When does human life begin according to Jewish law???
I thought it was only after the embryo was implanted?
Or is it sometime during the pregnancy?
Does the unimplanted embryo have any status as a human?
Facts or informaed opinions only.
This is not a debating board.
What I was taught in my (admittedly liberal) jewish education is that life begins at birth. Up until then it is “hypothetical” and the mother is considered primary, the fetus secondary. That is to say, the fetus is of value as a life but not equal to a born person. For example, abortion is specifically permitted if the health of the mother is threatened.
But experts disagree of course (and it seems like they always do in Jewish law – its like the Supreme Court which allows dissenting opinions). Some info from the Conservative branch of Judaism.
http://www.uscj.org/generic481.html
One of my favorite jokes:
40 days after conception.
It is also true that the life (not health) of the mother takes precedence.
IzzyR, I think you’re oversimplifying.
40 days is when the embryo is elevated to another level…e.g., its destruction represents (in terms of Jewish law) a miscarriage rather than simply an extra-long menstrual period.
But, while it’s not permitted to intentionally destroy the fetus for any reason other than the life of the mother, I don’t think it’s actually considered murder (in terms of Jewish law, let’s ignore, for now, the murder prohibition for B’Nei Noach) until after the child is born.
Traditional rabbinical law prohibits abortion if the reason is that the mother doesn’t want the child, or for economic reasons. But the law also provides that if the mother was having extreme difficulty in giving birth, the child in the womb may be sacrificed to save the mother’s life. Over the years, in various Responsa, the rabbis have held that abortion may be warranted when there is a hazard to the mother’s physical or even psychological health. In such cases, the fetus is regarded under Jewish law as a rodef, a word that refers to one who pursues another with intent to kill. It is permitted to kill a rodef in order to prevent his killing his intended victim.
In what way?
Bricker
Can’t guarentee that no one ever said such a thing. But this is not normative Jewish Law. Unless the “hazard to the mother’s physical or even psychological health” is so severe as to be life-threatening.
There’s nothing in Jewish law that says a fetus is human at 40 days. Now, within the Catholic tradition, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that “quickening” took place at 40 days, but that was not based on Scripture or Church doctrine. Rather, he was basing that opinion on the writings of Aristotle, which constituted the best secular science avilable at the time.
Aristotle had done some studies of dead fetuses, and concluded that fetuses became recognizably human at about 40 days. Aquinas accepted Aristotle’s word for that.
Now, I don’t think that Aquinas ever wrote about the subject of abortion, but if he had, would he have concluded that it was acceptable before the 40th day, the day of supposed quickening? I suspect not, but I can’t answer that conclusively.
IzzyR:
By defining the “beginning of life” as the point beyond which the fetus is considered to be more than “mere water,” but by not mentioning that this is not the point at which it has the status of a living human being in other ways, e.g., one’s liability for murdering it. There are various ways in Jewish law in which an unborn fetus differs from an already-born person, and not all those lines are drawn at that 40-day mark you mentioned.
Chaim Mattis Keller
er… astorian, The opinions of St. Thomas Aquinas have to do with Jewish law in what way?
And, yes, Jewish Law does state that [the most basic level of] personhood begins at 40 days; prior to that as already mentioned the fetus is considered “mere fluid.” It’s in the Talmud. Now, I’m no Talmud scholar but I’m fairly sure it has nothing to do with Aristotle, but rather is related to the somewhat mystical nature of the number 40 in Judaism.
Well yeah, I don’t think anyone would consider a fetus to be a full-fledged human e.g. to own property. I thought the OP meant human enough to outlaw killing it.
But you are correct, as usual. Thank you for the additional clarification.
Well, actually - that’s exactly what I meant. See, for example, Rashi on Sanhedrin 72b, re Ohalot 7.6 - if we accept that the child is a human person only after the greater portion of it emerges from the womb, then it could be argued that the specific commentary mentioned above - the likelihood that birth will physically fatally injure the mother - is analogous to a responsible and professional psychiatric diagnosis of prepartum depression, and a conclusion that continuing the pregnancy presents a strong possibility of suicide in a clinically depressed patient.
We could even argue that diagnosis of Tay-Sachs, under this latter viewpoint, together with some finding of depression on the mother’s part at the news that her baby is doomed to a brief and hopeless life, warrants an abortion.
Obviously, this is stretching the commentary, which applies, as IzzyR suggests, directly to physical harm. But it is precisely this sort of pilpul that renders Talmudic discussion interesting.
P.S. I am myself a devout Roman Catholic, so I advance the arguments above only as an exercise in theory, not as a matter of conviction.
A noted Conservative rabbi said (to my son’s Bar Mitzvah class) that there is another stage of development: that the fetus is considered a full human being when it takes its first breath (based largely on the fact that the Hebrew word for “breath” and “soul” are the same word.) Thus, if there is a choice between saving the life of the mother and saving the life of the fetus that has not yet breathed, one saves the life of the mother (who is a full human being) rather than the fetus (which is still only a potential human being.)
OTOH, once the baby has taken a breath, it is a full human being. I thought the argument/perspective was quite interesting. This guy later left our congregation to take up a significant post in academia within the Conservative movement, so he was not just talking through his hat.
BTW, his successor disputed this point.
My understanding is that traditional Jewish law would not consider embryonic stem cell research the taking of a life.
In other words, it would not agree with GWBush in this regard.
Is this correct?
I am not interested in a debate, only in informed views based on knowledge of Judaism.
I’m not sure what you mean to bring from these sources. It has been accepted throughout this thread that the mother’s life takes precedence before the child is born. The only quibble you have is what level of danger constitutes a threat to the mother’s life for this issue. The Talmudic cites that you quote shed no light on this at all. They therefore serve no purpose other then to confuse the issue, and to impress us with your Talmudic knowledge. (Which is not to say that have not been successful at the latter purpose. How does a “devout Roman Catholic” come by this knowledge?)
I beg to differ. “This sort of pilpul” is only relevant if it is engaged in by someone who is thouroughly familiar with the general principles of the Talmud, and who takes into account the full body of post-Talmudic discussion of this issue. What you are doing is analogous to a layman declaring that some specific US law must be interpreted this or that manner because “the Constitution says X which might be interpreted as Y” etc.
Is Bush’s position that stem cell research amounts to taking of a life? I am unaware of this.
IzzyR, thanks for the link to the OU’s web site…I was unaware that the OU had an official position paper on this.
I should emphasize one point, lest it be glossed over by those reading Izzy’s link, that the position paper specifies isolated fertilized eggs. It would therefore appear to me to be referring specifically to embyos created in a petri dish, not to embryos which had been in a woman’s womb and were then aborted.
Chaim Mattis Keller
A couple more links: