I did not know Leiby. I did not know his parents. I am not Jewish. If I were I would not be Orthodox. This is not a condemnation of orthodoxy. If I were Jewish I would most likely be like the friends I grew up with in East Flatbush Brooklyn, reformed. I am merely filtering this conception through the prism of my secular Catholicism. I am Catholic, most surely on Christmas and Easter as most of my Jewish friends and classmates at PS 208 were Jewish at least for New Year and Passover, or Pesach as 1 in 3 of them said. Belief was of a different order for us in East Flatbush, either Jewish or Christian, really Catholic because you were not likely a Protestant, yet of all my closest friends before I was eighteen, one was Lutheran and the other Anglican, Episcopalian.

Leiby’s parents have a different take…

There have always been ways to induce miscarriage in every society for all time. Medical advances may have insured greater safety; the “industrial” world, or the techonologically advanced world we live in, may have made an abortion one of the safest medical procedures, yet more women die of medical malpractice every year than they do of breast cancer. And that’s a statistic for the United States.

It’s in our contemporary society where traditional herbs or teas have been forgotten. Every midwife in every village in every country is or was also the abortion lady. Abortion has always been an option, and homeopathically, probably a lot safer than in cities in industrial advanced societies. Do we imagine that an abortion for a black teenaged girl in backwoods rural 1930s Mississippi, the daughter of a sharecropper, was more dangerous than an abortion for a black girl in 1950s Detroit? Pre-Roe-vs,-Wade. Women in…