NYT: The Abortion-Rights Side Invokes God, Too

[DeepModem Mom]

The Abortion-Rights Side Invokes God, Too
By NEELA BANERJEE
Published: April 3, 2006

....The Interfaith Prayer Breakfast (this year, at the Washington Hilton) has been part of Planned Parenthood's annual convention for four years. Most ministers and rabbis at the breakfast have known the group far longer.

Margaret Sanger, founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, drew clergy members in the early 20th century by relating the suffering of women who endured successive pregnancies that ravaged their health and sought illegal abortions in their desperation, said the Rev. Thomas R. Davis of the United Church of Christ, in his book "Sacred Work, Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances."

In the 1930's, Jewish and mainline Protestant groups began to voice their support for birth control. In 1962, a Maryland clergy coalition successfully pressed the state to permit the disbursal of contraception. In the late 1960's, some 2,000 ministers and rabbis across the country banded together to give women information about abortion providers and to lobby for the repeal of anti-abortion laws.

"The clergy could open that door because the clergy had a certain moral authority," said Mr. Davis, who is chairman of Planned Parenthood's clergy advisory board but whose book is not sponsored by the group. "They balanced the moral authority of the critics."...

***

It is not lost on Mr. Davis how the passion of the Christian right in its effort to abolish abortion and curtail access to birth control now mirrors the efforts of clergy members 40 years ago to do the opposite....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/us/03breakfast.html

[Warpy]

1. Mainstream religion was also in the forefront of the fight to overturn

antiabortion laws. Mainstream ministers were the ones who were called to hospital ERs to care for butchered church members who had been desperate enough to trust illegal abortionists or to try to do the job themselves with knitting needles, coat hangers, or caustic douches. They saw firsthand that antiabortion laws were killing women.

Crackpot cults always start to exert control over their members by attacking women first, so yowling about abortion was a natural for them. The Catholics have been saddled with the doctrine of papal infallibility and the legacy of an incredibly stupid pope who thought the only way to beat the Reformation was to outbreed it.

This is why we have separation of church and state. Church should never meddle in civil affairs, medical procedures, or anything else outside its scope of practice, although it may have an opinion for its own members.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Great post, Warpy -- thanks! nt