Moral Combat

by R. Marie Griffith

  Moody was born in 1921, the same year that Margaret Sanger was seized and arrested in Manhattan’s Town Hall raid. New York would eventually become his city too, but he began life in Dallas, Texas, as a conservative Southern Baptist steeped in the Bible and the very tradition that had nurtured the likes of Theodore Bilbo. By Moody’s own recollection, he started preaching at the age of five and was teaching Sunday School by the time he was fourteen; at fifteen, he was licensed to preach by his church. Intending to pursue a ministerial career, he attended Baylor University, the Southern Baptist institution in Waco, but left to join the marines. By then, he said, “I realized that Southern Baptism wasn’t the only branch of Christianity.”20 He spent four and a half years in the Marine Corps, serving as an aerial photographer in the South Pacific during World War II, but his experience served to make him into an “ardent pacifist” for some time afterward. After finishing college at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, he enrolled in seminary, eventually landing at Yale Divinity School. With Liston Pope as dean and notables such as H. Richard Niebuhr and Kenneth Underwood on the faculty at the time, Yale Divinity School was a vital training ground for a robust social gospel, and Moody flourished in his ministerial education during those heady times. While there, he became involved in Judson Memorial Church, which in the fall of 1950, during his final year of seminary, ordained him to the ministry as part of the Northern Baptist Convention (in that year renamed the American Baptist Convention), a more progressive counterpart to the Southern Baptist church of his childhood.21

  After graduating from Yale in 1951, Moody served as Ohio State University’s chaplain for five years. He began serving as Judson’s pastor at that time and remained at the church until his retirement in 1992. During the early years of his pastorate in Greenwich Village, Moody’s congregation opened the Village Aid and Service Center, the first drug treatment center in the country.22 As part of Moody’s own commitment to the arts and to making the church a part of the community it served, Judson Church also hosted an art gallery that showed abstract paintings, along with supporting any number of theatrical productions. Besides serving as senior pastor, Moody was president of the Village Independent Democrats, a left-leaning challenger to the official Democratic Party operatives in New York, and he later served as chair of the Citizens Emergency Committee, another progressive group that fought what they saw as the New York City Police Department’s repressive control over performers in city nightclubs. He wrote frequently for the Village Voice and was actively involved in the civil rights movement. He wanted to guide a church that would be wholly inclusive, “broadening the membership and including everyone who wanted to call Judson their community and become part of us… including believers, skeptics, agnostics and even atheists in its midst.”23

  Already well-known locally, Moody would gain national prominence with his work on abortion in the mid-1960s. In 1965 and 1966, a progressive member of the New York State Assembly, Al Blumenthal, was working on legislation to loosen the state’s restrictions on abortion, but his fellow legislators repeatedly prevented open discussion of the issue. In the meantime, a group of about a dozen Protestant and Jewish clergy began to meet monthly at one of Judson’s neighboring churches, Washington Square Methodist Church, to discuss abortion in all of its ethical and theological dimensions. Among this group was Moody, who perceived profound moral implications in the fact that only women, and not men, suffered the consequences of unintended pregnancy. As these clergymen worked to educate themselves about abortion, a physician who was a member of Moody’s church had the group meet with a number of his patients who had undergone illegal abortions. The women spoke about their experiences, some quite harrowing, and offered their perspectives about what could have helped them in their time of fear and need. This was “the most important discussion we held,” Moody later wrote: the group learned that the women would never have turned to the clergy or their family doctors during their pregnancy crisis, for they believed both would moralize and try to talk them into carrying the pregnancy to term or even tell their families about the situation. In Moody’s understated words, “We sensed that we were up against some long-standing historical biases which would make our job at best rather difficult.”24

  The clergy group gathered encouragement from a number of sources in New York, among them Lawrence Lader, a writer and influential abortion rights activist in New York. Called “the father of abortion rights” by feminist leader Betty Friedan, Lader came to the abortion issue while writing a biography of Margaret Sanger, who, though she never advocated abortion, had thoroughly convinced him of the profound importance of reproductive freedom for women’s full equality. As he studied abortion, he came to see it as a fundamental right. He believed that the US Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold decision, which established a constitutional right to privacy, was a crucial victory in the fight for abortion reform: If contraception fell under this right to privacy, why not abortion? The line between preventing pregnancy and terminating a very early pregnancy seemed thin, after all; some products sold as birth control could actually work as abortifacients.25

  Lader was also convinced that there was a need for an unapologetically moral argument favoring abortion rights, lest it appear that morality was solely on the side of the opposition. In his 1966 book Abortion, he wrote, “Nothing is stronger than the moral power of an idea once it has come of age.” Women, especially, needed to stand up and make the moral case against the powerful forces that had long treated women and their sexuality as iniquitous. Lader noted that more than a million American women sought out secret abortions every year, and yet “almost none has protested publicly against the laws that defiled her.” Lader angrily denounced the sustained misogyny that, he intimated, was the product of bad religion, insisting that “the moral power of legalized abortion will surely prevail when women have directed their anger against the superstitions of centuries, and cried out for the final freedom of procreative choice.”26 As he continued his advocacy, Lader became a one-man referral service, helping women find providers whom he believed offered safe abortions. To Lader’s mind, he was humanely rescuing countless women from the danger and humiliation of underworld illegal abortions; he was providing a service that appealed, as one observer later put it, to “a higher morality than the law.”27

