THE TORAH TELLS its followers to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” so that’s what Lisa Sobel, a devout Jewish woman from Louisville, Kentucky, set out to do.
It wasn’t easy. After more than three years of infertility, she and her husband embarked on a $50,000 IVF journey. Finally, after having to discard four embryos with genetic abnormalities, in April 2019, she delivered a healthy baby girl—and quickly began hemorrhaging. Sobel almost died.
Now 39, Sobel wants another child. But after all that, what she says is keeping her from moving forward are the anti-abortion laws Kentucky enacted in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision. It’s why she and two other Jewish women—both of whom also depend on in vitro fertilization to conceive—are suing the state on the grounds that its laws are vague and difficult to understand, and that they
