In 1967, Rev. Howard Moody, an American Baptist Minister in New York, organized a group of Ministers and Rabbis to provide abortion assistance. The clergy helped women find doctors, transportation and funding for abortions. The group grew quickly.
Pro-choice clergy in New York form the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion to assist women seeking abortions to find safe services.[snip] Within a year, the clergy service had 1,400 members throughout the nation.
In 1973, after the Roe v. Wade decision,
Mainline Protestant and Jewish leaders meet at the United Methodist Building in Washington, DC, to discuss the Roman Catholic Church’s pledge to overturn the new U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. This meeting, called by the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, leads to the formation of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights (RCAR).
The United Methodist tie was perhaps fitting, because the author of Roe v. Wade, Justice Blackmun, was a lifelong Methodist himself. The name of the group was changed to Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice in 1993, to make it clear that the group's mission included birth control advocacy.
Religious people, including Christians, have always been a mainstay of the movement for reproductive freedom. Dr. Hilda Standish, a birth control pioneer in the 1920s, was a prominent member of the United Church of Christ until her death at age 103 (and, incidentally, she continued to drive herself to church until age 99.)
Dr. Hilda Crosby Standish ran Connecticut's first birth control clinic at a time when it was against the law to operate the clinics or to practice or disseminate information about birth control.
That was in 1934, and the 1879 state law would remain in effect until 1965 when the United States Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting birth control was unconstitutional.
And then, of course, there was Dr. Tiller, a deacon killed while handing out bulletins at the church where he was an active member.
I'm not cherry-picking here. Religious people have been a cornerstone of the movement for reproductive freedom and health in the United States since its earliest days. The religious right are the Johnny-Come-Latelies to this issue, as ex-Fundamentalist Frank Schaefer explains in the Huffington Post::
In the late 1970s my evangelical pro-life leader father Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop (who soon become Surgeon General in the Reagan administration) went on the road with me taking the documentary antiabortion film series I produced and directed ( Whatever Happened to the Human Race?) to the evangelical public. The series and companion book eventually brought millions of heretofore non-political evangelical Americans into the antiabortion crusade. We personally also got people like Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan and countless Republican leaders involved in the "issue."
While the pro-choice religious movement has been open and outspoken, it has remained much lower-key than the anti-choice religious movement. Part of this is philosophical. Unlike the more-famous right-wing fundamentalist religious types, pro-choice religious people are not after money, power and adulation. Another reason for the comparative quiet of the religious pro-choice movement is practical: should abortion ever become illegal again, pro-choice clergy and other religious people will step back into the role they played in the 1960s, helping women in need obtain safe abortions. (In fact, in places like South Dakota, where abortion providers are scarce, they already do play that role.)
As for the diary on the rec list suggesting that we Christians are "running away" from our supposed ties to the anti-Choice movement (a movement forcibly grafted onto the faith in the 1980s by political opportunists), it is so sloppily written, poorly argued, and unresearched that it would require an entire diary to go into it. I chose to write this diary instead.
UPDATE: Thanks for the comments. I wanted to add a shout out to another religious abortion rights hero--Barnett Slepian, a doctor murdered in his home shortly after returning from his synagogue.