Criminal - The Procedure

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

In 1967, a very unlikely group of individuals gathered to quietly break the law and help facilitate abortions. They established a phone number. When you called it, a recording of a woman's voice would tell you what to do next. Who was behind this number? The Clergy Consultation Service, an underground network of ministers and rabbis who wanted to help people access safe abortions in a time before it was legal. We first aired our conversations with some of them in 2017. And after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year, we decided to call some of them back. Take our survey: vox.com/podsurvey Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey

involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. I'm Finley Schaaf, a retired Methodist minister. It's reverend.

I practiced in four churches in New York City for 40 years. And a woman that I didn't know and was not a member of my church came to see me in my office. I can still see her sitting there. And she told me that her husband raped their daughter, a teenage girl. And the daughter became pregnant. And did I know where her daughter could get an abortion? And I didn't. I did not know what to do or what to say. I didn't know. I couldn't help her. And she left. Before the 1970s, it was very hard to get a legal abortion in this country.

Different states, even different hospitals, had different rules, rules that kept shifting over time. But for the most part, you could not get an abortion unless you were going to die. Connecticut was the first state to criminalize the procedure in 1821, and state by state, the rest of the country followed suit. In 1902, the Journal of the American Medical Association endorsed a popular practice among doctors. They'd refused to treat a woman suffering from abortion complications until she, quote, confessed to breaking the law. Wealthy women would leave the country and fly to Japan, where abortion was legal.

But a woman without the resources to fly around the world had to find another way. Some tried to induce a miscarriage on their own. Most methods at the time were incredibly dangerous. The other option was to pay someone to help them quietly. Maybe a doctor, but maybe not. Oftentimes women would be given instructions like, meet me at X street corner. This is Gillian Frank, historian of sexuality and religion at Princeton.

And then they would get in a car, be blindfolded, get up on the table, sometimes be put in stirrups, and have the procedure performed on them. With the blindfold on, never see the doctor's face, and sometimes the procedure would work, but often it would mutilate a woman. They would leave her without an abortion and take her money. Some women would find themselves sexually assaulted by the person offering the abortion, whether they were skilled or unskilled. First of all, she had to have a password to get into the place where the abortion was going to happen. She was met by a man with a mask on. Reverend Barbara Gerlach is talking about a friend who got an underground abortion in New York City.

So she couldn't even see the face of the man who was providing the abortion and was sent off with nothing. So there was, it was just very dangerous. I mean, the numbers of women who were dying. You know, some coroner reported as early as 1951 that he had seen 1,200 women die in the course of his career. And this was a national, I mean, this had national implications. Women were dying because of these, what were called back alley or backstreet abortions. Women who'd gotten hurt by a back alley abortionist or by trying to induce a miscarriage would often wind up in the emergency room because of an infection or hemorrhaging. As doctors were confronted with the reality of this situation,

some felt justified in breaking the law to perform a safe abortion. A sociologist named Carol Joffe gave them a name, doctors of conscience. But then, after World War II, there was a shift. Men returned home and went back to work. Many women who'd been working stopped working. A record number of babies were born. This was the so-called baby boom. And what many employers would do is that they would fire women after they became pregnant to enforce these norms.

And this is called pronatalism, the sort of idea that everyone should have children, and this is pushing the baby boom. Families were having three and four children in quick succession. Birth control wasn't easy to get. Abstinence was encouraged. Illegal abortions increased, and so did the number of deaths and injuries. In order to get a safe abortion, some pregnant women would go to a psychiatrist and say they were going to kill themselves. A handbook even circulated to teach women how to fake a suicide attempt, and if they were convincing enough, a psychiatrist might refer them for an abortion. In 1962, a psychiatrist named Sidney Bolter wrote an essay in the American Journal of Psychiatry,

warning doctors to stay out of it. He wrote, We know that women's main role here on earth is to conceive chapter, Leviticus 19. It's called the holiest code in the whole Bible. It's in the middle of all these rules about priests and what they should do ritually. Rabbi Harold Kudan of Glencoe, Illinois. And it talks about how we should act in terms of others, the stranger, the widow, the orphan.

