From left, Jessica Kalb, Sarah Baron and Lisa Sobel are challenging Kentucky’s abortion ban. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Sarah Ladd)
We won.
I keep typing that and staring at it. On May 1, 2026, Jefferson Circuit Judge Brian C. Edwards ruled in Sobel v. Cameron that Kentucky’s statutory definition of “human being” as beginning at fertilization was unconstitutionally vague. With this ruling, the Court recognized that Kentucky’s laws created real fear and real confusion.
The timing of this ruling feels very Jewish to me. My co-plaintiffs and I filed just after Yom Kippur in 2022. This ruling came just before Lag B’Omer, a holiday that breaks into a period of mourning with fire, joy, and release. To celebrate while grieving. To hold victory in one hand and unfinished work in the other.
When Roe fell, and Kentucky’s trigger law took effect, families like mine were left wondering whether embryos created in a lab could be considered legal persons, whether decisions we had already made could someday be treated as crimes. The Kentucky Attorney General says IVF patients should not worry, as they do not plan to prosecute us. But that assurance is not legally binding. Kentucky families should not have to depend on prosecutorial promises. The law should be clear.
IVF is how my husband and I became parents. Anyone who has lived through it knows what it asks of you: your body, your finances, your hope, your marriage, your faith, your ability to keep getting back up.
The court did not rule in our favor on our religious freedom claims. That sits uneasily with me. Jewish law has a clear, millennia-old answer to the question of fetal personhood, and it is not the answer Kentucky lawmakers wrote into the statutes. We chose to include Preimplantation Genetic Screening for our embryos because, like many Jewish couples, we knew our community carries higher rates of certain genetic disorders. When the results came back, none of our embryos were viable. Not one could have become a living child.
My faith helped me survive that. Jewish law teaches that life begins at birth, not conception — that the developing fetus is not yet a person, and that the life and health of the mother take priority. For Jewish families navigating genetic disease, that framework is not abstract theology. It is what allows us to make devastating medical decisions with clarity instead of guilt.
My great-grandfather, Dr. Silas Starr, was one of the first OBGYNs in Kentucky. Maternal medicine has always been part of my family’s ethos. My name, Lisa Starr Sobel, is on this case because I stepped forward in 2022. My daughter, Flora Starr, exists because of IVF. My individual claims were later dismissed because I do not have embryos in storage. But the reason I don’t is that the law made another retrieval feel impossible: too much money, too much of my body, too much hope to risk on uncertain legal ground. That is the chilling effect. It is not only about embryos in freezers. It is about families that can not grow until there is legal clarity.
There is another layer, too.
When we filed this case, my father, Thomas Starr, was still alive. He did not get to see this ruling. He did not get to celebrate this victory. But today, I hear his calm voice. I can almost feel his hand holding mine the way he did on Erev Yom Kippur in 2018, when I was bleeding early in my pregnancy and terrified.
That is what this case has always been about for me.
Fear. Faith. Family. The right to build a life without the state turning private medical decisions into legal threats.
Today, my co-plaintiffs and I hold victory in one hand and unfinished work in the other. We won. And we are not done.