Repro rights researcher fascinates with podcast, future book scholarship
Gillian Frank examines important historical aspects of gender, religion and the reproductive rights movement
Gillian Frank has established himself as one of the foremost journalists and historians pertaining to sexual matters. He currently has a podcast, Sexing History: The Past Made Intimate, that depicts in vivid detail some of the more fascinating parts of abortion rights, birth control and sexual history.
He is also working on a book Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Reproductive Freedom before Roe v. Wade, which will be released in the next few years by the University of North Carolina Press. Much of his research will reveal groundbreaking new details about the operation of the Clergy Consultation Service, which was a network of religious leaders who helped people get abortions before it was decriminalized in 1973.
Frank’s scholarship reveals the close connection between the liberal religious tradition and reproductive choice.
“That is the sort of biggest takeaway of it,” Frank said. “That at the center of the story that gets described as secular, that gets described as immoral by the religious right, it is in fact a deeply moral, deeply religious undertaking.”
Frank recently presented some of his findings at Sacred Gathering, which was a two-day conference earlier this year featuring some of the most prominent names in the pro-choice community. The most interesting part of that pertained to Catholic involvement in the CCS.
“The Catholic Church needs to be understood as a complex, internally divided entity as an institution, particularly in the mid to late 60s where they were undergoing massive reform,” Frank said. “So that's the first thing. And so any sort of unified voice of the church that might be coming from the top down is often met with people who sort of pick and choose or who dissent either vocally or just through their everyday actions.”