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May 8, 2025 - Straight White American Jesus
43:14
The Jewish Fight for Reproductive Care in Kentucky: Part II
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Axis Mundi Axis Mundi The book of Genesis teaches that three of the four Jewish matriarchs Sarah,
Rebecca, and Rachel struggled to conceive children.
Their stories, read for generations by Jewish women and men, contain powerful and poignant themes.
Themes of badly wanting children, of struggling to conceive, and of the heartache that comes when the prayers for children remain unanswered year after year.
These stories also capture the joy that arises when these women Pregnancy is a fairy tale that we tell ourselves in this country.
We make it sound super easy to make it happen.
We make it sound like it is the best, most enjoyable experience that any birth-giving person could ever want.
This is Lisa Sobel, who we met in our last episode.
Nobody truly talks about what it means To carry another life in your body and the decisions that you make on a daily basis in order to just get up in the morning when that's what you're facing.
In June of 2022, Lisa learned that the Supreme Court had eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.
In Kentucky, where Lisa lived, an abortion ban and a host of restrictions went to effect immediately.
In 2019, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a trigger law that requires the state to immediately stop abortion services if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v.
Wade.
Of course, we see that happen.
LAX 18's political reporter, Carolina Buchak, joins us now live from Louisville with more.
She continues our breaking news team coverage.
Carolina.
The decision that the Supreme Court made this morning has made immediate changes here in Kentucky.
For example, behind me is one of Kentucky's very few abortion providers.
As of right now, they have stopped providing abortion services.
The Dobbs v.
Jackson decision, which overturned Roe v.
Wade capped half a century of religious activism that sought to stack courts and legislatures with opponents of abortions.
And the trigger law in Kentucky?
Defined personhood as beginning at the moment of conception.
These regulations didn't just affect those seeking to exercise control over their bodies, health, and futures by ending unwanted pregnancies.
It affected religious women like Lisa struggling to create life through assistive reproductive technologies.
In October of 2022, Lisa Sobel alongside two other Jewish women Put another way,
the debate over abortion after Dobbs in Kentucky was as much about freedom to practice religion as it was freedom from the sectarian views Welcome to Red State Religions,
a limited series podcast exploring liberal religion in conservative spaces.
My name is Gillian Frank.
In this series...
We're exploring the many perforations in the so-called Bible Belt and sharing stories of faith motivating progressive causes in unlikely places.
Today on the show, we're following the path that led Lisa Sobel to go from being a Jewish Kentuckian trying to conceive a baby to a litigant challenging the state's abortion laws on religious grounds.
Her activism was an expression of her faith and her commitment to making motherhood possible for herself and others, as well as making pregnancy voluntary for all Kentuckians.
Music by Ben Thede The Jewish community in Louisville has deep roots stretching back centuries.
I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky.
For people who are not from around these parts, that would be Louisville.
But you can tell I'm a native.
My family has been in the state of Kentucky since the 1850s, and in Louisville specifically since the 1860s.
Historian Sherry Rabin, in her magnificent book, The Jewish South, explains that Jews were present in what would come to be known as the South almost from the beginnings of European colonialism.
and they helped to define it.
Most Jews, she writes, persisted in their difference and they occasionally contested aspects of the Protestant-dominated society of Jews.
I think it's important to share with everybody because so often we get the question, there are Jews in Kentucky, and then people look very confused.
And then I have to correct them and say, no, Jews have been in the state of Kentucky since the founding of the territory and then the state.
We are a small minority, but we are here and have been here since the beginning.
And I think it's important for everyone, especially those in power in the legislature, to hear that we are not a homogenous group of evangelical Christians with one perspective, because they seem to think that only their viewpoint is representative of all of the people of Kentucky.
Louisville's Jewish community created a place for itself as a religious minority.
Protestants were the religious majority, but the region was also structured by racial divides.
Lisa's congregation was founded in 1843.
The synagogue that I grew up in is called the Temple Congregation Adith Israel Brith Sholem.
It is the fifth oldest Reformed congregation in the U.S. and the oldest Reformed congregation east of the Allegheny Mountains.
This is all very important to prove, once again, we have been here for forever.
