Moloch’s Clerics
Sacred Work by Tom Davis
Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances
Rutgers University Press, 2005
(261 pages, $24.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
A stalking-horse is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a horse, either real or painted on a canvas, behind which a hunter conceals himself to get close to his prey. For the past 70 years, Planned Parenthood (PP) has been using willing members of the Christian clergy as a stalking-horse to make their revolutionary idea of sexuality morally acceptable.
Tom Davis, the author of Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances, was ordained in the United Church of Christ in 1960 and taught for decades at Skidmore College, where he was also chaplain. In the 1990s, he sat on the national board of PP and now serves on the board of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and on PP’s Clergy Advisory Board. He assures us that this story has never been told before.
A Religious Duty
Davis admires “the Planned Parenthood clergy” (as he calls them) for having been “a major force behind a transformation of society’s view of women seeking abortions,” and even for being a step ahead of PP itself in the push for abortions: “It was the clergy who were earliest in the field.” Of course, they were: The mask is always foremost.
It started on May 22, 1967, with a front-page article in The New York Times in which the Clergy Consultation Service (CCS) announced that it would help women get abortions. They declared that it was a “religious duty” for them to assist “all women with problem pregnancies,” that the present laws compelled “the birth of unwanted, unloved and often deformed children,” and that “although there may be embryo life in the fetus, there is no living child upon whom the crime of murder can be committed.” They assured the public that abortionists were motivated by “compassion” and lived “by the highest standards of religion.”
Soon its members were working seven-hour days persuading women that an abortion was not “the most horrible thing in the world,” and by 1969 they were referring 10,000 women a year for abortions. Since it was already legal to provide an abortion to save a woman’s life, in December 1969 they began planning to open a facility where any woman might have an abortion on the “legal grounds” that two psychiatrists certified she was “suicidal.”
“The subterfuge of the two psychiatrists” became unnecessary in July 1970 when state legislators repealed New York’s abortion laws. The CCS now opened their own abortion facility on East 73rd Street and “provided almost all of its referrals.” It remained open 16 hours a day, seven days a week, doing 100 abortions a day, usually for $200. In the first year alone, it aborted 26,000 unborn children.
In the five years leading up to Roe v. Wade, the core group of 21 clergy expanded to about 2,000 clergy and referred over 100,000 women for abortions. After Roe v. Wade, the clergy’s influence on PP waned for 20 years, since by the end of 1973 “most mainline Protestant and Jewish denominations had taken pro-choice stands and were on record as opposing any movement to criminalize abortion.”
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
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