A Word Too Sharp for the Womb

For two decades, I remained silent. I had survived, and survival was supposed to be enough. It was what everyone wanted for me, what halacha allowed, what medicine insisted upon. But no one told me what came after. What it meant to live with a legal category, a theological term I never asked for: rodef.

For many years, I lived outside the orbit of halachic discourse. My community wasn’t religious, so I wasn’t exposed to it; I didn’t have to translate my grief into legal categories. I was spared the language, and so I was spared the rupture. Until I wasn’t. Until I heard the word spoken in a lecture hall, clean and clinical, as if it were just another term in a glossary.

A rodef is a pursuer, someone who endangers another person’s life. If someone is chasing you to kill you, halacha permits — even commands — that they be stopped, even by lethal force.

Sometimes, in matters of grave maternal risk, the foetus is called a rodef.

It started in November, with a question so ordinary it should have passed unnoticed. A scholar asked me if I had only one daughter. What was I supposed to say? Should I have told him about all my failed IVF cycles, all my miscarriages, the TFMR that saved my life but shattered everything else? All the silent tears and all the blood on my sheets?

He wasn’t just a scholar but a man, a father. The borders between his roles were blurred, and I had no just answer to either of them. If I spoke as a grieving mother, I risked theological scrutiny. If I spoke as a halachic case, I erased the love. If I told him the truth, it would have sat there between us like a live wire. And I couldn’t bear to see his mind reach for theology when what I needed was mourning. And no, I didn’t want his sympathy. So I said the only thing I could: yes, only one.

But that answer wasn’t neutral. It was a silence shaped like survival. It was the kind of silence women carry when their stories don’t fit into polite conversation or religious categories. And it stayed with me, long after the moment passed. Because when someone asks how many children you have, they’re not just asking for a number but for a narrative. And mine didn’t have a place in his world.

So it stayed with me. It felt like a betrayal — not only of him, but of her. The one I lost. The one I couldn’t name. The one I couldn’t mourn in any official way.

And by March, when I heard the word rodef, everything spilled out. I was listening to another scholar speak about abortion. It was a balanced talk, nuanced, rooted in sources. And then he said it: that in life-threatening pregnancies, halacha sees the foetus as a rodef, and permits its termination. He meant it as compassion, as a reassurance. But I stood up and told him what it felt like to be the woman in that equation. Because that rodef was my child.

In many countries, the medical protocol is clear: the mother is saved. I didn’t sign papers or light candles or ask halachic permission. The doctors acted, and they were right to. But after survival comes the harder task: surviving the survival.

No one told me that the halachic “green light” comes at a spiritual cost. That I would wake up grateful to be alive and shattered that someone else wasn’t. That I would be told the decision was “permitted”, but never be offered the language to grieve it. And then there was the word: rodef. The label for the child I wanted more than anything, and I had already begun to love. How could I call someone a pursuer when she didn’t even know she was alive yet?

In the years that followed, I heard women criticised for their choices. Women called selfish, faithless, callous — especially by those whose theologies had never been tested in fire. I watched Catholic voices condemn abortion under any circumstance, even when the woman would otherwise die. I heard them in 2012 when Savita Halappanavar had to die in Ireland to repeal the Eighth Amendment, which had equated the right to life of the mother and unborn child. Her death ultimately became the catalyst for Ireland’s constitutional change, but the cost was enormous. Fast forward ten years. In 2022, I heard them again in another country of the European Union: Malta. Andrea Prudente barely made it, fleeing to Spain. I wanted to scream: “It’s easy to say your God wouldn’t approve when hers abandoned her.”

I am no halachic authority. But I know this: when your foetus threatens your life, you may be permitted to survive. You may even be permitted to feel relief. But you are not obligated to feel whole. You are not required to make peace with the word rodef. And there is no blessing for what comes after. Just absence, and the silence that follows. No text that sanctifies the ambiguous grief of losing someone who never breathed air but lived inside you just the same.

