The Religious Pro-Choice
"A number of clergy and a number of congregations began to see abortion as a choice that women should make."
This week I found an incredible episode of the well-known true-crime podcast, Criminal. Within the first few minutes of listening, I knew you should know about it.
In 1967, a very unlikely group of individuals gathered to quietly break the law and help facilitate abortions. They established a phone number. When you called it, a recording of a woman’s voice would tell you what to do next.
Who was behind this number? The Clergy Consultation Service, an underground network of ministers and rabbis who wanted to help people access safe abortions in a time before it was legal. We first aired our conversations with some of them in 2017. And after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year, we decided to call some of them back.
See some of my favourite excerpts below.
“I discovered them by accident. I was looking at the legislative records, and I'm looking at these debates in the newspaper articles, and I keep seeing mention of the Clergy Consultation Service. And I was so surprised. I said, ‘This doesn't make sense. This doesn't sync up with any of the stories I've heard.’ I thought naively at the time religious folk were conservative and opposed abortion, and that abortion rights activists were secular. And it turns out that this story's much more complicated.”
“Leviticus 19 is an amazing chapter, Leviticus 19. It's called the Holiness code in the whole Bible. It's in the middle of all these rules about priests and what they should do ritually. And it talks about how we should act in terms of others—the stranger, the widow, the orphan—one of the most famous is, ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ But I thought today that is not the most important sentence. The most important sentence is: “Do not stand idly by the blood of your brother.” We cannot be idle when our neighbor is in distress. We just never questioned the fact that motherhood should be a free choice.”
What else did I find this week?
Actually, this found me! Our incredible friend Dr. Keisha Ray has launched an initiative called Black Bioethics. Check it out here! In case you missed it, I had a great conversation with the wonderful Dr. Ray last year and recorded it, listen to that here!
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-Nipa