Moral Combat
Page 26
Two progressive Christians stand out for having been born, bred, and steeped in churches and cultures on the other side before undergoing a kind of conversion in their religious and political perspectives. Both, moreover, were also deeply invested in theological and moral reasoning about abortion: their support for abortion rights came not from secular politics but from religious convictions. Howard R. Moody, the son of “devout hard-shell Southern Baptists,” as he described them, was immersing himself in sexuality issues at the same time that another Texas-born minister, Billy James Hargis, was turning to sex in the pages of Christian Crusade. Moody had a starkly different outlook on sex, by 1964 condemning the conservative Christian outrage over pornography and its simultaneous apathy toward far more important matters of human suffering. Moody’s background was not so dissimilar to that of Hargis. Moody was born in Dallas, raised strictly and religiously, and preached at family gatherings by age five. As an adult, he too was a family man, with a wife and children to whom he was devoted. But the positions that he took—favoring women’s rights, legal access to abortion, care for prostitutes, and equality for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people—were in thoroughgoing opposition to the fundamentalists in whose world he had been raised.5
Reverend Howard Moody speaking in New York. JOHN ORRIS/THE NEW YORK TIMES VIA REDUX PICTURES.
Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, in her office with CFFC poster and literature, 1985. CYNTHIA JOHNSON/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES.
Frances Kissling’s background differed starkly from Moody’s. A Polish-American working-class Catholic from Queens and a former postulant in a Long Island convent, Kissling became a nationally recognized leader in the abortion rights movement and, beginning in 1982, served as the president of Catholics for a Free Choice. Like Moody, Kissling was an active participant in the wars over abortion in New York between the late 1960s and the Supreme Court’s 1973 verdict in Roe v. Wade; indeed, she would remain active long afterward. And like Moody and others before them, what drove her was the plight of women whom she saw seeking abortions: many of them had been sexually exploited or abandoned, and virtually all were frightened as they struggled to address a major life-altering burden they had not asked or planned for. To her mind, a religious worldview that genuinely valued women as highly as it valued men would look compassionately on those reeling from unplanned and unwanted pregnancies and do everything possible to help them.
For both Moody and Kissling, the opposition of conservative religious leaders to abortion was part and parcel of a larger patriarchal worldview that rested on men’s authority over women. The Catholic Church and the conservative Protestant groups that most staunchly fought abortion were akin in regarding male leadership as a sacred given, a stance that preserved the privileged status of clerical leaders to make and enforce all the rules. Those male leaders tended to be especially concerned about sex and gender, Moody and Kissling both avowed, because religious rules pertaining to gender hierarchy and sexual morality prevented women from infiltrating the closed and exclusive culture of the clergy. Churchly prohibitions on sexual expression were thus fundamentally about power, and more specifically about the power to restrict the behavior and control the status of women. Moody and Kissling each maintained, in their lives and work, that the true message of Christianity was love for others and liberation from the tyranny of unjust rulers, whether reigning over church or state. These leaders were joined by swaths of Protestant and Catholic pro-choice supporters who had faith in the moral case favoring access to abortion, in opposition to the resistance of their conservative rivals.
BEFORE THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, the practice of intentionally terminating a human pregnancy was quite common and almost wholly unregulated across the United States. No state or federal laws clearly forbade abortion at the beginning of the nineteenth century; as in the tradition of English common law, the prevailing view held that an abortion prior to “quickening”—the stage of pregnancy when the mother first feels the fetus moving—was a misdemeanor at most. Abortions undertaken in the first trimester and somewhere into the second were rarely prosecuted. Abortifacient patent medications were advertised not only in mainstream newspapers but in religious papers as well. During the 1800s, courts in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maine, Iowa, Alabama, and Kentucky all upheld the position that abortion prior to quickening was not a punishable offense.6
It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that abortion became increasingly outlawed, at the initiative of physicians working to professionalize the practice of medicine. The American Medical Association estimated in 1871 that 20 percent of pregnancies ended via intentional abortions (as opposed to “spontaneous abortion,” or miscarriage), while other medical studies claimed even higher rates. As the press began publicizing stories of women dying from botched abortions, physicians spread the message that abortion was medically hazardous and perhaps morally wrong as well.7 By 1900, laws prohibiting the intentional procurement of an abortion had passed in every state in the country, although all but six states did allow for “therapeutic” abortions under the gravest circumstances, meaning the mother’s life was at risk such that continuing the pregnancy would likely kill her. Public attitudes regarding the ethics of abortion shifted from widespread indifference to strong disapproval. A woman distraught over a problem pregnancy could proceed with it and hope for the best; find a doctor willing to attest that an abortion was needed to save her life; attempt to self-induce an abortion, at very great risk; or seek out an illegal, likely painful, and potentially injurious if not lethal abortion.
Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, there was little public controversy or outcry over abortion and its general inaccessibility. Physicians themselves were often nebulous about the circumstances that would permit a therapeutic abortion; naturally, some obstetricians were more willing to perform abortions than others, and views differed as to whether a fertilized egg was sacred from the moment of conception or not—as well as, if it was sacred, whose life should take precedence if the mother’s was at risk. But whatever professionals’ personal views about therapeutic abortion, many were quite concerned about criminal abortions—that is, those performed by unlicensed practitioners, countless numbers resulting in injury, others in infertility, and some in death. Birth control advocates, in fact, regularly argued their cause on the grounds that contraception could greatly reduce the incidence of criminal abortion. But the persistent obstacles to obtaining birth control or finding a doctor willing to perform the abortion and deem it “therapeutic” meant that illegal abortions continued to be common. Still, abortion was a taboo topic. Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code censored mention of abortion, only allowing it to be referenced if it were overtly condemned, and it was not considered a matter of polite conversation. As one writer puts it, by the 1950s abortion was “invisible, unspeakable, yet ubiquitous.”8
Trying to reduce both its invisibility and its ubiquity, a growing number of professionals sought to bring discussion of abortion into the open. Particularly significant was the 1955 conference organized by Mary Calderone under the auspices of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Forty-three men and women from the fields of psychiatry, obstetrics, biology, forensic medicine, law, political science, demography, and public health convened to discuss ways to reduce abortion rates and systematize the rules under which to permit the procedure. In a collective statement issued at the end of the conference, the group maintained, “Present laws and mores have not served to control the practice of illegal abortion.” Illegal abortion was so common a practice, in fact, that the group called it a “disease” of American society, one with broad implications for the health of women and the family. Indeed, by the mid-1950s, Chicago’s Cook County Hospital alone was annually treating three thousand women for complications from illegal abortions, triple the number it had seen twenty years earlier, while Los Angeles County Hospital was seeing over two thousand such cases a y
ear.9 While the group’s overarching goal was to reduce illegal abortions as much as possible, that reduction could not occur within existing parameters of the law and social attitudes. The conferees called on professionals in medicine, education, religion, and the law to collaborate and strategize ways to alleviate this problem and make abortion law reform a priority. After this conference, Planned Parenthood began openly to advocate the reform of the nation’s abortion laws, a focus it would retain for years to come.10
Religious support for abortion law liberalization grew over time, largely out of the existing collaborations between clergy and birth control advocates. Protestant clergy in New York, for instance, had continued working for birth control access ever since their early alliance with Margaret Sanger. Clergy working with Sanger in the 1940s had created a National Clergymen’s Advisory Council, the first of several demonstrations of clergy encouragement, assistance, and promotion of Planned Parenthood. The council’s charge was to be the “spokesman” for “the moral and religious values of planned parenthood,” namely, the preservation of the health and happiness of children and the conservation of the family as a whole.11 The group’s first proclamation urging continued religious support to “the principles of responsible parenthood and family planning” garnered 480 Protestant and Jewish clergy signatories from forty-three states, including bishops, deans, seminary presidents, and many other leading lights. Elected members of the first national board included the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church (later a congressman); Dr. Sidney Goldstein, a prominent rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York; and the Reverend Arthur Powell Davies, the minister of All Souls Church, Unitarian, in Washington, DC. By the time of the council’s next proclamation a few years later, it received 3,200 signatures from Protestant and Jewish clergy nationwide.12 The clergy were so supportive of Planned Parenthood, and Planned Parenthood so pleased by this collaboration with influential religious leaders, that the dinner celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Planned Parenthood at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1946 drew its chief sponsorship from the clergy.13
Catholic religious spokesmen and Catholic physicians viewed abortion very differently and had grave concerns about attempts at liberalization. Believing abortion under any circumstance to be murder, Catholics worked to persuade others of this view, attempting, for instance, to translate their own language of natural law into the language of international human rights that drew much support from liberals in the wake of World War II. When the United Nations responded to Nazi atrocities by working to establish a full range of human rights that nations should agree to uphold, Catholic leaders advocated for the “right to life and bodily integrity from the moment of conception,” a formulation publicly presented to the UN by the National Catholic Welfare Conference in 1947. While the UN did not adopt their language, Catholic organizers hardly gave up. The next year, the Jesuit medical ethicist Gerald Kelly published a set of directives for Catholic hospital personnel that marked abortion as a human rights issue, insisting, “Every unborn child must be considered a human person, with all the rights of a human person, from the moment of conception.” In 1951, Pope Pius XII affirmatively declared, “Every human being, even a child in the mother’s womb, has a right to life directly from God.” Those who encouraged abortion, including therapeutic abortion, as merely terminating “life without value” were guilty of the same fallacy that prompted the Nazis to exterminate persons with “some physical or mental defect.”14
This comparison between abortion and Nazi genocide framed the issue in a new way that resonated widely among Catholics. Indeed, it was apparently repeated so much in the Catholic press that one expert notes “it would be hard to find a right-to-life advocate who did not make it.” While this framing successfully galvanized the Catholic opposition to abortion, it also stoked fury among supporters of abortion law reform who resented the implication that they did not respect human life. To those outside the Catholic Church (and likely to some within it), the Nazi comparison seemed absurd and felt downright offensive, quite personally so to Jews whose people had been so brutally slaughtered by Hitler’s regime.15 Many non-Catholics questioned the principle by which Catholic authorities equated a newly fertilized egg with a fully formed human, and abortion with murder. The liberalizers’ resentment at being compared to Nazis in no way weakened their resolve; if anything, it fueled their determination to fight Catholic intransigence on abortion.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Protestant and Jewish clergy continued to support Planned Parenthood both locally and nationally, often in skirmishes with local hospitals and health departments under pressure from Catholic leaders not to distribute birth control. Indeed, even as American Catholic clergy grappled both theologically and pastorally with birth control—not always in sync with the higher leadership—the non-Catholic clergy played an enormously significant role in working to change both public health policies and social attitudes to look more favorably on contraception of married couples and, at times, even unmarried persons.
