Questions on Abortion and Israel

Dear Ms Zonszein,

I don’t doubt that you have been through an emotionally taxing experience, and I appreciate very much your willingness to share from it in order to shed light on an important issue.  That cannot have been easy.  My questions don’t have to do with your personal choices, but with your editorial ones.

1. How did you determine that Israel’s policies on abortion were the “inverse of most Western countries, where abortion is lawful and largely free of restrictions”, when a cursory glance shows that this is manifestly false?
2. How did you determine that Israel’s abortion committees were related to Israel’s Zionism?  Are the restrictions in other Western countries because of Zionism too?  Or, perhaps, because of something else that is essential to who they are, rather than a policy you might oppose?
3. In a follow-up interview, you stated that Israel’s abortion restrictions were an outgrowth of its demographic fears. Have you found any evidence at all that abortion policies, de facto if not de jure, are more restrictive for Jewish women than for Arab women?  Are abortions more readily available for Arab women than they are for Jews? If, in future research, you find that they are less available, will you use this opposite claim as evidence of Israeli racism too?
4. You have tweeted and complimented an article which flatly points out this falsity (it calls your claim about Israel “not quite true”).  Will you be asking the Times to run a correction? Do you believe that the Times would have been eager to run such an article without its implicit attacks on Israel as uniquely illiberal and, importantly, not just illiberal in a particular policy arena, but illiberal because of its essence?

Yours,

Shany Mor