A Matter of Faith

Conservative Christians gutted abortion rights. Jewish women are suing to save them.

- By Abby Vesoulis

The Torah tells its followers to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth," so that's what Lisa Sobel, a devout Jewish woman from Louisville, Kentucky, set out to do.

It wasn't easy. After more than three years of infertility, she and her husband embarked on a $50,000 IVF journey. Finally, after having to discard four embryos with genetic abnormalities, in April 2019, she delivered a healthy baby girl and quickly began hemorrhaging. Sobel almost died.

Now 39, Sobel wants another child. But after all that, what she says is keeping her from moving forward are the anti-abortion laws Kentucky enacted in the wake of the US Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. It's why she and two other Jewish women both of whom also depend on in vitro fertilization to conceive-are suing the state on the grounds that its laws are vague and difficult to understand, and that they violate the Kentucky Religious Freedom Restoration Act's stipulation that "government shall not substantially burden a person's freedom of religion."

Their lawyers argue that Kentucky's abortion laws are so unclear that it would be reasonable to infer it is a crime to discard unneeded or genetically imperfect embryos, a common outcome in IVF. Sobel and her lawyers also argue the laws provide conflicting guidance on when abortion can be provided to a pregnant woman in medical distress. "If I were bleeding out from a miscarriage in the state of Kentucky," Sobel says, "I do not know that I would receive the life-saving care I would need." Her dying in this manner would violate traditional Jewish law, which holds the life of a mother has more value than that of a fetus.