Clergy Consultation Service – To Offer Compassion

In Memory of Rev. Carl E. Bielby

July 21, 2021 offercompassion

We recently learned of the death of Carl E. Bielby, in April 2021. Rev. Bielby, the founder of the Michigan Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, was a larger-than-life character who had numerous careers, all of them ultimately in service of justice and compassion.

Bielby was born in a suburb of Detroit and grew up Methodist. He played clarinet and later said, “Music was my first calling.” During high school, he moved with his family into a diverse neighborhood of Detroit. As a teen he had a born-again experience; he felt called to ministry, and he organized a revival meeting on a truck bed and played cornet with a group called Voices of Christian Youth. He attended conservative schools–Bob Jones University in South Carolina, and Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky–but not without rebelling against their more fundamentalist teachings. He studied counseling psychology, and counseling was what he really wanted to do.

After graduation, he served as associate minister at First Methodist in Owosso, Michigan, and DJ’d a religious radio show. He became solo minister at Asbury Methodist Church on Grand Avenue in Detroit, where his mission was to liberalize and integrate the church. His mentor was the Black minister of a nearby Methodist church. His marriage to his high school sweetheart broke up, and although the bishop disapproved of a divorced clergyman, he was called as co-pastor to a church in Warren, Michigan. He continued to study Methodist theology and pastoral counseling, and took classes at the Merrill-Palmer Institute on marriage, family, and human sexuality.

Eventually Bielby wanted to leave church-based ministry and became head of the marriage and family life department at the Metropolitan Detroit Council of Churches. It was in 1967, during his time there, that he became a founding member of the Michigan Council for the Study of Abortion, based at the University of Michigan. A public health professor from that group urged Bielby to start a Michigan Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, and Bielby went to New York to learn how from Rev. Howard Moody. Then, Bielby said, he and other clergy met with Michigan State Police representatives to ask them, “How can we do this so that you can’t arrest us?” Bielby observed a Chicago doctor as he performed abortions, and when he returned to Detroit, he actually taught the technique to a prominent gynecologist and helped him to set up an illegal abortion practice in an apartment building.

What Bielby saw as necessary, he accomplished. He left Detroit and worked at other nonprofits, did career counseling–including for clergy who wanted to change careers– went into advertising and promotion, and later started the Redeem the Dream Foundation, which served young musicians. We don’t even know all that he did–he was a man of many interests and talents and enthusiasms. We are grateful for the abortion work that he did, and for his sharing his memories with us.

His July 17 memorial service may be viewed on Carl Bielby’s Facebook page. We extend our sincere condolences to all of his family and friends.

History

50 Years Ago: Not Just Woodstock

September 4, 2019September 4, 2019 offercompassion

1969 was quite a year. This year we’ve observed the 50th anniversaries of the first moon landing and Woodstock. But 1969 was quite a year–for good and ill–in the realm of reproductive rights, too. That year, seven states passed bills liberalizing their abortion laws to some degree. A sampling of some more 50th anniversaries we should be noting this year:

January: The radical feminist Redstockings group formed. In March 1969 they held a meeting at Washington Square Methodist Church in New York at which women publicly spoke of their abortion experiences.

February: The feminist group Jane formed in Chicago in February, at first to refer women to illegal abortion providers they had judged to be safe. When they realized that their main practitioner was not, in fact, a physician, members of the group learned to do the procedure themselves.

February 14-16: NARAL was founded, starting with the First National Conference on Abortion Laws in Chicago. The theme was “Modification or Repeal?” The organizers included writer Larry Lader, who had played a big part in urging the clergy to make abortion referrals; Chicago physician Lonny Myers; and ecologist Garrett Hardin. Speakers at the conference included Dr. Bernard Nathanson–soon to become director of the Women’s Services abortion clinic opened by the Clergy Consultation Service, and later an anti-abortion activist; and feminist writer Betty Friedan.

April: The Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS) received a blackmail threat, and the New York Police Department itself helped Rev. Howard Moody to set up a sting to catch the culprit. (See pages 77-78 of To Offer Compassion.)

April 17: A moderate bill to reform abortion law in New York, sponsored by Assemblyman Albert H. Blumenthal, was defeated for a third time in the State Assembly. The bill would finally pass the following year, legalizing abortion in New York and permitting the 1970 opening of the CCS Women’s Services clinic in New York City.

