Conservatives—namely, white evangelical Christians—have long weaponized religious values as a shoddy defense for their decades-long conquest to criminalize abortion in the United States. But after a leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade sent shockwaves through the public consciousness on Monday night, a different kind of group of religious text-swinging heroes has emerged.

Coalitions of Rabbis across different sects of Judaism and a contingent of Jewish abortion activists are defending Jewish pregnant people’s right to abortion access, raising what they claim is a valid legal challenge: A national abortion ban would violate their right to religious freedom as guaranteed by the First Amendment. And as the right to bodily autonomy for women and pregnant people is threatened—largely impacting low-income Black and brown people—by conservative justices’ arguments that we should simply rewind to the good old years when women didn’t have any rights because, you know, some 17th century witch-hunter said so, Jewish communities are putting their foot down to say, “Not in my religion.”......

For evidence, Rabbi Ruttenberg points to the Book of Exodus in the Torah, which discusses a case where two men accidentally knock over a pregnant person and cause them to miscarry:

“When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other harm ensues, the one responsible shall be fined when the woman’s husband demands compensation; the payment will be determined by judges. But if other harm ensues, the penalty shall be life for life.”

The Hebrew Bible, she says, does not regard the fetus as a person, for the Torah doesn’t specify how long the woman has been pregnant when the miscarriage happens. Another annotated text states, “If she is found pregnant, until the fortieth day it is mere fluid,” meaning the fetus does not have agency for at least forty days of pregnancy. For that reason, some interpretations of Jewish law say that personhood begins with the first breath. “It’s not murder, basically, and the Talmud lays that out really explicitly,” she says.