Clergy would help women plan every detail of their trip. The trips would never be in the same state or city in which they met with the clergy. Some states made it illegal to even talk about or give abortion information, like florida. It wasn't just giving an abortion, but talking about abortion, giving abortion information, that made this a criminal enterprise. And so clergy felt that they were taking great risks. They worried that their phones were being tapped. Can you recall a swiss army man played by harry potter? A by harryPotter? In the era of the internet, a movie about a fartingcorp cells.
In 1967, a very unlikely group of individuals gathered to quietly break the law and help facilitate abortions. They established a phone number. When you called it, a recording of a woman's voice would tell you what to do next.
Who was behind this number? The Clergy Consultation Service, an underground network of ministers and rabbis who wanted to help people access safe abortions in a time before it was legal. We first aired our conversations with some of them in 2017. And after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year, we decided to call some of them back.
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