USA – ‘Abortion Was Not a Problem for Me’ — Remembering the Clergy Consultation Service

A network of brave clergy contradicts the conflation of religion with anti-abortion politics.

Cody McDevitt
August 12, 2026

In recent months, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution describing abortion as sinful; Vice President JD Vance, comparing abortion to child sacrifice, told March for Life attendees that the nation faces a choice between remaining “under God” or returning to paganism; and Pope Leo XIV told the Spanish Parliament that defending “the unborn” is a “goal of civilization.” Together, these messages reinforce a familiar impression: that religion and support for abortion rights have always stood in opposition. But history tells a more complicated story.

Long before Roe v. Wade, ministers and rabbis across the nation quietly helped women obtain abortions that were safer than the alternatives. Some challenged abortion laws that endangered women’s lives. Others saw helping women navigate unwanted pregnancies not as a rejection of their religious commitment, but as an expression of it. The history of Philadelphia’s Clergy Consultation Service offers a window into that largely forgotten chapter of American religious life.

Continued: https://religiondispatches.org/2026/08/12/abortion-was-not-problem-me-remembering-clergy-consultation-service

USA – Abortions Are Rising—Even After Dobbs. A New Book Explains Why.

“It’s a story of resistance and resilience and hope.”

Julianne McShane, Mother Jones
April 17, 2025

New data released this week reaffirmed a seemingly paradoxical reality of the post-Roe v. Wade era: Abortion rates have continued to rise despite the increasing restrictions nationwide.

The latest data, compiled by the abortion rights research and policy organization the Guttmacher Institute, shows that throughout 2024, clinicians provided more than one million abortions in states without total abortion bans, a slight increase compared to 2023. A closer look at the data reflects how healthcare providers and patients have adapted to changing circumstances—which have made access both more difficult and, in some ways, easier—since the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revoking the constitutional right to abortion.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/abortions-are-rising-even-after-dobbs-a-new-book-explains-why/

USA – “We Never Assumed Anything”: A Lifetime of Providing Abortion Care

In their new book We Choose To, Dr. Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd reflect on their decades helping women who needed abortions—before, during, and after Roe.

Regina Mahone
November 29, 2024

Five years ago, when Curtis Boyd, MD, and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, PhD, RN, set out to write a book about their lives and 50-year-career providing abortion care in Texas and New Mexico, Roe was still the law of the land. But their book, which was published in September, made its debut two years after that landmark case was overturned and just a few short months before Donald J. Trump will retake the White House. As they explain in the Afterword of We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe (Disruption Books), the work they devoted their lives to, expanding access to abortions, is being undone—and once Trump is back in power, that reversal will only accelerate. We can expect that Trump will seek out ways to impose international abortion bans like the global gag rule, and his supporters would like to see him enforce the Comstock Act, which would ban mailing abortion pills. Knowing all of that, Glenna’s question in the Afterword hits hard: “Why did we bother?”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/curtis-glenna-boyd-abortion-provider-interview/

USA – An illegal abortion killed my great-great-grandmother. A century later, what’s changed?

Opinion: I'm 16 and frightened by what might happen to me if I were to get pregnant against my will.

Sophia Rick Yudell
July 16, 2023

In 1921, my great-great-grandmother Anna died because abortions were illegal. She got pregnant — with her 11th child — when she was 40 years old, a full-time homemaker, married to a produce peddler in New York City.

The family was already poor. I imagine that she feared she couldn’t feed another child.

Continued: https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2023/07/16/illegal-abortion-killed-great-great-grandmother-future-roe/70408178007/

16.07.2023

Opinion

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Human Rights

Echoing history, reliance upon travel rises for abortion care post-Dobbs

Restricted access adds logistical, emotional and financial burdens for patients, advocates say

BY: KELCIE MOSELEY-MORRIS
JUNE 22, 2023

When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision one year ago, people of childbearing age in states across the country suddenly faced what seemed like a new prospect — having to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles from home to get an abortion.

But historians say it is merely continuing a long tradition of pregnant people seeking out the sometimes lifesaving care they need wherever it can be found, and other people helping them along the way.

Continued: https://missouriindependent.com/2023/06/22/echoing-history-reliance-upon-travel-rises-for-abortion-care-post-dobbs/

USA – Meet the Religious Crusaders Fighting for Abortion Rights

Christian conservatives worked to topple Roe. Can members of different faiths save abortion access?

ABBY VESOULIS, Mother Jones
FEBRUARY 17, 2023

The Torah tells its followers to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” so that’s what Lisa Sobel, a devout Jewish woman from Louisville, Kentucky, set out to do.