  On September 6, 1966—the day, coincidentally, that Margaret Sanger died—Lader met with Moody and two other Protestant ministers supportive of abortion law reform: John Krumm, an Episcopal priest in New York (later the bishop of southern Ohio), and Lester Kinsolving, an Episcopal priest in San Francisco (later a conservative talk radio host and White House correspondent for the right-wing WorldNetDaily). This was to be the first of several planning meetings with larger groups of clergy, and Lader’s encouragement was instrumental. He challenged the clergy to do more than talk: “Start with the women,” he urged, and consider what they lacked.28 What was needed, he said, was a clergy referral service for women needing safe abortions, not unlike the service he himself was offering but on a larger scale and from a trusted group of leaders. The larger group of twenty to twenty-five clergy soon determined that if Blumenthal’s efforts in the legislature did not work, they would take up the matter themselves. Sure enough, Blumenthal’s bill failed to get out of the Health Committee in the winter of 1966, and Catholic leaders actively opposed it. A pastoral letter signed by bishops in all eight of New York’s dioceses was read at Masses in most of the state’s seventeen hundred churches in February 1967, maintaining that laws allowing abortion “violate the unborn child’s God-given right” and urging the Catholic populace to do all that they could “to prevent direct attacks upon the lives of unborn children.”29 Moody’s clergy group met with additional doctors and also with lawyers from the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to get an understanding of the legal risks they faced for referrals and procuring abortions: up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

  By the spring of 1967, M
oody and his clergy circle had established the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS), choosing with this name to take that taboo last word “out of the closet and enable the public to hear the word and deal with it.”30 As Lader had urged, the CCS was a counseling and abortion referral service for women in need of safe abortions. Later recalling the conditions under which the group was formed, Moody and his able coworker, Arlene Carmen, recalled that few professionals could admit that there were many reasons unwanted pregnancies occurred, having to do with “a whole complex of problems related to unsatisfactory sex education, inadequate birth control measures, the heavy moral burden placed on single women if they performed sexually out of marriage, and most importantly related to a way in which men looked at women and put them in their place.” Remembering all that women had had to go through in those days in order to secure a risky, painful, and illegal abortion, “one can only conclude that abortion was directly calculated, whether consciously or not, to be an excessive, cruel, and unnecessary punishment, physically and psychologically, of women.”31 It seemed to Moody and his allies that anti-abortion forces were the same people most strongly attached to traditional sexual morality, particularly female chastity. Abortion opponents, Carmen and Moody believed, thus saw an unintended pregnancy as fitting retribution for a wayward woman’s sin. To abort was to get off unpunished, scot-free.

  The twenty-one clergy who were initially willing to sign on publicly with the CCS included two rabbis and nineteen Protestant ministers from six denominations, and they shared a concern for the impact of current abortion laws on women and the poor. All but one, a “woman Methodist minister” who apparently kept a particularly memorable, anatomically oriented meeting “from deteriorating into a stag party atmosphere,” were men.32 They put together a “Clergy Statement on Abortion Law Reform and Consultation Service on Abortion.” It began by noting that current laws led to over a million women annually seeking illegal abortions, “which often cause severe mental anguish, physical suffering, and unnecessary death of women.” Prohibitions on abortion also compelled “the birth of unwanted, unloved, and often deformed children” and branded as criminals the “wives and mothers who are often driven as helpless victims to desperate acts.” The statement noted that the greatest percentage of abortion deaths throughout the country occurred in middle-aged women who already had five or six children. In New York, the law was especially oppressive to the poor and minority groups, the statement noted, citing a 1965 report showing that “Negroes and Puerto Ricans” accounted for 94 percent of abortion deaths in New York City.33

  Expressing distress at the resistance to alterations in the New York anti-abortion laws that would allow for exceptions in the cases of rape, incest, and fetal deformity, the clergy decried the emotional tactic of claiming that all abortion is “murder” and directly rebutted the Catholic position: “We affirm that there is a period during gestation when, although there may be embryo life in the fetus, there is no living child upon whom the crime of murder can be committed.” The CCS clergy were insisting on an ethical distinction between “embryo” and “child” and contending that it was a moral act to expand women’s access to medical termination of embryonic life.

  These religious leaders wanted, as much as anyone, to reduce the abortion rate, and they believed the path to that lay in reducing its root causes—among them, poverty, lack of contraceptive access, and sexual violence. The religious values of this approach lay in an ardent commitment to living people who suffered; the clergy saw this work as an imitation of Jesus’s work among the poor and needy. Though it had been the Quaker Mary Calderone who had published the first major book on abortion in 1958, it was the Baptist Moody and his clerical collaborators who successfully brought religious leaders to the forefront of the movement for reproductive rights.

