To Offer Compassion provides a glimpse of a rare moment in American history when Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis were at the forefront of the campaign for abortion rights. In 1967, twenty-one liberal Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis in New York formed the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS), the nation's first counseling service to refer women to abortion providers. During the next six years, the CCS expanded to major cities across the nation and eventually involved hundreds of clergy and associated pastoral staff members who collectively helped hundreds of thousands of women obtain abortions at a time when the procedure was still illegal. To Offer Compassion tells the story of these ministers and the service they provided during the half decade before Roe v. Wade (1973).

Doris Andres Dirks and Patricia A. Relf's stated purpose in writing this book was to reveal a largely forgotten era when organized religion and the abortion rights movement were allies. Neither author is a professional historian, and when they embarked on this book project, they did not initially intend to write a historical monograph. But when they stumbled across a reference to the CCS at a Planned Parenthood interfaith service in 2002, they decided to follow up with their own inquiries and began conducting oral histories with aging CCS veterans. Eventually, they interviewed more than seventy of these retired clergy and staff members, including the primary founder of the CCS, the liberal New York Baptist pastor Howard Moody, who died in 2012 at the age of 91 while this book was in progress. No historian has ever conducted such a large-scale oral history project of the clergy who supported abortion rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition, Dirks and Relf also gained exclusive access to Moody's CCS archives, a collection that is currently closed to other researchers. This book, therefore, offers an unparalleled, detailed study of the CCS that is not likely to be duplicated.

The authors do not attempt to disguise their admiration for the clergy who risked their reputations—and sometimes their jobs—in order to provide a service that occasionally got them into trouble with the police. As the title of the book suggests, they believe that compassion was the main motivator for these ministers. Most were on the political and theological left, and many had participated in the civil rights and antiwar movements; some had even gone to jail for their activism. But at least at first, they did not set out systematically to campaign for abortion rights. Instead, they entered the pro-choice movement only in response to a perceived pastoral need after women in their congregations or the community contacted them to discuss crisis pregnancies. They felt compelled to help these individual women, especially after they began investigating existing illegal abortion services, which were often dangerous and unsanitary. By pooling their resources and sharing information, the ministers who founded CCS compiled lists of competent abortion doctors and directed women to abortion services that, while still illegal, were relatively safe and reliable. The authors note a few serious complications that occurred in rare instances, but for the most part, they report that the women who obtained abortions through CCS referrals were grateful for the service.

After New York legalized abortion in 1970, the CCS shifted its emphasis from arranging clandestine abortions to making the procedure affordable for poor women. CCS opened its own abortion clinic in New York City in 1970 and offered the service for less than half the price of the city's hospitals, with even greater discounts available to low-income women. In the early 1970s, it was the largest abortion clinic in the nation.

After Roe v. Wade, the CCS disbanded and ecclesiastical pro-choice activism faded. While many mainline Protestant ministers continued to support abortion rights, their voices were often drowned out by the much louder pro-life rhetoric of conservative evangelicals and Catholics. The CCS veterans continued to support abortion rights, although for many of them, their attention in the years after Roe shifted to other social justice causes, especially LGBTQ rights.

While historians of the reproductive rights movement will welcome the new information that To Offer Compassion brings to light, some may be disappointed that it offers a narrowly based, celebratory chronicle of an organization rather than a fully historically contextualized analysis of its subject. The book is framed around the assertion that religion was once an ally of the pro-choice movement, but this premise is overly simplistic and, even if partially true for some liberal Protestant traditions, is more of a descriptive statement than a historically analytical thesis. At rare moments in the book, Dirks and Relf do attempt to probe the complexity of their subject by examining, for instance, the tensions between the male, upper middle-class clergy in the CCS and the feminist women who came to dominate the pro-choice movement in the early 1970s. But for the most part, Dirks and Relf do not connect their organizational history to the larger story of abortion rights policy or to broader cultural and theological trends. Scholars of religious history, especially, will probably be disappointed at the limited discussion of theological influences, pastoral considerations, denominational politics, and other matters that might have shed new light on what made religious activism for abortion rights different from its secular counterpart. The authors also greatly understate the degree of antiabortion sentiment among Protestants (let alone among Catholics) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The ministers in the CCS were radicals even for their time, and perhaps a more theologically sensitive history would have shown that more clearly.

But while one might wish for a more historically contextualized analysis, this should not diminish the importance of Dirks and Relf's achievement. By conducting oral histories with dozens of participants in the CCS, they were able to capture a vanishing—and, for some, nearly forgotten—moment in the history of liberal religious abortion rights activism.