Four Conservative rabbis from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area joined in a statement here today expressing themselves in favor of a bill introduced in the Minnesota Legislature, modifying the state’s existing abortion law. The bill would permit abortion when pregnancy resulted from incest, or when there was grave danger to the mental or physical health of the mother, or where pregnancy probably would result in a child suffering a grave mental or physical deformity.
The four spiritual leaders — Rabbis Kassel Abelson, Arnold Goodman, Bernard Raskas and Moshe Sachs — declared in the statement: “Our reason for permitting the legal termination of pregnancy grows out of the time-honored Jewish view that, while a living organism is created at the moment of conception, personhood, or existence as a human being, commences at the moment of birth. For a variety of reasons, we oppose the absolute right to abort, but we affirm Judaism’s view that abortion in certain instances is religiously justified.”
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