Disregard Roe v. Wade because Israel happens to be the true moral model on this issue. There is only one intelligent, just, ethical position on abortion and it happens to be the Torah viewpoint. Unfortunately, over 95% of Jews and non-Jews are totally ignorant of it.



Ask any scholar knowledgeable about The Five Books of Moses or the Constitution, and you will receive an amazingly varied response to the abortion question. The followers of left of center ideologies will attest to the interpretation that the Hebrew Bible, Israeli law and The Constitution are definitely pro-choice and protect a mother's health. At the same time, right of center ideologies will swear to the fact that these great documents hold the pro-life position and protect children. Well-trained academics, rabbinic authorities and activists are all able to come to the same and opposing conclusions.



How can so many well-educated people totally contradict each other? Of course, it is human nature at its best. Therefore, the only logical, legitimate, compassionate solution seems to reside in this incredible 3300 year old Holy Book which holds that both sides of the issue are profoundly wrong, and that pro-choice and pro-life are radical, extremist positions. (Whenever I make this statement at the outset of one of my lectures on this subject, everyone in the audience seems to have utter contempt for my narishkeit...until I reach the conclusions.)



Therefore, a full explanation is necessary. According to most people, there are only 2 sides to this issue:



1) Pro-choice...means a woman can do whatever she wants with her body. Naturally, this includes ear piercings for adornment, haircuts, face lifts, rhinoplasty, wart/hair removal, or fetus removal. This position equates the status of the unborn fetus to skin, hair or excess cartilage. Intellectual honesty demands that we confront the moral consequences of our positions.



Yet, I have never met a single pro-choice individual, other than an activist (who will generally say anything), who truly places a fetus and a wart in the same category. It is important for pro-choice people to confront the issue, "Is destroying an unborn fetus the moral equivalent of getting a haircut and blow dry?"



2) Pro-life...means the fetus is a full life, and therefore, destroying it is murder. Staunch pro-lifers consider abortion the equivalent of the horrific crimes of Charles Manson, Baruch Goldstein, Timothy McVeigh, Palestinian suicide bombers, and even the Nazis, making abortion doctors and their nurses, mass murderers. Some right wing religious zealots have even coined the phrase "Silent Holocaust" to describe their misguided horror. This position places pro-lifers into an even more difficult and frightening category. If they sincerely hold to their beliefs, they are knowingly permitting mass murder to occur on a daily basis, and are possible accomplices to murder.



Imagine if someone were to go into nursery schools daily to murder 20 children, simply because the parents are having financial difficulties due to the burden of child-raising. There is not a decent person anywhere who would not attempt to physically intervene, even at the risk of their own lives. The fact that there are so few attempts on the lives of abortion doctors, proves that the pro-life crowd is intellectually dishonest and does not truly believe their own rhetoric.



That abortion has become legal is not a valid excuse, because if murdering a group in any democracy became legal today, decent people everywhere would band together to physically stop it from occurring. The fact that abortion has attained quasi-legal status in Israel and America, the two most moral nations in the world, only proves that the vast majority of its most law-abiding citizens do not consider it murder. The more important question is, "What do they consider it?"



What pro-choice and pro-life advocates fail to realize is that their positions make them either accessories to murder, or accomplices to a meaningless beauty salon activity or cosmetic surgery procedure. Now that we see the inherent foolishness of both positions, there is a need to examine the Biblical context for an astonishing revelation on this Solomonic issue.



In Exodus, chapter 21, verses 22-23, it states, "If men shall fight, and they collide with a pregnant woman, and she miscarries, but the woman lives, the punishment on the men is financial, as determined by judges. But if the woman dies, there should be capital punishment." Watch the brilliance and wisdom of these two sentences.



These verses clearly illustrate two important concepts. First, that the fetus is not a full life. If it were, capital punishment would be called for, as mentioned in the second sentence. We are also shown that the fetus is not a worthless piece of tissue, like excess nasal cartilage, since financial remuneration is required by the offenders. In addition, there are later references to the health of the mother taking precedence to the unborn.



So how do we interpret this God-given posture and how does it totally resolve the issue? This astounding centrist Jewish position is equally distant between pro-choice and pro-life. It simply states that abortion is not murder...and is not nothing! The only way to enforce these seemingly contradictory positions is to allow an immoral act, while at the same time to discourage it strongly, which is exactly what is done in Israel in the majority of cases.



The Jewish Biblical position is to create a meaningful societal stigma, so that anyone involved in an abortion knows there are grave moral consequences; that if you have an abortion, you are eliminating potential life and there may be guilt for a very long time. The Torah's position is that a society which has few or no abortions is simply a more moral nation. It is good to see that Israel is following Torah law for guidance on an issue, unlike capital punishment where God's words seem to be ignored.



Our own rhetoric should teach us something. When a pregnant mother feels movement or kicking, she announces, "The baby is kicking." Has any woman in the history of humanity said, "The fetus is kicking!"? Yet when a woman wishes to get rid of it, we always use the terminology of "removing the fetus."



A majority of religious and secular people seem to want abortion to be legal, yet do not want to simply "dispose" of developing life. This is truly the great dilemma. Abortion presents all of us, religious and secular, with a tragic moral choice. Because of the Jewish obsession with law, we sometimes try to resolve moral issues with legal resolutions. Lawyers are not always the answer, as adultery would seem to prove.



There are very few people, if any, who are pro-adultery, yet no one would seriously consider putting a law on the books prohibiting it. What we prefer, is to create a moral society where great Jewish/Torah values produce a powerful stigma to discourage married people from taking part in that "Fatal Attraction."



The basic Torah principle of "sex kept exclusively within the confines of marriage" should be taken seriously, because the consequences of disregarding it can lead to disaster. Since sexual relations are such a powerful component of the human condition, as King David's mischief has proven, the law establishes that we must never allow abortion to become a form of birth control.



Instead of more laws and lawsuits, we might even consider going as far as creating a fund to pay women not to have an abortion and put the baby up for adoption. There are millions of couples with fertility issues who would cherish the gift of a baby. Can such a system be abused with baby selling? Of course, like anything else in life and therefore it must be monitored carefully.



Abortion is not exclusively a woman's rights issue. The Torah understood this to be a fundamental societal issue and therefore to have an important religious value. Since the Feminist Movement began 40 years ago, women have been duped by successful men and their attorneys, to think that abortions should be allowed. This permits men who have affairs, married or not, to be absolved of large paternal lawsuits. Let us all listen to the Torah to keep those irresponsible, despicable males on the hook, by discouraging a mere $1,000 abortion.