Because we are made in God’s image, we have a right to personal bodily autonomy - The Dallas Morning News

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This column is part of our ongoing Opinion commentary on faith, called Living Our Faith. Get weekly roundups of the project in your email inbox by signing up for the Living Our Faith newsletter.

We gathered our families under a big Texan sky to celebrate the Jewish holidays last month. We noted that we weren’t born Texans, but we both sure have fallen in love with our neighborhoods, our local schools, and our diverse, interfaith partners, who each day bring a moral voice into our public conversations.

At this season of change and spiritual renewal, our Jewish faith beckons us with a mantra: Zochreinu l’chaim, “Remember us that we may live.” One theological reading is that we are pleading for God to remember us for good. But there is another way to read it, too: We humans are the ones who need to remember, for we are guarantors of freedom and life for one another.

We need to remember that we are all made in God’s image. Remember the awe of human minds that can discover scientific truths that save lives. Remember that all people have the right to bodily autonomy and control over their reproductive abilities. Remember that families need access to gender-affirming health care, so their transgender children become healthy adults. Remember. Because if we don’t, then we sacrifice the lives of other Texans on the altar of laws that counter the very religious traditions many of us purport to uphold.

As clergy, we handle matters of life and death as part of our daily work. We draw from a centuries-old tradition that recognizes the complexities of human development. Our rabbinic sages knew a truth of human development: that gender is diverse. Some people are born intersex; some people identify in a different gender than that of their birth. Even the rabbis of the 2nd century sought to help everyone live a fulfilling life, to the fullest extent possible, according to one’s God-given abilities.

More than half of all transgender and nonbinary youth in the U.S. seriously contemplated suicide in 2020, according to the Trevor Project. Three-quarters of LGBTQ youth reported that they experienced discrimination for their sexual orientation or gender identity. Yet, the Texas Legislature in the third special session contemplated 13 bills to bar transgender youth from playing team sports and prevent transgender youth from accessing private, thoughtful, and life-saving care from skilled physicians and mental health care providers. HB 25 was just signed into law.

Sadly, this assault on personal freedom extends beyond LGBTQ people. The recently enacted abortion ban in Texas creates unnecessary roadblocks to reproductive health care, leading to devastating results in our society. As participants in the National Council of Jewish Women’s Rabbis for Repro campaign, we understand the importance of raising these issues as people of faith. Despite popular belief, people of faith within and beyond the Jewish community have abortions. Jewish law even requires a pregnant woman to seek out an abortion if carrying a child to term presents a threat to health or well-being.

Without access to necessary reproductive health care, people are more likely to live in poverty, remain in abusive relationships, or risk their lives to abort pregnancies themselves. Reproductive justice, according to the reproductive rights group SisterSong, is “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Many of those impacted by SB 8 are people of color, young people, those living in rural communities, immigrants and people living with disabilities.

It is a human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy. Many of our leaders seek to harm the lives of vulnerable people and their families by denying critical health care access and by heightening discrimination and fear across our state.

Rabbis Kimberly Herzog Cohen and Daniel Utley are associate rabbis at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas. They wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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Because we are made in God’s image, we have a right to personal bodily autonomy - The Dallas Morning News
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