mother’s name in order to pray for her, and after nine months the child was born completely healthy and without any defect!
Best regards, K.A.
I think you are missing the more interesting point in the article, namely that the Constitution is a dead document. A claim fitting for an ex-religious person who cannot understand how acceptance of the rule in the past also binds him. In essence, that is all of progressivism in a nutshell.
The two links you brought are fascinating. The first, about the cantons, is thought-provoking. The second—sad, and proving that in the end everything is connected to socioeconomic status. Thank you!
All these things distract from the discussion. Heart-rending extreme cases and socioeconomic discussions are not the point, nor is the possibility of murdering with one’s left hand in another state (with or without money). The question I dealt with is: are the progressives right that this is a neutral act that concerns only the woman, and that all the regulations are paternalism that violates her rights, or not? That’s all.
Abortion is, by definition, a borderline case, because the woman’s body is involved here, and her life, and her future, and her physical and mental health. Almost everyone agrees that there are borderline cases in which abortion will be permitted. You rightly protest against the intolerable lightness of the possibility of aborting, because of the aspect of human life and the murder involved in it. But however you look at it, there are two souls here, not one. So the question is only one of proportions and balances. And that has already been said.
Sorry, the rest got cut off— for this reason, “extreme cases and socioeconomic discussions” are definitely part of the matter and not marginal to it.
After all, the progressives ought to be leading the opposition to abortions, since they encourage surrogacy in order to allow LGBTQ people to start a family. So why “harvest” the fetus when it can bring happiness to those who are childless?
Best regards, K.A.
Well, Rabbi Lichtenstein is dead. So who will pray for the fetuses now? And how many stories of prayers that *were not* answered does Dr. Katan know but prefer not to tell? And what about fetuses no one prayed for that still turned out fine?
The only reason it is expensive in clinics is that this is what those clinics do, and nothing more. In the health fund, the money is collected on a monthly basis and for a range of treatments. Bringing abortions into the health funds will simply raise the premium for women of childbearing age so that the fund can cover it. I don’t know whether this will also cause the health-fund committees really to have a less trigger-happy approach. They will receive the funding for the actual treatment from the Ministry of Health in any case.
I think it would have been worthwhile to establish the source of the moral prohibition on murder before approaching the question of from what point it is forbidden to kill a human being.
A conception of the moral law against murder as, for example, brute fact—“murder is forbidden, period”—will never be able to answer questions where the case is not so clear, like our case. By contrast, a conception of this moral law as an idea with reasons behind it may also lead to the conclusion that in the present case the prohibition does not apply, depending on the reason behind it. Therefore I see an exposition of your conception of morality as something important to do before addressing this question.
For example, I cannot manage to see an abortion that occurs in the first weeks of pregnancy as murder, because I do not regard murder as problematic so long as it involves no harm to a conscious creature capable of feeling pain/fear. Therefore I also think that besides the important part philosophy should take in the discussion of the legitimacy of abortions, science also has something to say on the matter.
One additional question—you wrote in the article that you too see a difference between murdering a person and murdering a fetus; where does that distinction come from?
In any case, though, it was really interesting to read this article, like all your articles. Your ability to analyze and make order of things is astonishing…
A certain tribe in Africa is known for the fact that all the natives have truly black skin. The reason for this long preoccupied various researchers.
Until… one day a young anthropologist asked the tribe’s women various questions about their way of life,
and among other things one of the women told her secretly that every new baby in the tribe whose skin color is not jet black is, according to the laws of the tribe, customarily fed to the hungry crocodiles in the nearby sacred river, and thus all the women of the tribe have acted throughout history …
It turns out those mothers are properly progressive feminists…
Perhaps we should recommend appointing them as justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Let’s not be naive,
this is not about a woman’s right over her body at all…
but about the right of the deviant man to sleep with his girlfriend when he really feels like it, even when he does not currently have contraception available.
That and nothing else.
It is impossible to establish the prohibition on murder. It is wholly founded on moral intuitions, and by their force one can also make decisions without conceptualizations and definitions from the outset. The prohibition on murder is not connected to pain and awareness but to your being human. If I drug a person and murder him, he will not be aware and will feel no pain, and the prohibition on murder still stands.
The status of a fetus is accepted in all modes of thought as being between a biological cell and a person, simply because of the intermediate value theorem in infinitesimal calculus (assuming we are dealing with a continuous function):
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%A4%D7%98_%D7%A2%D7%A8%D7%9A_%D7%94%D7%91%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9D
If at the beginning we are dealing with a collection of molecules and at the end we are dealing with a person, then within this development the fetus passes through all the states between a collection of molecules and a person. The question of the line is of course not solved here, but precisely because of that there is a prohibition on murder throughout the whole gray area. Except that this prohibition is not uniform throughout that area, since it is reasonable that the force of the prohibition is proportional to the degree of personhood (humanity) of the fetus at that stage.
The conclusion is that one can find permissions against the prohibition at earlier stages more than at the final stage. We are dealing with a continuum and not something binary.
