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Rights are Best Left to Women
By Rabbi Dennis Sasso

Sasso is senior rabbi at Congregation Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis, Indiana. This article was published in the Indianapolis Star on 4/4/06 and reprinted by permission of the author.

Among the bills the Indiana General Assembly did not approve this past session were two that would have significantly restricted the reproductive rights of Indiana women. Both bills passed the House but were drastically revised by the Senate Health Committee. The House resurrected the egregious language, but long debates on Major Moves and local government reform took precedence and the bills died without a final hearing in the Senate.

Yet efforts to restrict the reproductive choices of women remain a pervasive and persistent agenda that will continue to surface at state and national levels. We must be educated about the threats they pose to individual conscience, religious liberty and health care.
If Indiana is to compete in the economic marketplace and in the fields of science and medicine, it should not be a place that elevates the doctrinal beliefs of some to state law. Such legislation curtails the rights of women and families by imposing restrictions on fundamental privacy matters best left to a woman (or a couple), her competent physician and her conscience.

House Bill 1080 sought to impose physical and operational restrictions that would have denied women access to safe reproductive health services by forcing clinics across Indiana to close.

House Bill 1172 sought to define fetal pain in ways contrary to modern scientific knowledge. It further defined human life as beginning at conception, a matter that is not scientifically verifiable, and would have clearly violated the separation of church and state.
As a Jewish religious leader, I testified before the Senate Health Committee against these bills on behalf of the Jewish Community Relations Council. Our legislators needed to know that there is a historic moral and religious position that does not concur with what was being proposed.

The issue is not "When does life begin?" Life exists even before conception. The sperm is life. The ovum is life. Every cell and organism is a living entity. The issue is human personhood. When is that intangible moral and legal category upon which hinge so many privileges and responsibilities of identity and citizenship established? On this issue, science offers no answers and theologians and ethicists continue to differ. Judaism affirms that personhood begins at birth.

Jewish religious law honors and protects the fetus as potential life, but does not regard it as having the same legal or moral claims as the mother. Our tradition celebrates parenthood and family, but in a contest between the fetus and the mother, Judaism pre-eminently protects the physiological and psychological rights of the mother as a viable human person over the rights of the developing fetus.

The National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood of Indiana and the Indiana Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice also gave eloquent testimony to the irreparable damage that the bills would cause our state.

Indiana needs to honor the informed reproductive choices of all citizens without imposing one doctrinal view as the law of the state. We need to be vigilant that the protection of human life, the enhancement of health services, the advancement of sex education, the respect of privacy and tolerance for religious diversity are principles that Indiana and our national government will promote and uphold. That, ultimately, is a true culture of life.