No religion in the world permits abortion for convenience.
I remember when I became seriously religious as an adult. I converted to Judaism in 1993. I got a girlfriend. I compromised on my religion quickly as we started messing around. We didn’t always use protection.
I asked her one night, “What would you do if you got pregnant?”
“I’d just get rid of it,” she said. “I wouldn’t even tell you.”
Part of me was horrified and part of me was relieved. I didn’t want to have children with this woman but I wanted to have a lot of sex with her.
While I was screwing around, I was generally pretty careful about contraception, but not always. It’s probably luck that prevented me from becoming a father.
When you’re out there playing around, you want abortion easy and legal, in case you make some mistakes you want erased. By contrast, religion makes life more challenging. It creates more meaning in routine interactions and it’s not so easy to do as you please. The more religious you are, the more meaning you give to things like eating and sex, and as a consequence, there are more things you can’t do.
When you start compromising in one area, like sex (I don’t know how many women I told, ‘I’m 612’ [meaning I keep 612 of the basic 613 commandments, everything but sex], it just leads to compromising in other areas. By contrast, when you start standing firm in some religious observances, that leads to a firming up in other areas.
When you hang around people who are lax, you become lax. When you hang around people who are strict, you become strict. That’s why I hang around Orthodox Jews. It’s good for me because my temperament is lax.