One of the most famous is love your neighbor as yourself. But I thought today, that is not the most important sentence. The most important sentence is, do not stand idly by the blood of your brother. We cannot be idle when our neighbor is in distress. We just never questioned the fact that motherhood should be a free choice. A woman shouldn't be compelled to become a mother if she didn't want to be. We had pastoral confidentiality.

We could talk to women in a way that our conversations were privileged. And I thought, well, this is something that I can do. I can help women. A number of clergy and a number of congregations began to see abortion as a choice that women should make. It was a difficult choice, one that she should struggle with. But they believed that, you know, we need to prioritize the people who are already living

and that there are higher laws that need to be followed because the consequences will be tragic for women and their families otherwise. They decided to take matters into their own hands, secretly. And women seeking an abortion found help in a very unlikely place. Rabbis and ministers all over the country formed an underground network of doctors willing to provide safe abortions. They called themselves the Clergy Consultation Service. And in 1967, they got to work. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

The clergy consultation service was helmed by Howard Moody, senior minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York. He held secret meetings in church basements and traveled around the country to meet with clergy in their homes and explain the plan. They also needed to get the word out to women. So in May of 1967, they issued a public statement. Parts of it were published on the front page of the New York Times. They wrote, we believe it's our religious duty to give aid and assistance to all women with problem pregnancies.

And they listed a phone number women could call. And that phone number was hitched up to an electronic answering device. And the tape on the machine would have a woman's voice recorded on it. And it would simply tell them the names and phone numbers and times in which a clergy was available for counseling. And it would give them different locations. It would say, for example, if you were calling in New York, they would say, okay, so-and-so is available in the Bronx, so-and-so is available in Brooklyn, so-and-so is available in the Bronx, so-and-so is available in Brooklyn, so-and-so is available in Manhattan. And then the woman would call that minister or rabbi directly to make an appointment to see that person in their office. And so when a woman came in, she would have to get a note in advance saying that she was pregnant and how far along.

And then she would come to the office, a clergy would sit down with her, and they would review options. Do you want to continue with being pregnant and have the baby and keep the baby? Do you want to adopt the baby out? Or do you want to have an abortion? And if they chose abortion, and most women came in knowing they wanted abortions and choosing this, the clergy would have a list of providers ready, and they would help women plan every detail of their trip. The trips would never be in the same state or city in which they met with the clergy. And the reason they did this was their lawyers had advised them, saying,

if you send them over state lines, it makes prosecution more difficult. If you send them out of the country, it makes it even more so. Were they putting themselves in an illegal threat? So some states made it illegal to even talk about or give abortion information or referral information like Florida. And so it wasn't just giving an abortion, but talking about abortion, giving abortion information

that made this a criminal enterprise. And so clergy felt that they were taking great risks. They worried that their phones were being tapped. They would say, don't say the word abortion over the phone. They would say, use the word problem pregnancy. And they were worried, with good reason, that they were being surveyed by police or district attorneys. We'll be right back. A seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson,

the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. The Clergy Consultation Service network grew quickly. They started getting calls from clergy all over the country. Some wanted their names on the list, but others weren't so open. It depended on the congregation, and it depended upon their location. Some were wide open, and so senior ministers often would do this, for example, in Unitarian congregations with the full knowledge and support of their congregations.

Other clergy did it covertly, kept their heads down, did the referrals, and some paid the price. Some ministers were fired from their posts, never to work as a minister again. There's a couple of cases in Iowa where ministers were fired because their congregation felt that they were doing practices that were unethical or immoral and that they didn't agree with. But, you know, for the most part, I believe that most congregations had some inkling. The book of James speaks of religion being represented by the care of the orphans and the widows and their afflictions. Unwanted, unintended pregnancies and affliction.

It was a natural call, in my sense, to engage in this kind of work. I did. This is Reverend Robert Heyer. He was a pastor in Cleveland, Ohio in 1969 when he helped an Ohio woman visit a doctor in Massachusetts for an abortion. My attorney had said that you aren't breaking the law. At that time, the doctors were, and they were taking a great risk. Rave for them that they were willing to take such a risk. But he said, you know, what you're doing is kind of at the edge, but you're not actually in violation of the law talking to counselees. But it didn't work out that way for me. On her drive back to Ohio, the woman had a lot of cramping. She pulled over

and went into a police station. She ended up telling the police the whole story, including the names of both the doctor and Reverend Hare. I answered the phone call by the bedside at 6.30 or 7 in the morning one day. It was Associated Press wanting confirmation that I had been criminally indicted in Massachusetts. I had never heard of this. Didn't know what to do about it, but I could hear the ticker tapes running in the background. What were you being charged with?

