Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances (Rutger University)
Written by Tom Davis

Reviewed by Lee Gooden

"When I am confronted with arguments against Birth Control, arguments that are as a rule presented by learned theologians or indefatigable statistician, the dim far off chorus of suffering and pain begins to resound anew in my ears. How academic, how anemically intellectual and how remote from throbbing, bleeding humanity all these prejudiced arguments sound, when one has been brought face to face with the reality of suffering!"
-Margaret Sanger, from Motherhood in Bondage 1928

1997, A Washington DC Planned Parenthood open the doors to a new clinic in an area church. After the opening, the Washington Post printed an article with the headline, ‘Unlikely Alliance for Planned Parenthood’ “The Washington Post was merely reflecting the popular understanding that the work of Planned Parenthood is opposed by all religious institutions.” writes Tom Davis, an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ and chair of the Clergy Advisory Board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Davis, also, a chaplain emeritus and associate professor of religion at Skidmore College blows apart this myth in this rich tome on the history of Planned Parenthood and the organization's so-called unlikely partnership with the clergy. “An alliance between churches and synagogues, temples and Planned Parenthood has existed for over seventy years,” explains Davis, “Below public radar, mainline Protestant and Jewish Clergy in their alliance with Planned Parenthood, have played a major role in achieving respectability for birth control in a nation whose religious convictions always involve social and moral issues and never more than when the subject at hand involves women's sexuality.”
Sacred work involves the easing of suffering. The clergy recognized that Planned Parenthood performed sacred work by easing the suffering of women by providing other options than having unhealthy multiple births, raising children in poverty or seeking illegal and dangerous abortions. "In the biblical view, sacred work is love and in practical social realities, sacred work is justice,” writes Davis, continuing, “nowhere was injustice more clearly present than in the twentieth-century battle over contraception.” If women were given the right to choose whether they wanted to have children or not, would jeopardize the position of the status quo of men in power. “Since spiritual realities cannot be separated from social and political life,” reasons Davis, “the pursuit of the sacred work of justice takes clergy into the public arena. The realm of justice is a realm of hard, sometimes tragic choices. As Planned Parenthood and the clergy each tried to stand with women making those hard choices a bond was formed.”
Davis goes on to explain how Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood in 1913 searched for six months for information about birth control in the United States. Sanger had worked as a maternity nurse and saw the awful results of generations of women ignorant of birth control or any sex education. Davis writes. “She saw women having frequent illegal abortions, women overwhelmed by poverty and too many children, women dying because they had no knowledge of how to prevent one pregnancy after another.” Sanger was shocked to discover that even in the Library of Congress and some of the best libraries in the country she couldn’t find anything written about contraception. Sanger then went to Europe and learned about different types of contraception. When she returned home she published a magazine called The Woman Rebel and shared her finds with American women and traveled around the country giving speeches, she was immediately a target of the law and she knew she needed the aid of the clergy. In Cleveland Sanger made a speech in the First Unitarian Church. Later, the Unitarians supported her cause. "To their credit, a number of clergy joined Sanger in her urgency for the freedom to choose contraception,” writes Davis, “From the 1930s on, clergy support for Planned Parenthood grew steadily. In city after city, affiliates found that some clergy were more than willing to speak out publicly in defense of clinics. By the 1960s it was precisely the religious and moral authority of these supportive clergy that changed public opinion about birth control."
Davis continues with the history of the clergy's involvement with Planned Parenthood and discusses how the Roman Catholic Church made sure hospital funds were taken away when women were informed of different contraceptive techniques, let alone that contraception or even abortion was an option. The Vatican wanted to enforce a gag order that other clergy fought. Davis writes, "This issue remains alive as it was in 1952-53. The controversies that currently embroil Planned Parenthood and the women's movement involve government attempts to impose "gag rules" both internationally and domestically. These rules state that no government funding can go to clinics that inform a pregnant woman that abortion is one of her choices. That is forbidden speech. Those clergy who oppose gag rules invoke the right of freedom of speech."
Sacred Work is an epic on hope and human nature. One such as Margaret Sanger although secular in her beliefs understood that women needed to enlist the aid of the clergy and invoke their faith and belief that sacred work is justice and love. Sanger challenged the clergy to protect women from a male dominated society that demeans and subjugates women by taking away their reproductive rights. Davis has defined and set a standard for those that wish to do sacred work in the twenty-first century and beyond. Unfortunately today, this new era called the 21 century that was supposed to be cutting-edge and advanced is still grounded in an archaic ‘good old boy’ mentality and a value system that perpetuates the myth that our once grand ‘God fearing’ country is in on decline and rotting from the inside out like the Roman Empire or Sodom and Gomorrah. “This myth of a lost golden age is used by radio stations and legions of cable pundits to denigrate modern social conditions, often implying that feminism and the changed conditions of women’s lives are largely responsible for our plight.” When Bill Clinton was president he changed “twelve years of presidential antiabortion measures.” President Bush has a different agenda then his predecessor. Davis writes “In September 2003 the web site of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive choice reported that “the President privately told leaders of catholic charities that his proposed massive new faith-based initiative will help them promote opposition to a woman’s right to chose. Bush also promised the group he would immediately oppose abortion rights through ‘legislative initiatives…Beyond that, he said, ‘there’s a larger calling’ which he described as ‘changing the culture of the country.’”

When Roe v. Wade was passed by the Supreme Court it was a 7 to 2 decision, a landmark time in a woman’s right to choose. The 1992 Casey decision narrowed the margin of Roe 5 to 4. Samuel Alito, a newly appointed Supreme Court Justice wrote a paper earlier in his career that he wanted to overturn Roe v Wade. When our current Supreme court Chief Justice John Roberts was a Deputy Solicitor General in 1991 he co-authored a brief for the government in the case Rust v. Sullivan to overturn Roe v. Wade. He also questioned the right to privacy that was a 1965 Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut defeating a state law that the use of birth control–pills by married women was illegal. Many states in our country had laws on the books that made abortion illegal. The Roe v. Wade decision made these laws invalid. Some states like Indiana are all ready jumping on the band-wagon to try to take advantage of the more conservative leanings of the new Supreme Court to impose a stipulation to only abort when the ongoing pregnancy is a threat to the woman’s life or the chance that the woman might become profoundly impaired. Some states are trying to make it mandatory that a woman must view an ultrasound of the fetus and talk over with a counselor the pain it might feel during an abortion. As of February 11 2006, according to The Orlando Sentinel Florida has passed a law that a doctor must inform a minor girl’s parents before an abortion.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned will the last thirty-three years of a woman’s autonomy be buried similar to the way the Taliban enslaved Muslim women in Afghanistan who were former doctors, scientists, teachers and lawyer among many other professions? Will American women have to go back to the days of guilt over taking pleasure in sex and be humiliated by their friends and family for becoming ‘knocked up’? Will they seek back alley abortionists or pay exorbitant prices to physicians that perform secret abortions in private practices? Hopefully, there will always be somebody like Margaret Sanger and Tom Davis to continue their sacred work and do the right thing even when it is illegal. While being asked by the court in New York State not to violate Section 1142, a Penal code that made it a crime to give out birth control information, Margaret Sanger said, “I cannot promise to obey a law I don’t respect.”