Fasting While Pregnant?
Of the four fasts commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples, Tisha B’Av is the only one in which traditional rabbinic authorities don’t widely exempt pregnant and nursing women.
In the following video, posted Tuesday on Web Yeshiva, Rabbi Chaim Brovender — who is not a medical doctor — states that “there is really no reason today that a pregnant woman should not fast, if she’s healthy and if the pregnancy is as it should be.” However, he outlines special precautions for pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers who are fasting:
But an observant-Jewish physician friend of mine — speaking to The Sisterhood as a medical professional, not as a halachic authority — explained, “Twenty-five hours in the height of summer without fluids is not a good thing for a pregnant woman, especially if the woman is experiencing morning sickness and losing water. And for the first week or two of nursing, she needs to be drinking.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO