The Two (three, four?) R’s: Reproductive Rights and the Role of Religion

As we go into the Easter weekend (and Happy Purim as well!), I (as someone raised Catholic) will attend a Catholic mass with my family tomorrow. I will be preached to by a priest with whom I have fundamental disagreements about some essentials on how people should live their lives, which will make me think about the unrealistic strictures placed on people by their religion, and of states that bow to the pressures of religion to restrict abortion, gay marriage (here’s lookin’ at you, Poland), and effective sexual health education. Nonetheless, in the face of all these more depressive thoughts, I think it a fitting time to remember that there are also thousands of members of the Protestant, Jewish, and yes, even some renegade Catholic clergy, who are working for women’s reproductive health and rights.

On March 10th, a panel of religious leaders joined Democracy Now! to discuss their work in this field. The panelists included:

Margaret Roberts, Co-President and CEO, Planned Parenthood Mohawk Hudson

Rabbi Dennis Ross, director of Concerned Clergy for Choice for the Education Fund of Family Planning Advocates of New York State, where he coordinates an interfaith network of 1,000 clergy in support of reproductive rights.

Rev. Donna Schaper, Senior Minister of the Judson Memorial Church

Rev. Tom Davis, author of the book Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances. He is also a board member of he Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

 

Go here for the full text.

 

Some especially interesting remarks included Rev. Donna Schaper’s description of helping women mostly from Chicago’s South Side shuttle to New York in the pre-Roe days for abortions, like a mini-Underground Railroad:

“I do go way back on this. Before Roe v. Wade, there was a group of clergy organized, in a way, called Clergy Consultation. And I’m proud to say that my predecessor at Judson, the Reverend Howard Moody, was the founder of that organization. I happened to be in seminary in Chicago at that time, and it was my privilege to work for Clergy Consultation and to counsel women Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons from 4:00 to 8:00 in church basements to help them get to New York City to get an abortion, because it wasn’t legal in Illinois at that time. And so, we helped people who had never flown in an airplane before fly in an airplane. We helped people make moral choices about their lives and their families, and I was very proud to be a part of that. “

Also, Rev. Tom Davis gave a great recap of the history of clergy involvement in reproductive rights:

“Well, in biblical terms, the central command is to love the neighbor, and in social terms, that love always has to be translated into justice, and justice is very complicated sometimes. But when Margaret Sanger began and sought the support of the clergy, for example, typically in one year, 1916, when she began, three million American women had babies, and 18,411 of them died in childbirth. Now, that wasn’t just due to the medical care of the times. It was due to the fact that many of those women didn’t want to be in childbirth. But the law said birth control was illegal and that anyone who supported a woman was in trouble. And that law was not a joke. People were sent to prison under the Comstock laws.
In time, Margaret Sanger was able to persuade the clergy in a lot of denominations to move away from their somewhat in a state of indifference and become supportive of a woman’s right not to have children if she did not want to have it. The Catholic Church fought against birth control coming into public hospitals and welfare agencies all through the 1920s through the 1950s and ’60s. And in each of those fights, the Protestant clergy and Jewish rabbis lined up on the side of making contraception legal and making it accessible in public facilities. It was long struggles, but they finally were able to prevail.”

And Rabbi Dennis Ross provided a nice rundown on Judaism’s stance towards these rights:

“Well, within Judaism, there appears to be a very, very strong consensus that the health and the safety of the woman has to come first, which is why, in a sense, so many clergy are coming forward to support Governor Spitzer’s Reproductive Health (Ed: RHPPA) initiative, the act that you talked about a little bit earlier with JoAnn Smith, because this is a law that will protect the health and safety of women in a very difficult political and legal time here in the United States.”

(Ed’s Apology: I apologize for the exorbitant alliteration in this post’s title.)