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Abortion: Woman's Right and Legal Problem
By Howard Moody

IN THE PLETHORA of social problems that plague our lives, how does one choose, among all the claims upon our consciences, a single issue that we move into with purpose and in depth? The answer is that we don't usually choose; we are chosen by circumstance, by pressures, by our resources, by the power with which any given concern presses in upon us. In fact, social crusaders are seldom volunteers-they are usually drafted.

Our existential experiences are always the most potent shapers of our actions. Having counseled women who were helplessly pregnant and were seeking to be delivered from their unwanted burden, I think I heard the suppressed, screaming rage of women who, by means of social castigation enforced with legal retribution, have been denied the right to correct their mistake. The more I examined abortion law-riddled with hypocrisy, broken with impunity by those who could afford it-the more clearly I saw it had become an outmoded and repressive piece of discriminatory legislation that victimized and criminalized women whose only crime was their unwanted pregnancy.

My adversaries told me that the law was on the books to protect "the sanctity of human life" and that if we removed that law we

Howard Moody is pastor of Judson Memorial Church in New York City and a Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. In 1967, Moody brought together a small group of clergymen to help counsel women with "problem pregnancies." Risking public censure and criminal prosecution, the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion referred thousands of women for safe abortions. In addition, Moody and others formed a coalition to support the passage of a bill to legalize abortion. The New York Legislature passed such a bill in April, 1970, which permits abortions by licensed physicians within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.
On July 1, 1970, the New York Clergy Consultation Service, which had served as a model for other organizations in other states, was disbanded and reconstituted as Clergy and Lay Advocates for Hospital Abortion Performance. The new organization is designed to deal with local restrictions on abortions and the growth of high-priced "abortion brokers."
This article is reprinted from the March 8, 1971 issue of Christianity and Crisis, Copyright 1971 by Christianity and Crisis, Inc. The article is used with permission and is reprinted not only as a commentary on a controversial issue but as a case-study of the problems involved when clergy and churches take on the role of social and cultural change-agents. It's definitely not easy, but apparently it can be done. Dr. Moody wishes to acknowledge the assistance of is associate, Arlene Carmen.

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would be opening the door to infanticide or even genocide. But I knew that was not so, that the law was originally put there as a form of "blue law" (the Comstock era!), and that the law had been on the books for a hundred years. All this was done, for the most part, with the theological support and sanctification of the Christian church in America.

There is a great temptation for us (and, I believe, for the church in general) to be sidetracked by theoretical debates that paralyze action and keep us forever stalled in a slough of complex theological and philosophical questions.

The "abortion problem" with its accompanying question-When does life begin?-was the tantalizing temptress that would lure us into unending disputes about embryonic and fetal life in the womb which would prevent us from dealing with a woman's immediate, existential question of what to do with her life in the world. It wasn't just Catholic priests and theologians who pressed this issue. Many Protestant theologians, from armchair analysts like Paul Ramsay to radical activists like Richard Neuhaus, warned us of grim theological heresies implicit in our actions and hinted that we were activists unmindful of the weightier matter of the law. The theoreticians have been subverted in this area by an untenable preoccupation with the ethics of "feticide" and by related speculations, so that other moral and ethical considerations have been muted by the adversaries of abortion screaming "Murder!"

But the actual process of working with women compelled us to move beyond strictly theoretical hang-ups. In this process we always had to consider the moral question of whether it is justifiable to force the unwanted upon the unwilling. In our anxiety to honor the theory of the sanctity of life in general, we have played fast and loose with particular women's lives and forced them by legal fiat to bear children that they never intended to conceive. To use a woman's body, against her free will and choice, as a receptacle for unwanted pregnancy has got to be seen as a kind of "legalized rape" that must be as morally repugnant as "feticide" to those perpetrating it.

In a society where motherhood and the birth of a child should be the cause of genuine celebration, our laws and attitudes have turned many a birth into a curse and a form of punishment for a pregnancy incurred by human or mechanical error. Is it any wonder that women are rising in righteous indignation against a law that sanc-

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tions such an invasion of their privacy and such an apparent violation of their deepest liberties as human persons?

And this is a violation whether the woman is married or single. The single woman in our society has far too long been the victim of our hypocritical, double-standard sexual mores. When she becomes pregnant, she is further victimized by a discriminatory application of the law that favors the married woman. Thus the law becomes the instrument of the woman's punishment, creating a most blatant inequality that must be challenged.