I was charged with aiding and abetting a criminal abortion. Reverend Hare fought the indictment for years, all the way up to the state Supreme Court, until the case was eventually dismissed. How did the CCS know that the doctors they were working with were trustworthy? They would send female members of the CCS or their assistants to pose as pregnant women. Gillian Frank. And interview and investigate the doctors. They would check out where the clinic was. They would see if it was in a safe part of town.

They would check out the sterility of the instruments. They would even be up on the table right before the procedure was about to be performed, before they revealed their identity. And so that was the initial assessment. But that spot assessment was followed up by inviting each and every female client who they helped to write a review of the abortion provider. Was he kind? Did he charge you what he said he was going to charge you? Did he have sterile instruments? Assess everything, tell us everything. And there are these long, detailed letters from women who took them up on this.

And so if there was a negative report, if something funny was going on, they would get a call from the clergy. And basically because the clergy were this mass referral system, they had economic leverage. They convinced doctors to reduce their fees and sometimes to waive them altogether. Individual clergy reported using discretionary funds to help women make trips out of the country. Rabbis in New England remember congregants pitching in to offset costs. The clergy were able to find so many doctors who did such good jobs

and so many medical providers, because sometimes they used non-licensed physicians, who also did fantastic jobs, and how many women came away not only unharmed, but feeling that the procedure was safe, quick, efficient, and affordable. After a few years, the clergy consultation service had operations all over the country. In some places, there were Roman Catholic priests or nuns in the group. Many of the branches are helping hundreds and hundreds of people per week. It's a profound amount of people that are coming to them for help. The numbers of women coming to them made them more confident about what they were doing. They applied pressure to hospitals and lawmakers and wrote into newspapers,

arguing that the law was not and never had been enforceable. They wrote, The public debate on abortion laws is escalating. It is not important any longer to play a numbers game about illegal abortions. We do not believe in statistical morality. They argued that abortion laws disproportionately hurt poor women, especially women of color, writing, quote, the present law, by the way in which it's circumvented, is highly discriminatory, allowing remedy only for those who have access to money and private doctors and private hospitals.

Because clergy were respectable, because they had a lot of social status, because the meetings they have can be seen as privileged and not subject to legal scrutiny, they're in a perfect position to help women on the ground, but also to create a mechanism to challenge abortion laws. And so from there, it snowballs. We'll be right back. approach. According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and building sustainable eating habits. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's

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And it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. In 1970, New York repealed its criminal abortion law,

and the Clergy Consultation Service could send women to New York for legal abortions. Okay, what we did at Stevens, and this was true of women all around the state, particularly the women at Stevens, when the dorm opened at 5.30, we would take them to St. Louis. Reverend William Kirby was a university chaplain first at Stevens College in Columbia, Missouri, and then later at Princeton. They would get on an American Airlines flight to Dobbs Ferry in New York. Dobbs Ferry would have a limousine waiting for them at LaGuardia and take them to Dobbs Ferry. We had trained the

Dobbs Ferry staff and doctors. We had a nurse on our staff who would go to the clinics and train doctors. The woman would be there and get the abortion fairly quickly and then have a couple of hours to see if she was not going to hemorrhage. Then they would take her back to the plane. She would be on the five o'clock American Airlines flight back to St. Louis. A car would pick her up and she'd be back in the dormitory within the same day by 10.30. And subsequently, we sent our nurse. American Airlines allowed us to teach the flight attendants on that 5 o'clock flight back from LaGuardia to St. Louis that they may have a woman there who had had an abortion and might be hemorrhaging, and she taught them what to do.

So how many women would you say you supervised or oversaw putting on that flight? I estimated myself at 3,000, and we were... I don't know the answer to that question, frankly. I told my secretary, when the cops come, call my lawyer first and my wife second. The legislature in Jefferson City, Missouri, called me before a Senate hearing. Because in Missouri, if you even pointed toward the airplane and suggested abortion, you were guilty. I took the Fifth Amendment many times that night. Why don't you think more people know about CCS and what happened?

