Red State Religions: The Jewish Fight for Reproductive Care in Kentucky: Part I
Dr. Gillian Frank explores the legal and religious challenges faced by Lisa Sobel and two other Jewish women in their lawsuit against Kentucky's abortion laws. The episode delves into the trigger law that immediately banned abortions in Kentucky, even in cases of rape or incest. Lisas pregnancy journey highlights the conflict between Kentucky's abortion policies and Jewish religious beliefs, particularly focusing on the impact on in vitro fertilization. Historical context is provided on the longstanding involvement of Jewish and mainline Protestant leaders in advocating for reproductive rights. The episode underscores the continuous efforts by people of faith in Kentucky to preserve reproductive freedom amidst rising Christian nationalism.
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Red State Religions is produced by the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement with generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.
Created by Dr. Gillian Frank
Producer: Andrew Gill
Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi
Audio Engineer and Music: R. Scott Okamoto
Production Assistance: Kari Onishi
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My prayers were part of recognizing that I had gone through a loss.
And so for me, it was prayers, restoring myself, restoring my body, and then also communicating with God, begging, literally, that this should work and that we could get pregnant because I didn't know what we were going to do if this didn't work.
We were out of money.
In October of 2022, Lisa Sobel, alongside two other Jewish women, filed a lawsuit in Jefferson Circuit County against the state of Kentucky.
My name is Lisa Sobel and I am challenging Kentucky's abortion laws.
They argue that Kentucky's newly imposed abortion laws violated their religious rights.
Because I would like to have more children and right now in the state of Kentucky it's very challenging to do that if you need any reproductive services.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade with its Dobbs v.
Jackson decision, it eliminated a constitutionally protected right to abortion and allowed states to set their own regulations.
A number of states had trigger laws on the books, allowing them to immediately implement abortion restrictions.
In Kentucky, an abortion ban went into effect on the same day as the Dobbs decision.
The court's decision today had an immediate impact here in Kentucky, instantly outlawing abortion.
And it's all because of something state lawmakers did in 2019.
They passed this trigger law.
It was basically created for this very situation.
If the Supreme Court of the United States reversed Roe v.
Wade, abortion is immediately banned in Kentucky.
And today, the Supreme Court did that.
Overnight, Kentuckians were prohibited from accessing abortion at all stages of pregnancy because Kentucky now defined the fetus as an unborn child and declared the human life of an unborn child began at conception.
It did not matter whether the pregnancy arose from rape or incest.
It did not matter whether the fetus had a medical condition that made it incompatible with life.
The only exception to the law was whether In red state after red state, similar restrictions went into effect with rapid speed.
In Kentucky, it also appeared that the law viewed fertilized eggs, which are used for in vitro fertilization, as unborn children.
Because IVF often requires multiple attempts before producing a viable pregnancy, and because fertilized eggs are often lost or terminated as a matter of course, women depending upon the procedure to become pregnant were thrust into unclear legal territory.
For Lisa Sobel and her Jewish co-complainants, it was obvious that Kentucky's law, which now stated that life began at conception, was freighted with the theological assumptions of the Catholic and evangelical-dominated pro-life movement.
So then we ask, well, when does life begin?
According to Jewish law, which has been in place for thousands of years, and there has been lots of commentary to make sure that we all understand what the line of demarcation is, is traditionally understood that life does not begin until the head is...
out of the vagina and the first breath has been taken independently.
The The whole question of who you save is not a question we ask in Judaism.
Because if a pregnant person is facing a decision of who to save, you save the pregnant person with the understanding that they will be able to have children in the future.
But if you do not save them, there is no future to be had.
In the wake of Dobbs, a spate of lawsuits filed by diverse groups of religious plaintiffs cropped up in other states such as Indiana, Missouri, and Florida.
These cases powerfully asserted a religious right to an abortion.
The Kentucky lawsuit focuses on a different reproductive and religious right.
A religious right to use in vitro fertilization to make babies.
In vitro fertilization, or IVF, This process of harvesting, fertilizing, and implanting eggs is imperfect.
Often, embryos are non-viable, and doctors, to ensure the greatest possible success, regularly create more embryos than are actually used.
For a variety of reasons, other embryos are lost, The plaintiffs worried that under Kentucky's abortion law, which states that personhood begins at conception, these embryos would now be considered unborn children.
Discarding excess and non-viable embryos they feared would now be considered aborting or murdering an unborn child.
And for Jewish people living in the bluegrass state, especially those like Lisa, who needed IVF in order to conceive, Such laws contradicted their own theological understanding of when life begins and of their religious right to reproduce with assistive technologies.
