COMMENTARY: Planned Parenthood Has Long History of Clergy Support

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) In 1966, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America gave its highest honor _ the Margaret Sanger Award _ to a minister active in civil rights. This minister had served on a Planned Parenthood committee a decade earlier in his Southern city. In his acceptance speech, he directed his remarks […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In 1966, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America gave its highest honor _ the Margaret Sanger Award _ to a minister active in civil rights. This minister had served on a Planned Parenthood committee a decade earlier in his Southern city.

In his acceptance speech, he directed his remarks to the subject of justice. He noted that the civil rights movement _ then in full bloom _ would not have been as successful had it not been for the pioneering work of Sanger and the Planned Parenthood movement 30 years earlier. This speaker knew of what he spoke _ he was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.


If today most Americans are unaware of the support for Planned Parenthood by clergy like King, it is because the history of clergy support for reproductive justice for women has been eclipsed by a powerful anti-abortion movement that appears to have drowned out everything that happened before 1973.

My book, “Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances,” is an account of what happened before 1973.

In 1916, all American political parties and movements, and all religious institutions, agreed on one thing: Women should not have access to birth control. Some churches were opposed. Some were silent. But none of them was helping women.

Margaret Sanger took them all on. She opened a clinic in Brooklyn and distributed contraceptives. She was arrested and went to jail when she said she could not promise to obey a law she did not respect. Then in the 1920s, she took some of the thousands of letters she received from desperate women and began sharing them with clergy, appealing to their sense of justice.

In 1934, the American Episcopal Church became the first denomination to sanction birth control. Within a decade, most of the rest of Protestantism as well as Reform and Conservative Judaism followed.

In 1958, no New York City public hospital would give a contraceptive to anyone. There was no law against it; they just didn’t want to offend the Roman Catholic diocese of Manhattan. When a Jewish doctor in one of those hospitals was forbidden to give a contraceptive to a Lutheran woman who might not survive another pregnancy, the clergy _ the Protestant Ministers Council and the New York City Council of Rabbis _ made a public outcry. This resulted in the policy being changed.

In 1962, no one on welfare in the state of Maryland was allowed to receive birth control devices. The Planned Parenthood Clergy Advisory Board of Baltimore told the state board of welfare that while some religions considered contraception immoral, their religions considered it highly moral. Again, the clergy succeeded in changing the policy so that birth control could become available for married people.


In 1965, those same clergy won another victory. They argued that unmarried mothers were the forgotten souls in a society that cared little about them. They said that regardless of a fear of promiscuity, it was far more important to prevent the birth of unwanted children. In response to their claims, the Maryland Board of Welfare made contraception available to the unmarried.

In 1967, a group of New York City clergy announced (on the front page of The New York Times) that they would help women find abortions. This group, the Clergy Consultation on Abortion, quickly grew to a nationwide network of 1,400 or more ministers and rabbis who referred more than 100,000 women for abortions.

And when the state of New York legalized abortion in 1970, these clergy knew that women would be coming by the thousands to New York City seeking abortions. They also knew that the city was not prepared. Accordingly, these clergy opened the first legal abortion clinic in America. It provided abortion services for the next 13 months until enough clinics opened to meet the need. It also lowered the price from $600 to $200 and provided abortions free to those who could not pay.

“Sacred Work” makes it clear that clergy did all these things because they believed that these were matters of justice. For males who would never face the responsibility of pregnancy to make all the rules as to what women would be allowed to do is as obvious an injustice as one race making the rules for the lives of another race. Martin Luther King Jr. saw the connection and so do the thousands of clergy who continue today to support the work of Planned Parenthood.

MO/PH END RNS

(Tom Davis is an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ, chair of the Clergy Advisory Board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and author of “Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances,” published by Rutgers University Press.)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a photo of Davis and the jacket cover of his book.


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