Some subjects are for adults only.
All of us, it is safe to say, understand what an epiphany is. It’s that startling instant when the truthful reality flashes upon our understanding, making sense of the preceding senselessness. Now I get it. Now it makes perfect sense.
The subject of elective, non-medical emergency abortion of otherwise normal pregnancies has deeply distressed the United States for decades. The Supreme Court effectively repented from its usurpation of Legislative authority by returning the constitutional question of non-medical emergency abortion to the states’ legislatures by overturning the Roe and Casey decisions. After the predictable outrage by those who favored constitutionality, the states are sorting things out by a more representative process. Legislatures are deciding what their majorities want; some quite supportive and some more restrictive. As it should be, I agree.
The arguments for and against elective, non-medical emergency abortion are well trod paths. These arguments impasse over the terms of the debate itself, such as baby vs fetus — and that’s encouraging. It’s murder if it’s a baby but not if it’s not a baby. The implications of agreeing the normal healthy unborn is a baby and then advocating his or her murder is to normalize psychopathy. Ironically, it’s a pregnant female’s prerogative to choose what the gestating whatever-it-is is, necessary to rationalize whatever she thinks she needs to do. While her friends, family, and the public square will all weigh in on the matter, it is ultimately her choice notwithstanding some choices may not be practical depending upon her personal and public health circumstances.
The Bible has informed Abrahamic religious tribes for millennia. The oldest, continuously surviving adherents are the Jews, informed by it at least by oral traditions over five thousand years. This Torah, as it is anchored in them, keeps the Jew as much as the Jew keeps the Torah. Yet, the public version of the Torah’s text is silent on the topic of abortion specifically. The private version — the adult version is not so silent.
Genesis 6: 1-7 Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. And the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” There were giants [nefelim] on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. So the Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”
What was so absolutely evil about the generation of the flood that merited its annihilation? A do-over?
The written Torah word for giants includes the consonants NFLM. The plain method renders the vowels NeFeLiM (the plural of giant). An alternative version of the text is homiletic (d’rosh), with different vowel assignments:
N-F-L-M: [Another reason for this name was] because of aborted infants, which in Hebrew are called Nefalim. When a woman became pregnant through fornication, she was given drugs to induce abortion, that her shame not be known. The verse can be therefore read, “The aborted infants were in the earth.” The earth was literally filled with them. (MeAm Lo’ez on Genesis 6: 5-6)
The widespread practice of contraceptive abortion was a contributing cause of the Great Flood, where humankind was all but exterminated for cause, preserving only Noah’s righteous family. Abortion is potentially that evil. Why?
In the Beginning
An adequate examination of abortion begins with understanding what we human beings actually are. What exactly is one aborting? Concisely, each of us are spiritual beings, members of a specie fashioned “in God’s image.” Literally speaking, we are a body of energy with a will, intellect, and emotions. This soul (neshama) was created in a transcendent heaven. This soul animates our aliveness. It is our life force. We existed — as in our life began long before our father impregnated our mother.
What meaning and purpose we possess is a result of God’s creative will. We were created because God, in a very nuanced sense, needs us. This Divine need for us does not stem from any deficiency or inadequacy on God’s part. Simply, “God wills it.” This purpose can only be fulfilled in this lowest of realms; this physical earth. We must be incarnated.
The epiphany is this: The most rebellion act a human being can commit against God is to refuse a soul’s incarnation. To abort an otherwise normal gestation of a soul made in God’s image. Preventing the incarnation of a divine-purposed soul upon this earth is to repudiate humanity’s raison d'etre. The extermination of Noah’s unrepentant generation now makes reasonable sense. They became, by their own choice, globally, to refuse their purpose.
As an aside, Christianity’s protagonist, Jesus of Nazareth, asserted the days preceding the coming of the Messiah would be like the days of Noah (see Matthew 24:37 or Luke 17:26). Given our generations practice and endorsement of contraceptive abortion, are we asking for it?
So, legally (technically) this incarnation begins at the moment of biological conception and is a human life legally after forty days, in terms of a fetus’ having consideration in an injured party claim before a court. The stages teach our soul is aware of everything during our gestation within our mother. At birth, with rare exception, we loose — some say forget any conscious awareness or memory of our origin and relationship to our Creator. God’s spiritual reality is hidden from us, again with rare exception. Restoring this knowledge and then bringing the heaven we left to earth is part of our common mission and purpose.
We are here to fix and improve this world and make a home were in God may live openly. God found it necessary for us to do this work freely — from our uncoerced free will, so God is physically hidden from us. God is indeed exposable with our informed searching and making connections through our correct choices and actions. Therefore, avoidable abortion — that is to unnecessarily preventing a soul’s incarnation is an ultimate expression of rebellion from God’s grand and eternal plan. While acting to nurture and support every person throughout one’s life is the better choice.
All Torah jurisprudence from antiquity reflects this perspective. Justifications for abortion accommodate it. As a result, the Torah’s Pro-Life posture compels us to protect and nurture human life from conception (incarnation) to a soul’s departure (the body’s return to lifelessness), and suspend this protection only when permitted and necessary.
When we say, “All men (humanity) are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” this is that equality. These soul-level rights transcend our physical circumstance and station. The first right, certainly, is to be born.
Imagine the world we can build when the basis of our interactions with those around us are grounded in a holy respect of each other as divine image souls, sorting out how we elevate the world around us, together bringing Heaven to Earth.
Yet, there is room for compromise.
Young Thomas Jefferson, age 32, drafted and edited the Declaration of Independence, quoted above, humanity was not treated equally. The colonies would not confederate without the institution of slavery taken off the table. The greatest vision statement of Western civilization waited 90 years and a most bloody civil war to emancipate slaves into humanity. It welcomed women’s’ suffrage 130 years after it was published.
The realities of why fertile females choose abortion over carrying a pregnancy to term are often practical and entirely pragmatic. She may have justifiable reasons not to inform her parents or husband. She may already have children and one more is, in her estimation, impossibly burdensome. In exceptionally rare cases, she my have been illegally and/or violently impregnated, where the compassion or sacrifice to carry such a baby to term is beyond her psychological reach. (We set aside necessary mother’s life-saving interventions such as ectopic pregnancies and catastrophic fetal failures — these are not elective abortions, by definition).
So the compromise in this pluralistic world, where many mothers do not see life so purposeful and sacred is to perfect our Declaration. Just as we extended full personhood to slaves and women, we should grant legal personhood to the unborn beginning at some gestational age certain. Perhaps twelve weeks — three months from the end of the last ended menses. Just as Moses allowed divorce due to the harness of hearts, when from the beginning it was not so, perhaps this is a similar accommodation. In the meantime, let’s labor together to sustain a world where every conception is welcome and nurtured.