A Thinning Line of Defense
Like many, I suppose, I heaved a sigh of relief when 43 years ago today -- Jan. 22, 1973 -- the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Roe v. Wade, which recognized the constitutionality of certain reproductive rights for women.
My relief came in knowing that my days as a volunteer counselor for an organization called the Michigan Clergy Counseling Service for Problem Pregnancies had come to an end. We would no longer be involved in what was essentially an underground network of clergy and physicians -- the former guiding a woman or a couple in the tortuous consideration of abortion at some risk of ecclesiastical discipline, the latter taking the real chance of prosecution in actually performing the procedure.
I had been recruited -- but it felt like conscription -- into the counseling service by a fellow priest who was then on the staff of a prominent southeastern Michigan parish. I was trained for the work by a battery of psychologists, physicians and other more experienced clergy. Once counselors were deemed ready and able to do the counseling, their telephone numbers were made widely available in some manner I cannot now recall.
I think it was 1969 when I began, so I must have been at it -- along with being pastor of an inner-city Detroit parish -- for the almost four years until Roe v. Wade ushered reproductive rights out of the back alleys and on to main street.
As lately I have reflected upon that time, I came to identify what made me uneasy with the work the whole while. First, I have to say that most of my appointments were with couples, few with women by themselves. Second, each man involved seemed to me to be very solicitous of his partner's feelings, supportive of what her decision would be.
Several times I was asked if I would hear and bless a couple's marriage vows. And twice I did, because it was clear to me that, in any event, marriage was in the cards for each of them and that -- abortion or no abortion -- they were truly in love. As it turned out, one of the couples at whose wedding I presided had decided not to seek termination of their unexpected pregnancy. The second decided otherwise for reasons I fully understood and appreciated.
Still, the counseling put me in the position of deciding whether or not I would, in the end, refer such couples or individuals to the place and persons who would honor their choice of termination. I just didn't think that I had or should have had such authority. The result was that I listened intently and at length to what a couple had to say, what they were struggling with and how deciding one way or another would affect the rest of their lives. Only then did I give them contact information and told them that what they did with it was not my business and that what they had told me was under the seal.
Only once in those years did I make a judgment, and that after listening for more than 90 minutes. I found myself disagreeing with their end-point decision, and that was to take the child to full term and try their best to raise her or him. The difficulty was that almost assuredly the baby would have no chance of developing anything close to cognitive ability and would spend her or his life in a vegetative state. I strongly urged them to allow me to refer them to a physician who would, on my recommendation, consider surgical termination of the pregnancy. They rejected my offer, but we remained for many years in contact. Eventually, I presided at their baby's funeral when she was not yet six months old. The couple went on to have a healthy child or two and, last I knew, all were well and happy.
Some years later as a journalist, I had cause to read that 1973 opinion. No lawyer by a long shot, I thought even then that its tentative nature and not spectacular prose might eventually damn its existence. My reading of it came as the Moral Majority was becoming a political force, having helped to elect Ronald Reagan.
The late Jerry Falwell, the founder of said Majority, was, as once he declared with no apparent sense of irony, "death on abortion." Suddenly in the early 1980s, the reproductive rights recognized in Roe v. Wade began to come under attack. Right to Life emerged as a potent anti-abortion force. In the years since the door was creaked open a few inches by the court's ruling, forces have materialized that would slam it shut for good.
It appears that the Supreme Court as now configured could well provide the foot for the slamming. A weird civic piety has grown like a strange fungus around reproductive rights, and the existence of Planned Parenthood, for which termination of pregnancies is a very small piece of its work, is threatened.* Politicians on the right come out swinging against the organization every chance they get.
I do not want to think that such networks as the Michigan Clergy Counseling Service for Problem Pregnancies once was -- operating clandestinely with clergy risking ruinous opprobrium and physicians taking chances that acting on their informed professional judgments could land them in jail -- would have to be reconstructed all these years on.
The greater crime would be for the nation to snatch back 43 years' worth of quasi freedom women in this country have had to make decisions about their own bodies.
That said, I express my profound gratitude to the mothers of my four children and those of my five grandchildren for allowing nature to take its course. Those mothers had solid support behind them all the way. They were and are the fortunate ones.
I worry about those not so fortunate in the event that a reactionary Congress undoes Roe v. Wade with new legislation, or should the four enemies of reproductive rights on the Supreme Court bench convince a fifth to join them in overturning the 1973 ruling, thereby creating a new purpose for the scarlet letter.
*Disclosure: I served on the board of directors of Planned Parenthood of Michigan in the early 1990s and was proud to receive its Margaret Sanger Award as a "A Tireless Advocate of Women's Reproductive Rights."
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