Abortion Law Review by State Legislatures Urged by Rabbinical Council of America

State legislatures throughout the country were urged today to "review and to revise the permissive abortion laws which have been enacted." This appeal was issued by Rabbi Pesach Leyovitz, past president of the Rabbinical Council of America, in an address to 500 delegates attending the Council’s convention here. He stressed that this was not an effort to impose Jewish religious law upon the general society but an expression of anxiety over the "general deterioration of moral values in our society, of which permissive abortion is a significant symptom." Rabbi Levovitz declared that abortions have already assumed "epidemic proportions," and noted that in New York City alone, "over 100,000 unborn children have been aborted since the liberalized law went into effect last July 1." He asserted that most of these abortions were dictated by "consideration of convenience, not of health."

Castigating the daily press for running advertisements which offer easy abortion and lax state laws which legitimatizes permissive abortions, Rabbi Levovitz declared: "We call upon the legislatures to submit their abortion statutes to a serious evaluation in view of the experiences of several states during the past year. We call upon state legislatures throughout the country to set up special study commissions composed of members of medical, legal and religious groups to restudy the entire matter." Stressing that "we must not confuse civil permissibility with religious allowance." Rabbi Levovitz observed that particularly deplorable is "the claim of higher morality" by proponents of "permissive abortion." He said that "they wrongfully ascribe to traditional religion an insensitivity to human problems." This, he stated, is totally erroneous. He noted that Judaism resists a "blanket allowance to abortion, except under controlled circumstances as prescribed by competent rabbinic authority."