Not only had this Reformed congregation been there forever, as Lisa puts it, but it was an active participant in Louisville's religious and civic life.
For proof that Jews were welcomed, And to Louisville's social fabric, let's look at the dedication of its new temple in September of 1906.
For weeks before its opening, the Louisville Herald carried articles about the eagerly anticipated dedication of Adath Israel's new temple.
Louisville's newspapers offered detailed coverage each day of the three-day dedication ceremony.
They declared the building to be the finest temple in the South.
Reports proudly explained that distinguished rabbis from across the United States would attend the dedication, and news coverage emphasized that hundreds of Christians attended the services to celebrate with their Jewish neighbors the dedication of Louisville's new temple.
During the elaborate services, rabbis, in their sermons, reflected on what it meant to be Jewish in America.
They underlined their status as a religious minority and reminded their congregation that Jews still had to struggle for survival in a world hostile to them.
Even as they mark Jewish difference, one rabbi reminded congregants that the mission of Jews, as set forth in the Bible, is to be a light unto the world.
Since the 19th century, Louisville's newspapers have marked the many milestones that the Temple and its congregation have celebrated, from high holidays, to marriages, to births, and the wider community has regularly joined these festivities.
But growing up Jewish in Louisville, as a religious minority, and in a state that has become increasingly evangelical for the past half-century, has continued to mean being a stranger in a strange land.
The worst I can say is that sometimes I have to act as an ambassador for my people.
People aren't familiar with our traditions and why would they be?
But our traditions can be overwhelming and they're certainly very difficult.
This is Ben Potash.
And I'm one of two attorneys attached to the case Sobel v.
Cameron, which is seeking to overturn Kentucky's abortion laws on the basis of religious He's also lived in Louisville for almost all of his life.
The four years I lived in Lexington, Kentucky, when I was in college, as well as a year in Canada.
And like Lisa, Ben's family has deep roots in Louisville and its Jewish community.
My great-great-grandfather founded a synagogue here called Anshay Sfard.
I grew up modern Orthodox.
My rabbi was a Chabad rabbi.
I was bar mitzvahed in the very old style, leading a musaf entirely in Hebrew.
What was it like growing up Jewish in Louisville?
You know, it was great.
It really was great.
It's a small enough community that everybody is fairly friendly with one another.
My synagogue was less than a block from my house.
The Jewish Community Center was right next door to my synagogue.
And across the street from the JCC was the Jewish day school that I attended.
I lived in the heart of what you might call the Jewish community of Louisville at the time.
The vast majority of people here respect our differences.
And, you know, I find that people are more curious than anything else because many people who live in Louisville have never met a Jewish person or at least knew that they were meeting a Jewish person.
It's everything from why are you wearing that beanie on your head to why don't you have horns on your head?
Where's your beard?
Questions about kosher or correcting misconceptions about kashrut.
All sorts of strange things.
Some folks have learned things about Judaism that aren't true.
Just based on where they grew up and what their pastors may have told them about our traditions.
More often than not, people are just simply curious and that's okay.
That's okay.
It's okay to be curious.
I had the privilege to be part of the Governor Scholar program between our junior and senior years of high school.
And we were two, I think there were how many, four of us who were Jews on the campus out of 300 kids.
And I don't know how I ended up...
Being in a lot of conversations around religion, but I at one point got asked to be on a religions panel where I was the only junior rising senior around everybody else who was either in college or was a college professor talking about religion.
And one very nice young lady who was well-meaning and had no malice whatsoever asked me where my horns were.
And I happen to be blonde, and there's two patches on my forehead that are very blonde that look like there's supposed to be something there, but there isn't.
And I said, well, you see these two blonde spots?
That's where my horns were removed at birth.
To which she was very shocked and concerned.
And I was just telling a joke.
And I have since learned that you don't joke about things like that because people take you seriously because there's still...
misinformation floating around in the rural parts of the state.
How did that encounter make you feel at the time, and how do you feel about it now?
Well, now I'm laughing along with everybody else because it is a pretty funny story.
At the time, once I realized that she was not actually joking, nor did she get my joke in response, I took my role as somebody who would be representing Everybody in the Jewish religion at this upcoming panel very seriously.