Another moral consideration that is either ignored or treated simplistically is the third party. How can we be callous enough to write treatises on the rights of the fetus and not consider the unwanted, unborn child's chances for a happy life? By what moral or divine authority do we condemn an accidental embryo to be an unwanted and unloved child? It's not hard for us to become emotional and even indignant about a woman having to carry a malformed child to term, but what we many times fail to see is the malformed spirits and mutilated psyches of the products of loveless marriages or institutional inadequacies. Furthermore, the child abuse syndrome, which is so repulsive we can't stand to see it, is directly related to resented and unloved children-many of them the fruits of our laws for compulsory pregnancy.

A third ethical consideration is the larger society in which we live and for which we are responsible. It is day by day becoming unmistakably clear to us that our land and our world cannot bear the unchecked and unplanned reproduction of our species. It may well be that we are already in that unenviable ethical dilemma of choosing that a living person must die so that a fetus may develop. In a day when demographers are warning us of the dire results of our spiraling birth rate, it is a little cavalier to keep talking about the right to be born. The biblical injunction to "multiply and replenish the earth," which in the beginning of time may have been a joyful necessity, becomes in our day a fatal profligacy.

As said before, though, we were moved to act above all by the immediate needs of women with unwanted pregnancies rather than by theoretical questions. We didn't just operate out of our own perspectives and solutions. We counseled hundreds of women before we became committed to any program of action, and it was their

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feelings and problems and viewpoints and the solutions they chose that determined the directions in which we ultimately moved.

SURFACING THE UNSPEAKABLE

So I refused to believe that this "abortion law" was a bulwark and bastion for the protection of human life. It had much less exalted reasons for being there, and time and belief had eroded even these reasons. The law was a chain around the neck of women, enslaving them to compulsory motherhood, and it deserved to be repealed.

In much the same way that the laws and practices in the South elicited a strong sense of indignation from people who cared about rights and justice for Negroes, the law regarding abortion was so patently unjust and discriminatory toward women as to invite the same kind of defiance and civil disobedience in their behalf. At least this is how it seemed to some 26 ministers and rabbis who came together in the spring of 1967 to create the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS), a counseling service in New York City for women with unwanted pregnancies. It is important to remember that the public climate on the abortion issue at that time was so cool that the New York State Legislature's Health Committee could, without fear of much reaction from the citizenry, refuse to let any abortion reform bill go to the floor in Albany.

It is very important to understand how we conceived of our work as basically social service with women, and how this outlook related to changing the law. In our minds the women came first. We realized that through the experience of helping them attain their goal we would amass the evidence to convince legislators to liberalize the law. Our agreed-upon task was to work ourselves out of the job of counseling women.

Our goals, therefore, were rather specific: (1) We had to surface the unspeakable. Abortion was confidential and whispered about in conversations. When we were deciding what to call ourselves, we were tempted to use the euphemism "problem pregnancy," but that would only skirt the issue we wanted people to deal with and talk about. Every time the media used our name it had to say "that word." Abortion was a medical operation being performed on thousands of women every year, but people couldn't talk about it.

(2) We were by our existence as a clergy service legitimizing a socially unacceptable (and, perhaps, illegal) action. In our service, the clergy were giving reinforcement, encouragement, and comfort to

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a woman whose decision led her to a course of action that society held to be taboo and the law labeled criminal. Our original Statement of Purpose declared: "Believing as clergy that there are higher laws and moral obligations transcending legal codes, we agree that it is our pastoral responsibility and religious duty to give aid and assistance to all women with problem pregnancies."

We also gave aid and comfort to medical abortionists. In the same statement we said:

"We are aware that there are duly licensed and reputable physicians who in their wisdom perform abortions that some may regard as illegal. When a doctor performs such an operation, motivated by compassion and concern for the patient and not simply for monetary gain, we do not regard him as a criminal but as living by the highest standard of religion and the Hippocratic oath."

(3) Another goal was to reveal the dimensions of the problem, which, like an iceberg, were only partially visible. We never dreamed how large it was. In the first week we received 100 calls from women needing help; when we closed the New York City Consultation Service on July 1, 1970, we were getting 100 calls a day. In the three years of operation the CCS counseled and referred for safe abortions over l0,000 women. There are today some 34 services around the country with over 2,000 clergy and lay persons (Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic) counseling women in need.

(4) We also wanted to change the image of the clergy held by women with this need. Many women told us that the last person they would go to with the problem of an unwanted pregnancy was a clergyman, because all he would do was tell her to have the baby.