This work included conflicts over abortion. When, for instance, the New Hampshire Medical Society in 1961 proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would allow an abortion to save the mother’s life—the “live free or die” state was one of the few that had resisted this exception—the New Hampshire Council of Churches and the Manchester Ministerial Association joined the physicians to support the effort, even as the Roman Catholic bishop of Manchester vigorously opposed it. In fact, as one observer noted, the “sharp cleavage of religious opinion on abortion” strikingly revealed itself when legislators voted on the bill in early March: in the state’s House of Representatives, virtually every oppositional vote was cast by a Catholic, while in the Senate, “all affirmative votes were either Protestant or non-sectarian; only two Protestants voted in opposition.” The measure passed both chambers, and twenty-one clergy leaders—including the state’s Episcopal and Methodist bishops and congregational leaders from Baptist, Congregational, Unitarian, and Jewish organizations—issued a joint statement that placed “religious conscience” squarely on the side of abortion access. Wesley Powell, the conservative Republican governor, vetoed it anyway. The Catholic periodical America censured the Protestant supporters, lamenting the “permissive attitudes” toward abortion that were growing and the “shallow psychiatric reasons” that were being used to justify therapeutic abortion. “If the churches do not guard morality in a democratic state,” warned the writer, “the determination of morality tends to go by default to the majority vote and the popular will.”16
The gravest threat to morality, in this view, was feminism. The movement was indeed gaining force in the mid-1960s, which witnessed the formation of numerous women’s organizations focused on women’s equality. The National Organization for Women was formed in 1966, with an initial focus on putting an end to sex discrimination in the workplace, education, and the media. Groups of younger women devoted to what was being termed “women’s liberation” flourished in many urban areas and began to argue that “the personal is political,” that is, issues such as intimate relationships, housework, and sexuality had profound collective consequences. As they discussed topics relating to sexual exploitation and assault, they contended that women had the right to find joy and pleasure in their sexuality and their relations with sexual partners. And they crafted what one observer has called “a new analysis of legal, available abortion as fundamental to female freedom”: “The prohibition of abortion, they argued, forced women to bear children; the state’s enforcement of motherhood exemplified the oppression of women.”17 Abortion access, in this view, exemplified women’s full sexual liberation, and it needed to be decriminalized.
By the time feminists began gaining momentum in the articulation of this message and their demand for reform and repeal of the old nineteenth-century laws outlawing abortion, clergy collaboration with Planned Parenthood was long established. That collaboration was enormously significant,
as was apparent well before the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1969 officially came out in support of repealing much traditional anti-abortion legislation. By then, Protestant and Jewish clergy had already established a burgeoning network of religious leaders who assisted women with problem pregnancies to procure safe abortions, without shame or sanction. That group, the Clergy Consultation Service, largely owed its existence to the leadership of a Baptist minister, the Reverend Howard Moody.18
SHORTLY AFTER HE STARTED WORK in the senior ministerial position at New York’s Judson Memorial Church in the fall of 1956, Howard Moody received a woman who sought his counseling. She was a middle-aged mother, estranged from her husband and pregnant, possibly from an affair. She was desperate and wanted an abortion. Moody sympathized with her plight and traveled with her to find someone who would safely perform an illegal abortion. After several false leads proved fruitless, he managed to help the woman secure the termination for $600 in a secret complex on the Upper West Side. With his associate and collaborator, Arlene Carmen, a church administrator at Judson who worked closely with Moody for many years, he later wrote that he “never forgot this first glimpse of that dark, ugly labyrinthian underground into which women were sent alone and afraid.”19 A few years later, he would be at the forefront of a major movement of Christian and Jewish clergy seeking to help women find safe abortion providers and, ultimately, to overturn the laws banning abortion across the land.