One can argue that there is a stage at which a soul enters it, and then there is a discontinuity in the function. But even if that is true, I know of no one who can point to that stage, and therefore we return to the same picture, except that this time not on the axis of vagueness but on the axis of doubt (for the difference between them, see Book 12 in the Talmudic Logic series, and also here in the series beginning with column 322).
Assuming the prohibition on murder really is a prohibition built only on moral intuition, I assume its boundaries are also determined by moral intuition. Now, if you say that morality is objective—then seemingly it makes more sense to go דווקא by the intuition of the majority in order to determine what the הדין is (objectively) regarding a fetus. And if morality is subjective—then all the more so your intuition or that of any person regarding the law of murdering a fetus is not relevant to another person, and any statement on the subject would amount to saying that it is forbidden because that is how it feels to you (which does not mean the other person feels that way).
In addition, you spoke about the possibility that there is a stage at which a soul enters, producing a discontinuity in the function so that one can determine a point from which onward it is forbidden to harm the fetus. What is not clear to me is why not use consciousness for that same discontinuity. After all, it is clear (to me at least, and I believe to you as well) intuitively that the prohibition on murder does not apply to a non-conscious being, whether made of inorganic or organic materials (a robot, a stone, a dead person). And the point at which the person “acquires” consciousness can supposedly be investigated by philosophical and scientific tools (the same tools we use to build the conception that other human beings and certain animals have consciousness, while robots, plants, and stones do not, and we also behave toward them accordingly). So why not use that point as the point of no return regarding the prohibition on murdering fetuses?
Even if you are right, why go after the majority? I act and judge according to my own intuition. Beyond that, I did not set any intuitive line at all; on the contrary, I argued that vagueness and uncertainty require stringency in any case of doubt. Drawing an arbitrary line will not help here.
As for consciousness, I do not think that is the criterion. A conscious being is a person, but that does not mean that the moment consciousness enters is the moment he becomes a person. I also do not see how you would determine when consciousness enters a fetus. I very much doubt that even a newborn infant has consciousness.
I agree that there is no conceptual necessity to follow the majority on moral matters. But if there is a way to discover objective morality (assuming of course there is such a thing), I would expect that to be the way. Still, I do not really understand your astonishment toward people who have a moral view different from yours regarding abortions of fetuses; it sounds as though the basis for the views of both sides here is similar—moral intuition… Likewise, I assume you published your articles on abortion for some purpose, but what stake do I really have in your conception of abortion if it is an entirely subjective matter?
Regarding consciousness: because of what you said, what I emphasized in my claim was the fact that intuitively we do not apply the prohibition on murder to any non-conscious object (whether you call it a person or not). You can disagree with me that this statement is not true, and I would be happy for an example where it is not true if there is one, but if you agree with it then I do not see what the problem is with proceeding according to that parameter.
As for the way one can determine the presence of consciousness: I agree there is really no way to determine unequivocally the presence of consciousness, but we nevertheless relate to different creatures as conscious or not according to their behavior and according to whether they have the biological structures in the brain associated with consciousness. With a fetus it is even easier, because we know, even if only partially, the relation between consciousness and the structures in our own brain, and therefore it will supposedly be easy to project from them onto a fetus.
I will repeat myself one last time. They do not have a moral view different from mine. They draw an arbitrary line and ignore the fact that this is murder. They speak only about the woman’s right and behave as though this were a trivial act devoid of moral significance. That is not a position different from mine but wickedness resulting from brainwashing. That’s all.
As for consciousness, we forbid murdering a sleeping person, even though at the moment he has no consciousness. The active presence of consciousness is not a condition for the prohibition on murder. The prohibition applies to beings with consciousness, but they need not have active consciousness at the moment. Therefore I do not see justification for indifference toward murdering fetuses, which are beings with consciousness (human beings), even if at the moment they have no active consciousness. I already wrote to you that even a one-day-old baby has no consciousness. Is it also permissible to murder him?
That’s it. I think we have exhausted this.
I just now saw an article about a crazy phenomenon in Göttingen, Germany, where in the name of equality they allow women to be in pools and water complexes bare-chested, like men. This stupidity no longer belongs to ethics or humanity, but has completely crossed the bounds of logic. In the name of equality, I would suggest they allow women to be naked from the navel and not below that, because for men the upper part starts higher than for women (they are taller on average than women).
https://travel.walla.co.il/item/3511554?dicbo=v2-5d0fde8b1e3b9319699b89e6c60fe89e
The analogy would be that equality between women and men means that neither sex should expose private sexual organs in public, each according to its organs. In other words, men are allowed to expose the chest but not breasts, so even now there is inequality.
We have already heard that the devotees of “rights discourse” are already talking about rights not only for animals but also for inanimate objects, and we have already heard that in New Zealand they gave a river “legal standing” and representation in court. Why should fetuses be left out? It would be proper that in every discussion on approving an abortion there should be someone to represent the fetus as well and demand its right to life!
Best regards, Nachshon Gershon HaNaami
I just saw this now: https://m.ynet.co.il/articles/h1rrshn5c