This lawsuit filed by three Jewish Kentuckians reminds us that liberal religion persists and resists in the very spaces where abortion is now a crime.
Music Welcome to Red State Religions, a limited series podcast exploring liberal religion in conservative spaces.
My name is Gillian Frank.
In this and our other episodes, we explore the many perforations in the so-called Bible Belt.
The term Bible Belt conjures images of old-time religion and conservative Christianities.
But just like any other belt, this label fails to contain the excesses it surrounds.
In Bible Belt states, a variety of faiths are thoroughly entangled in progressive causes.
These stories of liberal religion are urgent at a moment of heightened Christian nationalism and a full-scale attack by politicians on the reproductive freedoms that have been part of the fabric of religious and public life in the United States for well over half a century.
music When we think about the relationship between reproductive rights and religion, it is all too easy to see religion as something that is always saying no to abortion.
Five decades of sidewalk preachers outside of abortion clinics screaming that abortion is a sin.
Billboards proclaiming that it's not a choice, it's a child.
White crosses on church lawns and the condemnations of abortion as the murder of them born by conservative Catholics and increasingly Catholicized evangelicals have all made it seem that abortion is to religion as oil is to holy water.
And anti-abortion activists have been all too happy to claim that they represent authentic religious values.
The story they tell...
is one that many of us have accepted as gospel truth.
It is one of so-called religious people arrayed in opposition against so-called secular and feminist supporters of abortion rights.
I'm speaking today on our national sin and I suppose the subheading is we are winning the battle.
I've predicted all over America that in the next four to seven years The United States Supreme Court will be either modifying or reversing Roe v.
Wade, and that we're going to pick up our newspapers wherever we live one wonderful day and read the words, abortion outlawed in the United States.
Much must happen.
These loud religious voices have obscured the fact that religious people and entire denominations were and remain In Kentucky, a state that has become increasingly red over time, liberal religious beliefs and practices in support of reproductive rights have deep roots.
But before we can get into the roots of those rights, and their religious champions, we need to understand the reproductive landscape where they found themselves.
Before Roe v.
Wade, Kentucky prohibited abortion, As a result, Kentucky women with unwanted pregnancies had limited options.
They could bear the unwanted child and choose to keep it or give it up for adoption.
Women with financial means before Roe v.
Wade could try to secure a safe but illegal abortion from a skilled physician.
Some women might try to find the funds for a trip abroad where abortions might be more accessible.
A number of women attempted to self-abort using home remedies like drinking quinine or using dangerous instruments like knitting needles or bottles.
In the background, there were always the back-alley butchers.
who had questionable training and motives.
These experiences of illegal abortion could be traumatic and dangerous.
Rita Ray survived a back-alley abortion in 1959 when she was a high school student in Louisville, Kentucky.
I was told to go to an alley after dark and enter an apartment through a back door where a woman met me and performed the procedure.
Then I was told to go to a motel room and wait it out, which was a nightmare.
It was a horrifying and extremely painful night.
I survived this dangerous and terrifying experience, but many from that era did not.
Too many women and girls died needlessly because they were denied safe reproductive health care.
You know, it's been that long, and I still...
I have trouble talking about this.
Rita also wrote about her experience for The Guardian in 2022.
These are her words.
I don't remember if I boarded that evening or morning, and I didn't look at the fetus.
The guy wrapped the fetus in newspaper and dumped it in the trash bin outside.
It was a horrifying experience, she wrote.
I had no one to comfort or advise me.
Even though this experience was horrifying, Rita was nonetheless lucky.
Her abortion provider was skilled and used sanitary instruments.
Other women weren't as fortunate.
One notorious abortion provider, a man named Joseph Blaine, represented how dangerous it could be Blaine didn't have any formal medical training or religious motivation.
He did it for the profit and he did not care who he hurt along the way.
Blaine was a fireman in Lexington who had learned the rudiments of performing an abortion from a veterinarian friend.
When I interviewed Blaine, he told me that he had practiced the procedure a few times on livestock Blaine operated on these pregnant women in the hose towers of the firehouse where he worked, or in the back seat of a car parked in alleys.
He told me the price that these women paid for his services, saying, his words, Sometimes it cost the woman $100, sometimes $50, and sometimes I traded the abortion for an occasional stereo, antiques, or sexual favors.
numbers.
Blaine was careless and crude, mutilating some of his clients and nearly killing others.
And his clients, like the many women who went to pre-row abortion providers, were reluctant to seek medical help or file criminal complaints when things went wrong.
Shame about getting pregnant?