It wasn’t easy. First, she endured three years of infertility. Then, she and her husband embarked on a $50,000 in vitro fertilization (IVF) journey, during which they had to discard four embryos before implantation because of genetic abnormalities. Finally, in April 2019, Sobel delivered a healthy baby girl. Immediately after, she began hemorrhaging and almost died.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/religious-clergy-fighting-for-abortion-rights/

Before Roe, a Baptist Preacher Performed Abortions in Secret. Now He’s Helping Texans.

Dr. Curtis Boyd’s career encapsulates our long-fought abortion wars.

CECILIA NOWELL
Dec 14, 2022

The first thing Dr. Curtis Boyd did when he arrived at work one cloudy Monday morning in January was turn on his radio. It was 1973, and Boyd, an ordained Baptist minister, had been providing underground abortions for five years, most recently out of a mountaintop house in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The only people who knew the location of his clinic were members of the Clergy Consultation Service, a national network of faith leaders that discretely connected patients to reliable, and safe, doctors. As far as Boyd knew, he was the network’s only provider in the Southwest.

A group of Texas women had flown in that morning for appointments, but Boyd was distracted. A Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade was expected any day now. He kept one ear tuned to the news as he readied himself for the day. When the story broke that the Supreme Court had recognized the right to an abortion, Boyd and his nurse “looked at each other somewhat in shock” and then embraced. “It’s over, it’s over, thank God at last it’s over,” he says. He no longer had to live in fear that he—or worse, one of his patients—might end up in jail.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/12/curtis-boyd-abortion-clergy-consultation-service-preacher-texas-new-mexico-roe/

Before Roe, Faith Leaders Helped Texans Get Illegal Abortions. What Will They Do Now?

Progressive religious leaders are mulling their options to help women who seek abortions—and some are willing to risk lawsuits and jail time.

By Ana Marie Cox
October 24, 2022

Most political observers know Texas as a key battleground for conservative Christian victories in banning abortion. But progressive people of faith in the state have a long history of fostering resistance to the assault on abortion access. Texas was a major hub in the Clergy Consultation Service, cofounded in New York City by Dallas native Howard Moody in 1967 to help women find competent and compassionate doctors willing to perform abortions. In 1970, Texas attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee started the road to their Supreme Court triumph in the Roe v. Wade abortion-rights case by garnering support from the Women’s Alliance at First Unitarian Church of Dallas. Today, liberal faith leaders across the state—some of whom began transporting pregnant Texans to New Mexico clinics after the Legislature passed a six-week ban on abortion last year—are assessing the still-hazy legal limits for helping women in a post-Dobbs world.

Continued: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/faith-leaders-helping-texans-get-abortions/

USA – People Helping Women Get Abortions Pre-Roe Were Heroes. It Wasn’t Enough.

Stories like the Rev. Robert Hare’s are incredibly moving. But what we need is for abortion to be legal.

BY GILLIAN FRANK
JUNE 21, 2022

She was a 23-year-old white unmarried schoolteacher. She was also pregnant, and she would inevitably be fired from her teaching job when her employers found out. It was April 1969, elective abortion was illegal in Ohio, and unwed motherhood was a source of great shame.

Desperate, the young schoolteacher reached out for help to a recently formed religious organization, the Cleveland Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion. The Plain Dealer, one of Cleveland’s major newspapers, had spotlighted the CCCSA, as did a slew of other news outlets across Ohio and the United States. Through these laudatory stories, Ohioans heard a startling announcement: an ecumenical group of local Protestant and Jewish clergy had announced that it was their “pastoral responsibility [to] give aid and assistance to women with problem pregnancies,” and promised to help them find an abortion, even if that meant breaking the law.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/clergy-consultation-service-pre-roe-abortion-access-history.html

21.06.2022

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Lester Kinsolving

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I Helped Women Get Abortions in Pre-Roe America

To think we’re going back to that world makes makes me angry and sad.

By Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Atlantic
June 4, 2022

When I was 16, I helped desperate women get abortions. This was in the sliver of time between New York State’s 1970 legalization of abortion and the Roe v. Wade decision three years later, which allowed women in every state to choose whether to continue their pregnancies. I answered phones for the Women’s Abortion Project at its headquarters in a shabby, unheated meeting space of the Women’s Liberation Center, on West 22nd Street in Manhattan.

Before New York made abortion legal, the project had been part of an underground, directing women to two or three gynecologists who, for reasons of conscience, wanted to perform safe abortions. From 1970 onward, these doctors continued this medical work in the open, and the Abortion Project continued to collaborate with them.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/an-abortion-activists-experience-in-pre-roe-america/661175/

04.06.2022