May 19: Activist Bill Baird was sentenced to three months in jail for “exhibiting obscene objects” (contraceptives) and distributing such an object (handing a student a package of Emko contraceptive foam) at a public lecture in Massachusetts.

May 19: An 18-year old from Bay Village, Ohio, died in London. The Cleveland CCS had referred her to a previously very reliable clinic and was horrified at her death. The head of the Cleveland CCS, Rev. Farley Wheelwright, flew to London. He learned–and the official inquest confirmed–that her death was not the result of her abortion but of post-operative negligence by the anesthesiologist, who was dismissed by the clinic. (Page 78, To Offer Compassion.)

May 23: The New York City Police raided a group of abortion providers in Riverdale, Bronx. Writer Larry Lader and a few CCS counselors had referred to the group. Lader, Moody, Arlene Carmen, Rev. Finley Schaef, and other members of the CCS testified before a grand jury in the case that September. No charges against counselors came from the case.

June 10: Rev. Robert Hare of the Cleveland Clergy Consultation Service was indicted by Massachusetts for referring a woman to Dr. Pierre Brunelle for an abortion. Hare appeared in court in Massachusetts. Brunelle was convicted–he was unlicensed in Massachusetts at the time, for a start–and Hare’s charges were dismissed. But in a rare move, the prosecutor appealed the dismissal. The case was still in flux in early 1973 when the Roe v Wade decision by the Supreme Court made the matter moot. (Pages 78-83, To Offer Compassion.)

September 5: For the first time in the U.S., an abortion law was declared unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of California ruled that the state’s old abortion law, which permitted abortion only when necessary to preserve a woman’s life, and under which Dr. Leon P. Belous had been convicted, was unconstitutionally vague. Importantly, the Belous decision cited an established right to privacy and liberty in reproductive decisions. (Note: The case had great symbolic but little practical importance at the time, as California had passed a reformed abortion law in 1967, after Belous had been charged.)

November 10: Now, for the first time, an abortion law was declared unconstitutional by a federal court. Federal District Court Judge Gerhard A. Gesell dismissed the indictment of Dr. Milan Vuitch for performing abortions in the District of Columbia, ruling the law unconstitutionally vague on the subject. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which in 1971 overturned the ruling as to vagueness, but treated abortion as it would any other surgical procedure and upheld the judgment of physicians in medical decisions. Very shortly after that appeal, the Supreme Court justices voted to take up other abortion cases, including Roe v Wade.

And, in 1969, the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion continued to expand. New chapters officially opened in nine more states, including Colorado, Ohio, and Virginia; several more started referrals but were not yet public; and many more were in the works.

Legacies of the CCS

A new year’s look back: 40th anniversary of the Clergy Consultation Service

January 4, 2018 offercompassion

A snowy day in a new year seems tailor-made for looking back–and maybe sorting some of the boxes and boxes of photos we’ve vowed to take care of. Eleven years ago at this time, Judson Memorial Church was planning a 40th anniversary celebration of the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion. That May brought a mighty gathering of many of the founding and early members of the CCS. Rev. Howard Moody gave a stirring sermon on “The Unfinished Revolution in Roe v. Wade.”

Co-founder Rev. Finley Schaef spoke, and Rev. E. Spencer Parsons, founder of the Chicago CCS was also there. Rev. Tom Davis, who had been a CCS member with his late wife, Rev. Betsy Davis, and the longtime chair of Planned Parenthood’s national Clergy Advisory Board, spoke that day. He recently recalled, “I remember Howard Moody and some of the others sitting in the front row looking like bandits who got away with something. Such brave people.”

Ignacio Castuera and Tom Davis — Rev. Ignacio Castuera, then chaplain of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Rev. Tom Davis, longtime chair of PPFA’s Clergy Advisory Board, May 2007

And the host that day, as for the 50th anniversary, was Rev. Donna Schaper, Judson’s senior minister, who had also served the CCS in Chicago when she was in seminary. Since then, we’ve lost Howard Moody and Spencer Parsons and all too many of the other CCS participants. But their legacy abides in Planned Parenthood’s clergy boards, in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, and many other reproductive justice groups.

Rev. E. Spencer Parsons and Rev. Donna Schaper — Rev. E. Spencer Parsons, founder of Chicago CCS, and Rev. Donna Schaper, senior minister at Judson Memorial Church, May 2007