And it actually is part of the catalyst that set me on the path that I've taken since then.
It's what made me more interested in learning more about Judaism.
It's the reason why I became a religion major in my undergrad as the only Jew representing.
The Jewish faith, once again, in all of my classes, and at one point arguing that if they were going to bring in other alternatives to Christian religious theology, they needed to include Jews as well as Muslims, because they already had Hindus and Buddhists covered.
That also catapulted me to working for Jewish student life on college campuses for Hillel, which is where I met my husband, and has been the tie that has kept me part of the Jewish community, either as a Jewish communal professional for over a decade or now as a very engaged member of the community.
So I would say that the experience for me helped sort of solidify my Jewish identity as a meaningful and important part of who I am.
am.
The lawsuit that Ben helped Lisa to file is inseparable from Lisa's attempts to become a mother.
And that journey toward motherhood and becoming a litigant are inseparable from her deep ties I wonder if you can tell me about your journey towards filing this lawsuit against the state of Kentucky.
As we got married and we did what married people do and tried to have kids, and it became apparent that this was going to be more of a challenge for us than the fairy tale that we had all been led to believe, especially here in the South with sex education being questionable, that if you sleep with somebody, you're instantaneously pregnant.
As we went down our process of finding out that you don't just magically have sex and get pregnant, There was a lot of shame and hardship on my end.
I thought it was my fault completely because nobody ever talked about male factor infertility.
I finally said, oh, you need to go get tested because that's what the OBGYN is saying now is that we've run out of things that we could test me for, which that led us to find out that he only had one vas deferens.
You need one of those in order to...
Procreate, because it's what takes the semen to become sperm.
So that meant that we would have to do IBF in order to have biological children.
And so we decided that that's what we would do.
We did a ton of research.
We met with the leading clinic here in town because we asked.
Where should we go?
Who should we talk to?
And even with the IVF community, there's this idea that magically you go down this process and you do a retrieval, they do what they do with a peachy dish, they do a transfer, and magically you're pregnant.
That is not actually how it happens.
The IVF process is incredibly expensive.
It is time consuming.
It is filled with physical and emotional pitfalls.
The success rate of IVF hovers around 30-40%.
And the older you are, the harder it is to conceive, which in turn means that IVF becomes increasingly difficult and expensive.
Historian Laura Briggs suggests that we need to think about IVF as existing in a context when each individual household has a privatized responsibility Most states and insurance plans in the United States, Briggs tells us, cover assistive reproductive technologies only partially or not at all.
And so when Lisa and her husband struggled to find funds for their IVF treatment, they joined a broader community of people seeking to overcome both biological and economic hurdles.
We didn't know how we were going to pay for it because right before we started doing IVF, my husband was let go from his job.
And so a lot of friends said, oh, well, why don't you do a GoFundMe?
So we ended up doing a GoFundMe to help raise the money to be able to go through IVF.
And our first retrieval that we did...
Resulted in six eggs being harvested because I also have low ovarian reserve, so we have two-factor infertility.
He has his issues, I have mine.
And they had to take one sperm and inject it into one egg.
They could not just let semen go in the petri dish and let nature take its course.
Because my husband doesn't produce semen.
He only produces sperm.
So in doing that, we ended up having four embryos that made it to five-day blastocyst stage.
And we decided that we would have pre-implantation genetic screening done.
Just to make sure that even though we'd had extensive genetic screening for ourselves, that we were setting ourselves up for the best possible outcome.
So a few weeks went by, and it's approaching our anniversary, and I get a phone call from our doctor as I'm driving to pick up my husband to go on our anniversary trip.
And he tells me, unfortunately, none of your embryos are viable.
All four of them had different genetic anomalies, none of which were compatible with life, and I was the most devastated I could have possibly been.
Nobody told us that that could happen.
We were told that 97% of couples with dual-factor infertility who have four embryos that make it to five-day blastocysts and have them PGS tested, at least one is normal.
So to be in the 3% that that didn't happen, you don't think about statistics that way.
We would have to go through yet another retrieval, which we had no idea how we were going to pay for.