The law may allow it, and survival may demand it. But our hearts are slower to follow. I was told many times by wise men that in Judaism, we don’t talk about the foetus as a person until birth. But these wise men never grew their children in their own wombs. They told me that the soul enters gradually. That pain is temporary. That halacha offers mercy. But while halachic mercy may permit survival, it does not teach us how to mourn what survival costs. They couldn’t feel that mercy wrapped in erasure is not mercy.

And I am done staying silent. The foetus that endangered my life was not my pursuer. She was not my enemy. She was mine.

I never spoke to the first scholar about it. He couldn’t have known. The second did. He listened, and he understood — possibly not everything, but enough.

I did what I had to do. But don’t ask me to rename love as threat. Don’t ask me to treat language like anaesthetic. Because rodef may be a halachic necessity, but it is a word too sharp for the womb. Because permission to live is not the same as peace. And I am still learning how to live with both.

The word rodef is not inherently cruel. In its original context it is a legal term, precise and purposeful, designed to protect life when life is under threat. But when applied to a foetus in cases of grave maternal risk, something shifts. The term that once named a threat now names a child. And the woman who carries that child becomes, by implication, the one who must be protected from it.

It is a linguistic sleight of hand, but its consequences are profound. The mother is no longer simply a patient or a parent. She becomes the victim of a threat that originates within her own body. The foetus is reclassified not as a life in formation, but as a danger to be neutralised. And in that moment, the language of care collapses into the language of defence.

This shift does more than justify action. It fractures identity and alienates the mother from the child she has already loved, already named in her heart, already mourned in advance. It turns a medical decision into a halachic confrontation, and a private grief into a public category. The word rodef does not leave room for ambiguity. It does not accommodate sorrow. It does not ask whether the threat was wanted, or whether the loss will be carried in silence for years to come.

A single word can redraw moral boundaries. It can sanction harm under the guise of protection. It can offer permission while denying comfort. And when that word is spoken in a lecture hall, it can transform a woman’s story into a case study — precise, permissible, and utterly unrecognisable.

Some words protect. Others divide. And some leave wounds that no ruling can heal. The power of a word is not just in what it permits, but in what it erases.

What began as a private silence became a confrontation with the language itself. Silence is not simply the absence of speech. It is often a decision: deliberate, strategic, and deeply political. In communities where language is sacred and questions are a form of survival, silence can feel like a betrayal. But it can also feel like a kindness.

We do not always stay silent because we are afraid. Sometimes we do it to protect others from discomfort, from confusion, from the weight of a story they didn’t ask to carry. We measure our words against their reactions, and we choose quiet because it seems gentler than truth. We omit, we soften, we deflect — not to deceive, but to preserve something: their peace, our dignity, the fragile balance between them.

But losses we don’t speak of are not forgotten. They are buried alive in language that refuses to name them. And what remains unspoken becomes ungrievable; not because the grief is less real, but because it has no place to land. No ritual, no category, no shared vocabulary.

There is a kind of violence in what’s left unsaid. Not loud, not visible, but it persistently erodes memory and distorts belonging. And over time, it teaches us that some truths are too heavy to share, even when they are ours to tell.

So, in November, I said, “only one,” and let the rest dissolve into silence, waiting for a language that could hold them. A mercy for the man who meant no harm, who didn’t deserve the burden of my truth, and whom I didn’t want to carry blame for his kindness. “Only one” — not because the others didn’t ache, but because he didn’t need to ache with me.

When it all comes down to dust, I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can.
When it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can.

I don’t quote these lines out of reverence, nor to make a point. I recognise them because they echo something I’ve already lived — not with pride, and certainly not with melodrama but with the sort of quiet inevitability that resists interpretation.

What I did was required, and requirement doesn’t leave much room for sentiment. I offered help where I could, and I caused harm where I believed there was no alternative. At the time, the distinction seemed clear enough.

I continue to live with both — the act and its consequence, the permission and the silence that followed — not in pursuit of peace or understanding, but simply because continuation is what remains once everything else has been accounted for.

And when it all comes down to dust, as it invariably does, certain things endure, whether or not we choose to name them. This is one of mine.