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Jilly_in_VA

(10,886 posts)
Wed Feb 1, 2023, 04:42 PM Feb 2023

Muslim-American opinions on abortion are complex. What does Islam actually say?

After the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion, Zahra Ayubi started to notice a theme among some critics of the historic shift.

"They'll draw analogies between abortion bans in the United States and Muslim conservatism," Ayubi, a professor of Islamic Ethics at Dartmouth College, said of some of the commentary she saw on TV and on social media. Critiques ranged from attempts at humor to outright Islamophobia.

In some cases, as Ayubi recalled, critics blamed the so-called "Texas Taliban" for new abortion restrictions in that state. She also saw a widely-shared photo of Supreme Court justices edited to show them in beards, turbans, and burqas. The punchline?

"To show that SCOTUS has now become ruled by Sharia," Ayubi said wearily.

New York City-based artist and writer Maryam Monalisa Gharavi shares a similar weariness, given the difficulty she's faced in talking openly about abortion in her community, and in light of one simple fact: Sharia — the body of religious law in Islam — can, in fact, be very permissive of abortion.

"I myself started provoking conversations in my own circles, in my own family," said Gharavi, "Saying, hey, do Muslims even know their own faith?"

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/01/1152071397/muslim-abortion-islam-religion-united-states

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Muslim-American opinions on abortion are complex. What does Islam actually say? (Original Post) Jilly_in_VA Feb 2023 OP
I "suspect" that this Ferrets are Cool Feb 2023 #1
Jewish law and Muslim law are often very similar. LetMyPeopleVote Feb 2023 #2

Ferrets are Cool

(21,957 posts)
1. I "suspect" that this
Wed Feb 1, 2023, 05:08 PM
Feb 2023

"permissiveness of abortion" by Sharia is wholly administered by the male of the species.

LetMyPeopleVote

(154,427 posts)
2. Jewish law and Muslim law are often very similar.
Wed Feb 1, 2023, 06:15 PM
Feb 2023

Muslim religious rules/law and Jewish law often overlap. The same food establishments that serve Halah foods can often qualify as kosher. Strick kosher food establishments are accepted by many Muslims as being Halah. My kids are all good friends with a number of Muslims and my youngest child's best friend is a Muslim. The running joke is that both groups share tips on where to eat when they want to be observant. I am friends with a good group of Muslim precinct chairs in my county and we joke that we have more in common that we do with some christian groups

Under Jewish religious law, it is clear that life begins at birth and there is no prohibition in the Torah on abortion. According to my Rabbi, the life of a fetus is only potential life and the life of the mother is more important than the life of a fetus. Alito's proposed opinion elevates Christian beliefs over Judaism.



https://jezebel.com/jewish-leaders-banning-abortion-is-absolutely-a-violat-1848885645

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.

I like the idea of a lawsuit filed on the basis of the First Amendment. Alito's draft opinion favors conservative christian theology over the faith all all or most Jews and many Muslims.
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