We also didn't know how we were going to tell our community that had been following us and supporting us, not just through the GoFundMe and personal conversations, but that we had the local newspaper.
were following our journey to parenthood because we felt that it was very important that they understand about what the infertility community is like.
Lisa and her husband turned to the Jewish community for further support.
They had heard of a Jewish organization out of San Francisco that helped families with grants in order to go through fertility treatments.
This grant, in addition to financial support from family, And friends was crucial to Lisa becoming pregnant.
And so we ended up going through a second retrieval where we only got three eggs.
Two made it to five-day blastocyst.
One came back genetically normal and the other came back as a mosaic, meaning that some of the cells that they had retrieved and tested had an anomaly, but not all of them.
So in their second round, they have one embryo that genetically should result in a body that can function after being born, and they have one embryo with a genetic anomaly that could make survival possible.
And with the anomaly that they had, they didn't quite know what the outcome would be because it was so rare that there wasn't any literature on it.
So he said, okay, we're going to go with baby A that has no genetic issues.
Finally, on their fifth embryo...
They're getting closer than they've ever been to having a sustainable pregnancy.
And it didn't take, because magically, who would have thought that you transfer a perfect embryo into a perfect lining and things don't work out perfectly?
With only one embryo remaining, Lisa and her husband first had to find more money to pay to have it implanted.
Then they had to decide.
If they were okay with the genetic anomaly in that embryo and taking on that risk of complications down the line.
And we did that, and it took.
And we were pregnant.
And we were like, yes, we are pregnant.
We don't know what this anomaly means, we don't know if it'll become part of the baby, but at least we're pregnant.
It's an incredible amount of effort to become pregnant.
We're to the starting line.
We have spent...
$50,000 and 18 and a half months to get pregnant.
Out of the $50,000 that it took us to get pregnant, we fundraised $38,000.
The path toward pregnancy for Lisa was arduous, but it was not atypical.
IVF is a physically and emotionally agonizing process.
Not to mention, it's very expensive, and every stage is filled with worry that something could go wrong.
When she became pregnant, Lisa turned to prayer and to a Jewish ritual bath called a mikvah.
It was a way to signify the importance of what I was preparing to go through.
And I was blessed to have a wonderful friend act as my MCFA lady who could totally support me because you don't have your contacts in.
So that was one of the big hurdles for me is that I am practically blind without contacts or glasses.
You can't have either of those when you go into the immersion bath because there shouldn't be any separation between you and the water.
So no contacts, no nail polish, nothing on your skin, like lotions or anything like that.
And so I actually lit candles alongside the mikvah, acknowledging all of the embryos that we had lost, either through not being able to use them because they weren't viable or...
the one that did not take.
And then I lastly separated out a larger candle that represented the one embryo that was left that we were transferring.
What were you praying for?
Well, the traditional prayer for the mikvah is...
Praying for your soul to sort of be restored because you're coming out of a time when you have lost blood.
But my prayers also were part of recognizing that I had gone through a loss.
I had gone through grief.
I had lost hope.
The fairy tale of magically getting pregnant and then being able to do a surprise.
My husband, hey, we're pregnant.
You know, we didn't get any of that.
We knew the moment that our embryo was transferred.
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.
Lisa's pregnancy was high risk, and she had to be induced at 38 and a half weeks.
Up until this point, she had poured every thought and every prayer into carrying this pregnancy to term, and to hoping that the baby would be healthy.
It hadn't occurred to Lisa that her own life...
So at 38 weeks, I was induced, and I had a fairly regular induction, and I had a fairly normal birth, and then I bled out.
Or I got close to bleeding out, I should say.
And they had to take me and my entire medical entourage into surgery to save my life.
*Music*
Often, when we think of reproductive rights, we frame them in terms of preventing or terminating a pregnancy.
In that sense, reproductive rights are freedoms from compulsory pregnancy.
But reproductive rights also include the right to plan and become pregnant, and the right to access comprehensive healthcare, including assistive technologies, and they include the right to urgent care, should a pregnancy go wrong.
After her long and expensive IVF journey, Lisa gave birth in the pre-Dobbs era, and she has raised a healthy kid for five years.
Lisa also survived the journey, thanks to her medical team's intervention that stopped her from bleeding out after giving birth.