Changing this image, we discovered, wasn't too difficult. As soon as the word got out that the clergy would let the woman decide her future and help her with whatever course she chose, stereotypes and prejudices quickly toppled. When clergy were arrested (not in New York City) and faced prosecution (though no trials ever came to pass), many women became convinced that clergy were willing to bear the same risk in attaining an abortion.

It is entirely possible that, in those days at least, no other group-except, perhaps, the medical profession itself-could have provided the same psychological support to women seeking abortions. Lending the respectability of the church to the issue in a practical rather than philosophical way was of incalculable value in reversing women's previous attitudes about themselves. This supportive stance

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helped restore self-respect to women as decent human beings at a time when they were rejected by society as untouchables. In later years we welcomed the entry of women, both clergy and lay, into the area of abortion counseling. While we always believed that women, especially those who had abortions, were "natural" counselors of their sisters, in the climate of 1967 only some respected profession and institution could have undergirded the shattered egos of accidentally pregnant women.

(5) Finally, we wanted to avoid arrest. We felt that kind of challenge to the law and public exposure would divert our attention from our chief goal-to help women. Our legal confidant and valued advisor, Ephraim London, used to warn us consistently that "you can't help women inside of a jail." This meant that we adopted and committed ourselves to what was conservative legal advice and ethical practices even within the framework of what many considered illegal.

I am convinced that this discipline was what kept us from being harassed or stopped by any law enforcement agency. Sometimes we were even protected. In April, 1969, a man who claimed his girl-friend had been helped by the CCS threatened to give the name of the physician who had aborted her to the authorities unless we gave him $5,000. We immediately contacted the New York District Attorney's Office and informed them of the situation. With their full cooperation and that of the Rackets Squad, the blackmailer was apprehended and arrested.

The model of the Clergy Consultation Service, which included decentralization in individual churches and synagogues, low overhead (Judson Church furnished coordinating staff), and limited, short-range counseling, proved to be a popular and easily repeatable structure that spread throughout the country. With simple local modifications these counseling services were duplicated without building large and expensive organizations (the average cost was $1,500 to $2,500 a year). In 1968, the National Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion was organized in order to facilitate and develop the growth of these local services. Local Clergy Services rapidly expanded, and today there are some 2,000 ministers, rabbis, and lay people in 25 states counseling women and providing a nucleus of support for changing laws in their respective locales.

A by-product of our organizing was increased economic control of abortion practices. When the first New York CCS opened in May,

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1967, the fee charged by physicians doing office abortions under 12 weeks l.m.p. was $600. Although it took a year for the clergy to realize that they were in a strong position to negotiate a lower fee for the women they referred, by 1970 the fee in most parts of the country was $200.

Within 10 months, as the models multiplied and the word spread, the allied professions began to cooperate. In the last year of our service before the law changed in New York, some 75 percent of our counselees were referred by gynecologists who in the beginning refused even to sign the required slips verifying pregnancy. It took two years, but even the pioneering New York City Planned Parenthood (shades of Margaret Sanger!) found the courage to refer women to CCS.

As the problem surfaced and public interest grew, the women's liberation movement became visible, insisting on the right of women to choose an abortion. Other organizations came into being to challenge the law and fight for reform.

HARD LESSONS

The foregoing were the goals and strategies of our CCS in May 1967. In April, 1970, the state legislators in Albany passed an unprecedented repeal of the law, leaving the matter up to women consulting with their doctor, the only limitations being that the operation should be performed before 24 weeks by a duly licensed physician. It was more of a miracle than anyone had hoped for, and more difficult to account for than most political prodigies.

Having seen the struggle for a new law succeed, and looking back upon the clergy's role in it, I can't help but notice that some of the hard lessons we learned are applicable to other areas of social change. The following cautionary notes will fall on deaf ears if you believe that social change comes with nasty rhetoric or physical destruction of your opponents. But if you still believe that tactics and strategy may be more important than scoring points or scaring the establishment, then these may be helpful hints.

First of all, we didn't antagonize or unnecessarily provoke our natural adversaries. In this instance there were three: the Roman Catholic establishment, the medical profession as a whole, and law enforcement officials (about whom we spoke previously). The Catholic Church, though it was certainly aware of our activities, was never overtly hostile. We considered our battle to be, not with the Church,

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but with an archaic law (put on the books by Protestants) and an apathetic public. As a matter of fact, Father Robert Drinan, whose paper on The Right of the Fetus occasioned great controversy in the Catholic hierarchy, was an unwilling ally in many debates over changing the law. His brilliant Aristotelian logic led many an uncertain liberal from reform to repeal of the law as a superior course, both theologically and logically.