We kept no records. We weren't taunting the police. And so nobody knew about us except people who wanted an abortion. And the women knew about us in the community.

By 1972, the Clergy Consultation Service was operating in more than 600 locations across the country. The next year, when Roe v. Wade granted women the constitutional right to have an abortion, some clergy shifted their focus to making sure women had access to contraception. Others went back to normal life, leading their congregations. Do we have any numbers about how many women were served?

In some ways, it's impossible to know for sure exactly how many women obtained an abortion through the CCS. And so it depends how you do the math. I would say conservatively, they helped upward of a quarter of a million women. And I think that because they kept such poor records, or they would destroy records out of necessity, we don't really have the exact number. How did you hear about this? I discovered them by accident. I was looking at the legislative records, and I'm looking at these debates in the newspaper articles, and I keep seeing mention of the Clergy Consultation Service.

And I was so surprised. I said, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't sync up with any of the stories I've heard. I thought naively at the time that religious folk were conservative and opposed abortion and that abortion rights activists were secular. And it turns out that this story is much more complicated. In May of 2017, the surviving members of the Clergy Consultation Service

met at Judson Memorial Church in New York City to mark the 50th anniversary of their formation. They came from all over the country. Most of them had never met in person before. There was a church service open to the public, and the clergy consultation members sat in the first two rows and stood up to be recognized one by one as their names were called. Hello? Hello, this is Phoebe Judge calling.

Yes. How are you? Good, very good. Thank you. The last time we talked to you was in New York at the 50-year reunion. It was a celebration. Yes, I recall that. And here we are again. Yes, yes. Unbelievable. overturned Roe v. Wade in June, we called a few of the members of the Clergy Consultation Service who we had talked to back in 2017, including Rabbi Harold Kudan.

We had fought a battle against an unjust system, and so we thought we had accomplished something really significant. We never thought that we would be faced with this situation. Yes, here we are. I was extremely distressed. Reverend Barbara Gerlach. That it would be overturned completely was shocking. I thought that battle was won.

It's going to just be more pain for people. Reverend Finley Schaaf. How old are you now? I'm 92. Yeah. What is it like at this point in your life to see this happen again? I feel very kind of helpless and just sit back and watch it, but it's discouraging. I wish I could be more hopeful, but I'm not. As a retired minister at this point, I am not in a position to be one of the cutting edge people on the action edge of this.

But I do think that there will be systems of underground assistance that will draw upon some of the experience that we had in the time prior to Roe. The fight goes on, and that's why we're here, is to fight for justice all the time. I think that the conversations were so memorable that we had with you and other members of the Clergy Consultation Service, because we don't automatically assume that religious leaders will be the ones helping women break the law. Well, the religious leaders breaking the law, is that really a new thing? We did that in the Civil Rights Movement. I was in Selma, and I recall that very, very vividly when Dr. King said that we had to accept the fact that we were breaking the law.

So breaking the law for a just cause, I think, is something that is inherent in the religious cause. The experience of counseling women around difficult reproductive choices was one of the most profound experiences that I had. It was always an honor, a sense of being on holy ground where people were making very deep and important decisions about their lives. And I think anyone who wants to do this work needs to be deeply grounded in their own value system and commitment so that they are willing to bear the consequences that they could experience if they, you know, are prosecuted for their actions.

I'm afraid at my age that I will not see the reinstatement of women's rights in this area. I don't think in my time. So that's very sad. But at least I've seen a lot of changes in our world. And we have to remember that things do get better, and I think it will get better. I have not given up hope. Unfortunately, it will take time, and there will be many deadly consequences in the intervening years. I feel sorry for those that are going to suffer in the years ahead.

And they will suffer. But I think ultimately we will win. Maybe, as I said, not in my lifetime. But as Dr. King always said, you know, the arc of justice. So I think that this is going to happen. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Libby Foster, and Samantha Brown. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. If you like the show, tell a friend or leave us a review. It means a lot.

We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at Criminal underscore Podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation.

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