  The CCS signers pledged themselves to educating the public and to working toward the liberalization of abortion law in New York and the United States more generally. They might have ended there and patted themselves on the back for taking such a stand. But if current anti-abortion law was immoral, as these clergy vehemently argued, then church leaders could not in good conscience comply with it. Likewise, they were grateful to those physicians, “motivated by compassion and concern for the patient, and not simply for monetary gain,” who attempted to help women by performing therapeutic abortions in cases of need. “Therefore,” the statement concluded, “believing as clergymen that there are higher laws and moral obligations transcending legal codes, we believe that it is our pastoral responsibility and religious duty to give aid and assistance to all women with problem pregnancies.”34

  On May 22, the religion editor at the New York Times introduced the CCS with a front-page news article, “Clergymen Offer Abortion Advice.” It featured Moody as the leader and spokesman for the group, and listed the names and congregations of the other twenty clergy. The piece quoted frequently from the CCS statement and gave a thorough account of the group’s plans. It also printed the phone number that women could call to speak with a cleric about a problem pregnancy.35 Two days later, the Times followed up with a report that the CCS had received more than thirty-five calls in its first day of service. Rabbi Lewis Bogage reported the calls came from “the very wealthy, some very fine people and the very poor,” including “four or five Catholic women.”36 And two days after that, the newspaper followed up with a report that Moody’s group was hearing from clergy all over the country asking how to set up CCS chapters in their own communities.37 Hopes for loosening strict abortion laws were widespread, gaining steam in June, when the American Medical Association voted for the first time in its history to condone abortion under the following conditions: to protect the health or life of the mother, to preclude bringing a child with a physical or mental defect into the world, or to terminate a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. This “unequivocal stand,” wrote the Times reporter covering the AMA’s vote, would surely “speed a slowly developing trend toward the liberalization of state laws.”38 And so would the clergy.

  The Clergy Consultation Service quickly spread out from New York to become a national network, with clergy in many states participating in the work of providing legal and medical assistance for women seeking abortions. Their work received significant coverage in the local and regional press. The CCS would eventually include somewhere around two thousand clergy across the country, including college chaplains and ministers from many different denominations. The head chaplain at Southern Methodist University launched the CCS in the state of Texas, and the University of Chicago’s dean of the chapel established the Illinois branch. Clergy who had supported Planned Parenthood for years were especially ready for this work (although Planned Parenthood itself remained focused on contraception, not abortion), but others had been first mobilized to be activists through the civil rights movement and came to this work as a way to fight sexism in addition to their work against racism.39 Two clergymen were arrested along the way, inciting outrage against the stringent anti-abortion laws and the law enforcement officers who had targeted clergy. According to Moody, the wives and daughters of police officers used the consulting service for their own abortions with the keen consent of the men, including a captain in the New York City Police Department.40

  The CCS played a significant role in legitimizing abortion access as a moral crusade and provided crucial support in the heated battle for decriminalization.41 A 1969 profile of Moody’s activism and the CCS by the feminist writer Susan Brownmiller noted that he “considers the [abortion] law to be at the root, man’s vengeance on woman, the self-righteous punishment inflicted on women by men who hold to a double standard on sexual relations.” And it was farcical to distinguish between legal and illegal abortions as the current laws did: “Legality is determined by the whim of the doctor, expediencey, the looseness of the particular hospital, etc. It’s whom you know and how much money you have that makes the difference between a legal and an illegal abortion.” Abortion was plainly not
murder, moreover, since embryonic life could in no way be equated with the life of a viable infant or young child. The moral problem for Moody was not determining what circumstances did or didn’t justify terminating a pregnancy, an undertaking he felt smacked of patriarchal condescension; rather, it was how to support the young girl or woman who asserted her own need for an abortion, without imposing upon her “the judging attitude that she has come to expect” from clergy.42 When New York legislators voted to liberalize the state’s abortion laws in 1970, Moody, Carmen, and the CCS established the first legal, nonprofit abortion clinic in the state, soon known as the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health.

  The abortion rights movement had powerful religious support, and the message of compassionate care that he and CCS supporters around the country articulated was critical for helping many Americans understand the diversity of moral and religious views on abortion no less than on the sexuality questions of which it was part. Catholics who opposed abortion held fast to their convictions, but the mood for decriminalizing abortion in other religious settings was strong. Perhaps the most potent statistic publicized by the CCS showed, in different parts of the country, that Catholic women were seeking abortion counseling and referrals in proportion to their population numbers. That is, in a region where 20 percent of the citizens were Catholic, so too were 20 percent of the women being counseled by the local Clergy Consultation Service. Lawrence Lader’s Abortion had made the same point in 1966, citing four studies that showed, “Catholics comprise over 20 percent of all abortion patients, almost equal to the Catholic ratio of about 25 percent in the total U.S. population.”43 “Naturally,” then, as one observer noted, “the ministers involved concluded that religious belief was not a factor in determining which women sought referral services.”44 As with birth control, Catholic leaders might oppose abortion, but people in their parishes seemed to hold a wider range of views and certainly a more varied set of life experiences.