Instead of attacking the medical profession (especially the gynecological specialists) as cowards hiding behind an arbitrary and cruel law to avoid dealing with their patients' needs, we appealed to the medicine men's better professional instincts, offering the clergy as "patsies" to make referrals to their colleagues and absolve them of moral culpability and legal risk in their profession. It was not a role we bore without resentment, but our struggle was not against doctors but for women. Many an effort for social change has gone down the drain because it was more dramatic and exciting to fight real or mistaken enemies than to do drudge work as servants of a cause.

But social activists should also beware of the temptation to become exclusively preoccupied with a single issue like abortion. It is only one part of a much larger picture of family planning, population control, and ecological disaster. The danger of developing into an "expert" on a single issue or judging all political actions in terms of that one issue is the occupational disease of every social crusader-it's called myopia.

I don't believe for one moment that abortion is more important than self-determination for black communities, the struggle against the Indo-China war, fighting the draft, or working with Chavez. No one has more than a piece of the action--one small handle to turn so that suffering is eased, injustice undone, or priorities rearranged.

It's just that circumstances and providence put some of us in a particular battle at a particular time. I rejoiced when my colleagues in the church engaged other issues that were vital, knowing these were other dimensions of the same struggle. Surely the immensity and complexity of that struggle ought to save any wise activist from the arrogance that believes only one issue is important.

We also learned from our work that in making legal reform, experience with the problem is the most important index to how the law should be changed. The attitude of our clergy toward what changes should be made in the law emerged from our experience

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with women victimized by the law. Most of us were in favor of some liberalizing of the law when we began counseling, but within one year all our clergy believed passionately in the repeal of the law. It quickly became apparent that prestigious professionals, such as the members of the American Law Institute, were concerned with legal niceties and the appearance of reforming the law-but lawyers and others serving on that judicious body had no personal experiences with women in need of abortions!

The political pragmatists warned us that coming out and battling for repeal of the law was politically naive and practically hopeless. But our work with thousands of women taught us that anything less than repeal would be liberal window-dressing covering a deadly status quo: the public would be conned by the appearance of change. Of the 10,000 women who went through our counseling service in New York City, only 5 to 10 percent would have qualified under any proposed liberalization of the abortion law.

We learned that reform is often the enemy of real change, and for the products of Consciousness II this is a very hard lesson. We are too quickly satisfied with easy reforms, deluding ourselves into believing that we've really changed something when conservative legislators begrudgingly shift slightly the burden of an oppressive law. Even those of us who consider ourselves political realists ought no longer to be bought off with that empty promissory note.

A related lesson we have learned (and should have known) is that changing the law doesn't cure social ills; it simply removes the legal encumbrances. Two obstacles to a free and fair implementation of the law remain: prejudiced minds and a whole health delivery system (doctors, nurses, hospitals) that is unsympathetic toward, and even resists, any change in attitude and practice regarding abortion.

Laws may be changed overnight, but mores, morals, and taboos die very slowly and are not overcome by our winning repeal. Women wanting abortions will still feel guilty and ambivalent; doctors performing them will feel like they're violating the purpose of their medical practice; some, because of religious convictions, will feel like they are assisting in "murder." These psychological and social proscriptions will change much slower and will still impede the law.

The second unfinished struggle is the effort to gear up a gigantic, conservative and bureaucratic medical delivery system so as to insure all women an early, safe and reasonably low-cost abortion. Long

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after the law is passed this system will impede, delay, and even deny some women their legal right to an abortion.

And finally, there are those who will not admit that the law should stay on the books. The Roman Catholic Church and other allied organizations have been preparing legislators (especially Catholic ones) and providing financial resources for reversing the repeal action or crippling its intent with restrictive amendments. It perhaps would not be a rash prediction (though I hope I'm wrong) that the pleasant harmony of Protestant-Catholic relations will be shattered here in New York State by a bitter battle this year over the abortion repeal issue.

There are no final victories in legal reform without continuing vigilance on behalf of these hard-won liberties. Most of the states of this nation still have statutes that are in effect compulsory pregnancy laws, denying a woman the right to choose whether she wants to terminate her pregnancy. The Supreme Court has several abortion cases before it which may be decided late this year. But in the meantime there is work to be done, women to be helped, minds to be changed, laws to be repealed.

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Any clergy wanting to organize counseling services in their localities should contact the National Clergy Consultation Service, who will be happy to send a consultant to meet with any local group without charge. Requests may be directed to the Rev. Howard Moody, 55 Washington Square South, New York, New York 10012.