And it was precisely these precarious circumstances that motivated religious leaders and congregants to challenge abortion laws in the 1960s and 1970s.
Clergy and congregants learned from national religious publications that abortion restrictions, in the words of one journal, drive nearly a million American mothers into the world.
Each year to abortion mills where approximately 5,000 of them die at the hands of bungling quacks.
Such reporting contributed to mounting concerns among Jews and Protestants that millions of women were seeking out illegal abortions and countless numbers of these abortion seekers were being injured or dying.
In the 1960s and early 1970s As numerous state legislatures considered reforming their abortion laws, mainline Protestants and Jewish denominations spoke out in favor of liberalizing abortion laws.
Religious leaders called the stringent abortion laws on the books inhumane, and they warned that these restrictions drove women into the arms of back-alley butchers like Joseph Blaine.
*music*
When Lisa Sobel and her fellow litigants sued the state of Kentucky in 2022 over its abortion restrictions, they were following in the footsteps of American Jewish activists who had fought for reproductive rights since the 1960s.
Citing centuries of Jewish thought, rabbis in the 1960s explained that their faith sanctioned abortion and that the mother's life or mental well-being took priority.
For example, in 1964, Rabbi Morris Eisendrath, the head of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which represented Reform Jews, explained Judaism's support for abortion and contraception.
He called on legislators to, his words, make childbearing the most precious and joyous choice of a mother's and father's love.
Make parenthood voluntary.
Redeem so wholly a responsibility as the creation of a human being, a child of God, from being the accidental byproduct of passion or lust.
Jewish women weren't quiet bystanders in these conversations.
Their faith guided them as they advocated for their reproductive rights.
For example, in 1965, the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods issued a statement They represented more than 600 Reform Jewish congregations, and their rationale was plain.
They insisted that abortion laws should make a distinction.
between pregnancies which occur voluntarily and those which happen involuntarily, either through force or otherwise.
By 1967, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, representing Reform Jews, issued a position statement indicting abortion restrictions.
What was needed, Reform Jewish leaders argued, was a responsible law that allowed women to access abortion for physical, social, economic, And then as now, Jewish leaders understood that religious beliefs about where personhood began underpinned the abortion debate.
In 1967, a rabbi representing the conference of presidents of major American Jewish organizations emphasized Judaism's perspective on abortion.
He said, Beyond these mere words, religious leaders put faith into action.
One organization, called the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, enlisted religious leaders and people of faith in dozens of states to help tens of thousands of women safely access legal and illegal abortions.
Chaplains and a number of clergy across Kentucky participated in these efforts and offered abortion counseling and referral services in Louisville, Lexington, and a number of smaller Kentucky towns.
In 1971 alone, 1,000 Kentucky women, some as young as 12, used one such abortion referral service, which operated out of a local church.
For religious supporters of reproductive freedom in the bluegrass state, abortion rights were religious rights.
And as with other clergy across the country, there was a willingness of people of faith in Kentucky to fight in the courts for such rights.
Music by Ben Thede In 1971, a Unitarian clergyman, alongside doctors and women activists, brought suit against the state of Kentucky.
In their filing, they noted that Kentucky's pre-row abortion statute, which describes the fetus as an unborn child, in their words, enacts as law the religious beliefs of certain groups not held by other persons.
This viewpoint they maintained inhibited the ability The case was never fully aired out in the courts.
The Supreme Court vacated the suit in January of 1973 with Roe v.
Wade.
But the religious debate over abortion in Kentucky's courts and legislature was in a sense just getting started.
Music.
After Roe, the religious composition of the Right to Life movement in Kentucky and across the country steadily shifted.
For decades, this movement had been predominantly Catholic.
But after Roe, the movement became increasingly evangelical.
In part, the transformation took place because Catholics courted evangelicals and sought to build ecumenical alliances.
But the other part of the story is that the meaning of abortion It seems that there's kind of an attitude of...
Really great distrust for women that we cannot speak for ourselves.
And when once we become pregnant, lo and behold, there's little mentality that we are in possession of.
It seems this exists among physicians and among people at large.
So our grappling with this whole social condition is bigger than just getting rid of the laws.
It's establishing a trust in the actual...
Real, genuine responsibility of women to make up their own minds, which they do every day of the year, for heaven's sakes, under and facing much worse situations than simply getting a few minutes' worth of capricious benevolence.
Heaven help us all.
For growing numbers of evangelicals, Rose symbolized what they called abortion on demand.
They were upset that women could choose whether to keep or terminate pregnancies, Increasingly,
evangelicals found themselves working alongside conservative Catholics like Phyllis Schlafly and finding common ground over the belief that abortion rights were part of the Women's Liberation Movement's assault on divinely ordained family values.
