There’s a book “The Value of Human Life: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Medical Ethics” (Feldheim, 2010).
It’s the transcribed lectures from the first International Conference on Jewish Medical Ethics in Switzerland, 2008.
Rabbi Moshe Hauer was one of the speakers there, and he discussed some of the “Jewish medical Ethics” involved in organ transplants and determining “end of life”.
In the middle of his discussion, he writes (pg. 62):
“…So let us talk about the world going mad.
In the seventies there was another major medical ethics issue: abortion.
That was the decade when Roe. V. Wade became law in the United States, making abortion legal upon demand.
At that time, Rav Moshe Feinstein, whose opinions on brain death are questioned and disputed so much, expressed an unambiguous opinion on abortion. In fact, many would consider his opinion extreme.
Rav Feinstein considers abortion to be murder. The Talmud says there is no capital punishment for it, but in his view it is murder. He permits it only when there is a real danger to the mother. He wrote a responsum to this effect and in the responsum he writes some very unusual and surprising things. It seems clear to all who study it that he was single-mindedly pursuing a pre-determined conclusion, namely, that abortion is murder. How can he do that? Where is the objective scholarship?
Let me say something a little bit heretical: Rav Moshe Feinstein was looking at a world going mad. How many times over this weekend have you heard the term “slippery slope?” I would suggest that if he were writing his responsum on abortion in old community in Russia in the 1930s, he would likely have said that abortion is not the right thing and is not allowed under most circumstances, but may be allowed under certain specific conditions.
But here he was in the United States, and the world around him was sliding toward a free-wheeling culture of abortion on demand. At that moment, every part of Rav Feinstein said, “Oh my gosh, where are we headed?” And so he came out with the statement that abortion is murder.
We call our great rabbis gedolim. We also call adults gedolim, as we call kids that become bar mitzvah gedolim relative to ketanim, to small children. Developmental psychology teaches that when a child is very small- a katan- he sees only a small field around him and in front of him: the breast from which he eats.
As he gets bigger, he doesn’t just see the breast from which he feeds, but he sees his mother, and then he sees the family, and then he sees the community, and the he sees society. That is what it means to grow into a gadol. A gadol is not just looking at the mishnah in Ohalos; he is not just seeing the small picture. He is seeing a big picture, a world of context. And the world is going mad….”