Abstracts
Abstract
This article reads Norma Rosen’s 1982 novel At the Center, a novel set in an abortion clinic, as articulating the ethical complexity of abortion for American Jews in the years following abortion legalization. It argues that the novel presents legal abortion as morally complex. Given the harm of dangerous illegal abortion, providing legal abortion makes the world safer. But the fear of abortion becoming illegal again is ever-present. The increased availability of abortion can lead to it being conducted without grappling with the morality of ending a potential life. Jews must also negotiate the probable comparisons of abortion to Nazism. The article first shows how abortion is presented in Rosen’s journalism from the late-1970s before explicating how At the Center presents the central moral issues of abortion through analyzing the novel’s central characters.
Keywords:
- Abortion,
- Norma Rosen,
- At The Center,
- Jewish Literature,
- Medical Ethics
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Appendices
Biographical note
Brian Hillman (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University in Towson, MD. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Jewish Identities, Jewish Studies Quarterly, the Jewish Book Council, and Religious Studies Review.
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