It’s time for people of faith in Idaho to speak up for women and abortion rights

Led by Donald Trump’s three far-right appointees, the Supreme Court is poised to gut the established law of Roe v. Wade, thereby denying American women freedom to make their own reproductive choices. Such a ruling will go down in infamy as the first time the court has taken away a fundamental right from over half of our nation’s citizens.

Following the expected decision in 2022, many states, including Idaho, will either drastically restrict or entirely outlaw abortion.

While many religious conservatives will rejoice in that outcome, it will, in fact, profoundly threaten a value that they otherwise claim to hold dear: religious liberty. The same groups that eagerly defend the baker who refuses to make a wedding cake for a same sex-couple utterly fail to recognize that for thousands of women, their choice is no less a matter of faith, with far greater impact.

To deny these women (and families) who believe in abortion rights the freedom to act in accord with their own conscience and sacred traditions is to grossly violate the spirit of the Bill of Rights.

There are, of course, many people whose religious convictions move them to oppose abortion, often based on their insistence that human life begins at conception. That is well and good. They are entirely free to have as many babies as they wish, and also to peacefully employ moral suasion to attempt to convince others to do the same. But that freedom ends when they enlist government to impose their beliefs and practices on others, who ground their own reproductive choices in different understandings and sacred beliefs.

In my Jewish tradition, an embryo is not a human being; it remains a potential life until it is born into this world. During pregnancy, therefore, the mother’s welfare always takes precedence over that of the unborn fetus. Jews can and do differ on our attitudes toward abortion — much as we tend to respectfully disagree among ourselves on almost everything. But none of our sacred texts, including the Hebrew Bible, consider abortion to be murder.

This is why the vast majority of American Jews are pro-abortion rights — and whatever our personal preferences, we do not seek to forcefully impose them on others.

In this, we are not alone. Countless houses of worship espouse similar positions that are grounded in deep-seated religious conviction. We embrace a system of family values in which every child born is wanted and loved by those who freely decide to bring a new life into this world.

We, too, ground our political work in an ethics that comes from God. We, too, value life — and that value compels us to respect the real lives and decisions of women who face difficult reproductive choices.

The time has come for the majority of the faithful who favor abortion rights to make our voices heard. We can no longer afford to let the religious right dominate the public discourse. We must speak proudly out of our own faith traditions, proclaiming that the moral choices that arise from an unwanted pregnancy are best made by the woman, in consultation with her loved ones, medical advisers, the teachings of her faith community and her God — rather than the government.

We owe it to ourselves, our wives, our sisters and daughters — and the Holy One.