“Today I want to speak to The Challenge of the Sexual Revolution, or to The Use of the Body in Regard to Abortion,” declared the Reverend Charles Landreth on, June 6, 1971. From the pulpit of First Presbyterian Church in Tallahassee, Fla., Landreth invited those present to imagine different situations that led to a “problem pregnancy.” Landreth prodded his congregants, asking them to consider what an unwanted pregnancy and lack of access to abortion could mean to an older married woman, a young woman who had been raped or a high-school girl “scared literally to death to tell her staunch Catholic parents and therefore very tempted to run to a quack.”
That Sunday, at Tallahassee’s oldest church, Landreth argued that Jesus’ declaration that the first stone should be cast by those “among you without sin” was a “radical challenge to the Scribes and the Pharisees and to their conception of morality and authority.” Invoking these scriptural passages, Landreth protested against the immorality of Florida’s laws, which prohibited abortion unless the pregnancy endangered a woman’s life.
Toward the end of his sermon, Reverend Landreth revealed to his congregation what they may have already learned from Florida newspapers in the preceding weeks: he and his colleague Leo Sandon had been helping women in Tallahassee obtain abortions.
Landreth and Sandon’s abortion referral activities at Florida State University had drawn the attention and anger of a state senator and a district attorney who in turn denounced them in the press. After twice appearing before a grand jury, the clergymen worried that they would be charged and prosecuted.
But Landreth and Sandon were not alone. Their experiences reveal how, in the half-decade before Roe v. Wade, respected religious leaders participated in a nationwide struggle to make abortion more accessible. This largely forgotten history undercuts the popular myth that religious people oppose abortion rights. Fifty years ago this month, in May of 1967, as mainline Protestants and Reform Jews called for the liberalization of abortion laws, a group of clergy in New York City founded the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS), an international network of clergy that helped women obtain legal and illegal abortions from licensed medical professionals. When Landreth spoke out, it was as part of CCS, which by then counted over 2,000 other ministers across the United States and Canada as members.
“Whenever we try to make conditions for each other more human, we are engaged in a religious pursuit,” Landreth once explained. “Christians and the Christian church simply cannot turn their backs on the problem of abortion and the dilemmas which it creates.”