re: Indiana Activist Judge Rules There is a ‘Religious Right’ to Kill Babies in Abortions

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Judaism being a Bronze Age religion and being a guide to living more than what we conceptualize as a religion is going to create some leeway on those issues. It was written for a different population in a different temporal setting with different needs to create the demand for the religion to be created.

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Rabbinic Judaism is not the same religion the ancient Israelites practiced.

The religion of ancient Israel during the Bronze Age and early biblical periods looked very different. Worship revolved around animal sacrifices offered at local shrines and later at the Temple, carried out by a hereditary priesthood, and tied closely to the national or tribal worship of Yahweh.

Beyond the structure of worship, there were also differences in beliefs about when life begins.

By the Second Temple period, writers like Flavius Josephus describe Jewish law as forbidding women from inducing an abortion or destroying the fetus afterward, even characterizing it as killing one’s own child because it destroys a living being and diminishes humanity.

Later Rabbinic Judaism takes a different view. It generally does not treat abortion as murder, since the fetus is understood as not yet having full personhood.