After Dobbs, however, the things that made Lisa's complicated pregnancy possible and that saved her life are now in jeopardy.
One thing I learned quickly is that IVF, almost always, I think we can go ahead and say always, requires the creation of...
More fertilized embryos than the putative mother would intend on giving birth to.
And most of those embryos are not going to be viable.
They're not going to be compatible with life, as the IVF community phrases it.
The ultimate disposition of those fertilized embryos that are not compatible with life is termination.
They'll never turn into human beings.
They'll never develop all of their organs.
You know, any life that they could possibly have is not going to last more than a couple minutes, maybe a couple hours, and they'll be born in pain and they'll die in pain.
So, of course, the IVF practice is to dispose of them, not simply because of that, but because the parents don't want them implanted.
They don't want nine children, as one of our clients, Jessica Kolb, she has nine embryos on ice.
She doesn't want nine kids.
What does the law allow IVF patients to do?
We were asked that quite bluntly by the women who would become our clients.
And our answer was, we have no idea.
They essentially make it so that I can't risk my life going through IVF again in order to get pregnant.
So because we can only use IVF to have biological children, And I've already had bleeding during pregnancy and I have had other medical issues because I bled out during my delivery and because I am over the magical false age of 35. I am so
high risk that it would not be prudent upon me to go down this path.
Because I can't get the expedient medical attention that I need.
Basically, if you are a woman in the state of Kentucky who is going through a miscarriage and you go into the doctor's office or the ER to get medical attention, they have to consult with their lawyers to make sure that you did not cause this miscarriage.
And if you did cause the miscarriage, Well, at what point can they save your life?
Because they can't give you the life-saving care that you need should you be bleeding because your life might not be fully, fully, fully in danger.
It's the idea that you have to be, what is the exact wording?
Eminent death.
Yeah, eminent risk of death.
What is an eminent risk of death?
It's kind of like, well, how dead are you?
How septic do you need to be?
So what I'm hearing then is that to get pregnant again for you would be to take your life in your hands.
And I have a five-year-old and a husband and others that depend on me, and I can't risk that without the knowledge that should something go wrong, I could get the medical care that I could have gotten five years ago.
At every step of her journey toward motherhood, Lisa and her family relied upon the Jewish community for sustenance and support.
And it was to her community that she turned when Dobbs v.
Jackson endangered the ability for her and others like her to have children.
She found two ready allies from attorneys that she had known for years, Ben Potash and her childhood friend Aaron Kemper.
Religious school together, Sunday school, as it were, at the temple.
And we've known each other since we were five or six years old.
So Kemper and I decided really quickly that we didn't know what we were going to do, but we were going to do something.
We were going to do something.
And so we looked around the legal landscape, specifically the legal landscape of Kentucky.
The rest of the state is far more evangelical than Louisville.
They're far more conservative than Louisville.
And the kinds of constitutional challenges and legal challenges that have been very successful in Kentucky at the state and federal level have been these religious claims.
Religious rights in Kentucky are very strong.
During the COVID pandemic, the governor of Kentucky, who was and is a Democrat, same guy, Andy Beshear, enforced a lockdown that included Temporary restrictions on churches, church gatherings.
And the evangelicals who belonged to certain churches were very upset by this, and they instituted a legal challenge to it under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and they were ultimately successful.
So while the federal Supreme Court and sometimes some state Supreme Courts are reeling back all of the victories, That liberals had achieved through the court system over the last 50 to 70 years.
The same time they're doing that, they're adding new rights for people on religious grounds.
Now, it just so happened, I don't think coincidentally, that all those folks were conservative in their outlook.
So we said, why not adapt those winning strategies for this issue?
We wanted to do it in such a way that would ask the question, who has religious rights in America?
Are religious rights reserved for Christians?
Are they reserved for the far right?
Or do Jews get them and Muslims and Hindus?
et cetera.
Here's Aaron.
Should our clients be restricted from their reproductive assistance under their religious rights?
Because in Judaism, there's a commandment to be fruitful and multiply, and our clients have support from their rabbis saying, use whatever means you have to to create life, whatever you need to do.