The mission that I've had has been to oppose the women's liberation movement, which I think is basically anti-family.
It's basically an attack on God's plan.
The premise is God goofed in making people of two different kinds.
And what the women's liberation movement is trying to do is to have all the laws and the regulations and society and the schools treat men and women exactly the same, because they think there isn't any difference, or if there are differences, they want to eliminate them by reconstituting society.
Now, what our mission has been is to preserve the family unit, the equal and the broad look, but essentially different missions that God has given to men and women.
And we don't think he made a mistake.
We think he set up the society to fulfill his plan.
With abortion legal in all 50 states due to Roe, the anti-abortion movement began a five-decade war of attrition, At the heart of the campaign was enshrining into law and into culture that personhood began at conception and that the fetus was an unborn child.
In Kentucky, anti-abortion activists engaged in direct actions against clinics, patients, and providers, and they undertook legislative campaigns and lawsuits.
to whittle away abortion access.
Abortion might be legal, but Right at Life advocates wanted it to at least be as difficult as possible to access.
They regularly attempted to convince abortion seekers that their fetus was an unborn child and that abortion was murder.
As Americans, let's cherish the sanctity of life, because we know how it feels when others treat us as less than human.
Amen.
On the eve of the 2022 Dobbs decision, there had been five decades of anti-abortion activism in Kentucky, and the pro-life movement had secured numerous successes.
In 2017, Kentucky only had one abortion clinic.
Sustained political and social pressure, At the same time, legislators continued to narrow the scope of abortion rights in the bluegrass state to shorter and shorter time frames,
And they passed a trigger law in anticipation of the day when Roe would surely fall, stipulating that all abortions would be prohibited in Kentucky in all cases, except if the life or the health of the mother was in grave danger.
It was this trigger law, alongside a six-week abortion, But through it all, people of faith continued to serve in Kentucky's clinics, to advocate for the preservation of access.
And to be quietly guided by their faith as they managed their pregnancies.
In other words, people of faith in Kentucky remained some of the most adamant defenders of reproductive freedom.
guitar solo
Indeed, after Roe, religious organizations in the Bluegrass State continued to understand reproductive freedom as religious freedom.
One group, the Kentucky Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, which included 24 religious organizations representing thousands of Kentuckians, maintained in their words that abortion is not murder.
Abortion is not a sin.
Abortion is not immoral.
Abortion, most often, is a thoughtful decision.
And the synagogue that Lisa Sobel belonged to, Congregation Brit Shalom, was just one of a number of Jewish organizations that joined a religious coalition determined to preserve abortion access in Kentucky.
When Roe fell before the Supreme Court in June of 2022, people of faith took to the public square, I couldn't get any work done that day.
I don't know that anybody got any work done that day, if I'm honest.
And I was immediately on the phone and texting and messaging friends going, okay, what are we doing?
What's happening?
Like, what the heck just happened to our country?
And even though we were set to go out of town for a family vacation, I told my husband that we were going to be taking our daughter to the rally that was going to be at the courthouse this afternoon.
I didn't care how hot it was until, let me tell you, June in Kentucky is, it is not something you willingly choose to be outside for hours at a time in.
So we went to the rally and...
That's when I started learning about what the actual implications of what had just occurred would have on women here in the state.
I didn't realize that there was a trigger ban, but all of a sudden there was a trigger ban.
What does that mean?
How does that affect us?
Dear God, they've codified that a human being is when a sperm and an embryo meet.
What the hell does that mean for those of us in the IVF community who have what is now being considered frozen people that we are paying thousands of dollars to keep on ice?
What does that mean for us?
As Lisa's case winds its way through the legal system, at every turn she reminds us that the fight over abortion in Kentucky after Dobbs is also a struggle Lisa and her fellow advocates have deep roots in Kentucky,
but have never enjoyed the privilege of being a religious majority.
Their struggle speaks to the ways in which Jews live out their faith through their reproductive choices, And within their communities as religious minorities.
In part two of this story, we'll hear directly from Lisa and her two lawyers to find out how her legal battle has been received by the Jewish community and other people in her red state.
music music music That's it for this episode of Red State Religions.
Thank you so much for listening.
Red State Religions was created by me, Dr. Gillian Frank, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement and Access Monday Media.
Red State Religions is produced by Andrew Gill and Bradley Onishi and engineered by Scott Okamoto.
Carrie Onishi provided production assistance.
Red State Religions was made possible.
Through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation, religious folks fighting the good fight in the most unlikely places.
