The Jewish Abortion
I personally am more interested in how religion shapes foreign policy than I am interested in how it is a topic for foreign policy experts, because to me, foreign policy is more prevalent to my daily life. Policy experts may discuss the issues at play, but the actual policy is what shapes my everyday life. One of the main issues that currently affects my everyday life is the United States’ war on women. The United Nations developed a list of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and Goal 5 was Gender Equality but all over the world we see that Women’s Rights are not being met. Indeed, in our own country, we are facing a religious attack on women’s bodies with the new “Fetal Heartbeat” bill in Texas. As a Jew, this affects me personally, because my religion allows for abortion up to 18 weeks without any needed reason, and even further if the mother’s health is in danger, because Judaism believes that the baby is not a life until it takes its first breath outside of the womb. Safe access to abortion is, as such, a religious freedom that should be guaranteed by our United States Constitution. However, the U.S. Supreme Court, stacked by Donald Trump and the Republican Senate he enjoyed during his tenure, is looking the other way due to favoritism by their heavily Christian base, a religiously based policy that is infringing on my religiously protected freedoms. And we’re not alone in this policy. All over the world, women are being denied access to safe medical care because of religious belief systems that they should not be able to seek out basic care like annual pap smears, birth control, or even get treatment for STIs because the local religious communities view women as less-than. So, I, personally, would like to spend a lot less time talking about how religions affect foreign policy and more time doing something about it. And I think that the time for religion interfering with women’s bodies has come due.
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