And there's no issue or question about like, well, is this embryo going to get destroyed during the process maybe, or you have to make 12 embryos or like, so we think that, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
If they have religious freedom, we should have religious freedom.
The case that Lisa Sobel filed with attorneys Aaron Kemper and Ben Potash Part of the delay had to do with legal wrangling over the proper venue for the lawsuit.
And then, it took 13 months for the judge to issue his ruling.
In June of 2024, Judge Edwards dismissed the lawsuit brought by these Jewish mothers.
Rather than addressing their religious freedom concerns, the judge stated that they lacked the standing to bring the suit He described their concerns as misplaced, even as he acknowledged that the trigger law will need to be revisited and addressed by the Kentucky Supreme Court.
In response to the ruling, Aaron and Ben issued a statement saying, At the time of this recording, The case is being argued at the Court of Appeals.
Our clients demand that we continue the fight, Ben and Aaron wrote.
While this case and others like it wind through the courts, Kentucky women must travel out of state in order to end unwanted...
And non-viable pregnancies.
Why not leave the state for medical treatment then?
Well, for many reasons.
The first is that some medical care that you might need is emergent.
And there is a perfectly good hospital five minutes from my house.
Why can't I get medical treatment at that facility that I need and that my tax dollars support?
Why should I have to drive anywhere from an hour and a half to six hours in order to get medical care that is truly medical care?
I don't see a single man having to drive that far in order to get any medical attention that he may need.
It's like, why if you have an erection for four hours, are you going to want to drive eight hours in order to get medical care?
Why don't you leave the state that your family's been in for generations?
I have been here.
My family has been here.
My family has been pillars of the Louisville community for generations.
This is where my roots are.
Why should I have to leave that?
Is it that I'm not...
That would essentially be agreeing with the people who are saying that I'm not enough of a Kentuckian to qualify.
For my rights to be understood and upheld as a citizen of this state.
Jews have been in Kentucky and part of the communities that they frequented or lived in since the 1600s.
We should not have to leave in order to have our faith recognized and our citizenship supported.
That's ridiculous.
We are strangers in a strange land, and we will live next to our neighbors, but all we want is to be respected and to have our faith respected.
Thank you.
The book of Genesis teaches that three of the four Jewish matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel, struggle to conceive children.
Their poignant stories, read for generations by Jewish women and men, contain powerful themes.
Themes of badly wanting children, of struggling to conceive, and of the heartache that comes when the prayers for children remain unanswered year after year.
Their stories also capture the joy that arises when the women are finally blessed with wanted pregnancies.
When I interviewed Lisa last summer, I asked her what her prayers are for the future.
So I think that the prayer that best encompasses where I am personally and religiously is that every Friday night at Shabbat, I bless my child, and I ask God to make her like our strong Jewish mothers, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel.
And I think that every observant Jew who does that is asking for this next generation that we are raising have that strength of conviction and of self.
To be able to do what I and my co-plaintiffs and my attorneys are doing, which is to stand up and say, Hineni, we are here and we matter.
What I would pray moving forward is that our country find a way to come together and celebrate.
How we are different rather than tearing ourselves apart because we are different.
It is our differences and the celebration of our differences and the acceptance of those differences, the acceptance of self as self, that is part of the fabric of this nation and of this state in particular.
It is the fact that we have written into the Kentucky State Constitution that our conscience, what leads us to make the decisions that we make every day is a freedom of ours.
And I would hope that it is that line that those in power and in governing responsibility would remember.
We have the right to celebrate who we are and what makes us who we are without infringing upon others.
We have no quarrel with people who are pro-life.
What we are not saying is don't be pro-life.
What we are saying is that we have every right to be pro-choice and to make...
The decisions about our bodies and about our family make up as anyone else does.
They don't have the right to impose their conscience upon us.
That's it for this episode of Red State Religions.
Thank you so much for listening.
I'm Gillian Frank.
Red State Religions was created by me, Dr. Gillian Frank, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media and Civic Engagement, and Access Fundy Media.
Red State Religions was produced by Andrew Gill and Bradley Onishi, and engineered by Scott Okamoto.
Kerry Onishi provided production assistance.
Red State Religions was made possible.
Through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.
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