{"id":16792,"date":"2022-08-10T06:00:42","date_gmt":"2022-08-10T04:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/?p=213142"},"modified":"2022-08-10T06:15:13","modified_gmt":"2022-08-10T04:15:13","slug":"the-american-clergy-who-helped-women-get-abortions-before-roe-v-wade","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/rss_feed\/the-american-clergy-who-helped-women-get-abortions-before-roe-v-wade\/","title":{"rendered":"The American clergy who helped women get abortions before Roe v Wade"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Emma Mason\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Wednesday, 10 August 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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Known as the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, this interfaith group of Protestant ministers, Jewish rabbis, and dissenting Catholic nuns and priests spanning more than 30 US states helped tens of thousands of abortion-seekers to safely move within and across national borders to obtain reliable reproductive health care. Many of these women travelled to London, dubbed \u201cthe abortion capital of the world\u201d, where women could privately obtain abortions safely, legally, and with minimal \u2018red tape\u2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here, Gillian Frank, a historian of abortion, picks up the story\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

In December 1969, a woman from Oak Park, Illinois, a town west of Chicago, handwrote a letter to Reverend Spencer Parsons about her overseas abortion. \u201cMy trip to London was indeed a pleasant one,\u201d she stated. \u201cDr. Sopher is an excellent doctor who took a personal interest in me as a patient. He put me at ease immediately. And as long as I was in London I took a few days to tour that lovely city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parsons (pictured above) was an American Baptist minister and the Dean of the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago. He also led the Chicago branch of the Clergy Consultation Service (CCS), an interfaith group dedicated to helping women obtain elective \u2013 and often illegal \u2013 abortions before Roe v Wade<\/em><\/a>, the landmark United States Supreme Court decision in 1973 which recognised a federal constitutional right to choose abortion.<\/p>\n

This letter to Parsons, like so many other letters written from abortion-seekers to religious leaders of that era, highlights two aspects of terminating a pregnancy before Roe v Wad<\/em>e: first, abortion-seekers had to travel to get healthcare because there was a scarcity of skilled physicians in the United States willing to risk their careers by breaking the law and offering elective abortions. Second, religious forces powerfully shaped abortion travel networks.<\/p>\n

The 1950s and 1960s saw mainline Protestant and Jewish leaders become increasingly alarmed by the public-health catastrophe caused by stringent abortion restrictions. In January 1961, The Christian Century<\/em> magazine editorialised against the \u201carchaic state and church laws\u201d that \u201cdrive nearly a million American mothers each year to abortion mills where approximately 5,000 of them die at the hands of bungling quacks and filthy midwives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Newspapers regularly shared disturbing statistics about hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions taking place annually. Reports also signalled the horrendous human costs of criminalising abortion in the United States: hospital wards filled with septic women; needless deaths from botched illegal procedures; and those physically or emotionally traumatised from clandestine abortions or sleazy providers.<\/p>\n

For many clergy, these stories about abortion-seekers were not abstract tales about other people\u2019s mothers, sisters, or daughters. They reflected what they were hearing first-hand from members of their communities, their congregations, their close friends, or sometimes even their own spouses or family members.<\/p>\n

American clergy who tried to help women secure abortions were also keenly aware of the institutional roadblocks at hospitals. In accordance with state laws, doctors could only perform legal abortions in cases where the health of the mother was jeopardised. Whether \u201chealth\u201d was narrowly interpreted to mean a woman\u2019s life, or expansively applied to include her physical or mental health, depended upon the whims of the committees of doctors who adjudicated each abortion request. For the most part, these abortion committees acted as deterrents \u2013 at once denying medical care to most abortion-seekers while also stymying more sympathetic doctors who might bend the law. In short, strict anti-abortion laws and stringent hospital regulations prevented most abortion-seekers from seeking legal medical services.<\/p>\n

By the mid-1960s, more and more Protestant and Jewish clergy believed that women had a right to access safe abortions for any reason. They viewed abortion rights as integral to women\u2019s quest for social equality and personal freedom. James Pike, an Episcopal bishop in California, put it this way in January 1966: \u201cThe decision must in the final analysis be with the woman concerned. No one else can make it for her or take it from her, if she is to be a genuinely free moral agent.\u201d<\/p>\n