Reverend Howard Moody, who created a coalition of pro-choice clergy members who referred women to illegal abortion practitioners before Roe v. Wade. He and his organization were responsible for arranging tens of thousands of abortions. From the speech “The Unfinished Revolution of Pro-Choice: Beyond Sound-Bites and Slogans””
“My understanding of free choice is that the right to choose is a God-given right with which persons are endowed. Without choice, life becomes a meaningless routine and humans become robots. Freedom of choice is what makes us human and responsible. And for women, the preeminent freedom is the choice to control her reproductive process. Any theological or moral arguments that subordinate a woman’s freedom to the imaginary screams of a fetus… will be less than human, no matter how much talk there is about the preciousness of life….there is no law so oppressive and no economic policy so dehumanizing as that which consigns a woman, because she is poor, to involuntary servitude on behalf of an unwanted burden for unnumbered years of her life.”
This speech was given at the annual meeting of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice on September 17, 1997
Freedom of choice is indeed a critical part of Judeo-Christian theology. Adam and Eve made a free choice, and the whole world has faced the consequences. People under the Old Covenant made free choices and faced the legal consequences…if they were lucky. People under the New Covenant make free choices and face the eternal consequences, although that is not supposed to get anyone off the hook from the rule of law on the mortal plane. Never has freedom, in the context of our faith, referred to any kind of protection in order to do as we please.
…But perhaps I’m only rambling in order to get my mind off of the fact that a clergyman just referred to people who were not enthusiastically fought for during pregnancy as “an unwanted burden for unnumbered years of [their mother’s] life.” We all burden somebody at some point during our time on Earth, but in the eyes of God we are so much more than that!