The thousands of women dying from unsafe abortions in the U.S. in the 1960s were disproportionately poor women of color. Moody and Carmen expressed special disdain for “therapeutic abortions,” which allowed women with money and connections to receive legal abortions by getting a friendly physician or psychologist to deem a pregnancy life threatening—the only circumstance in which abortion was legal under New York law. “‘Therapeutic,’” they wrote, “was only a term to describe the difference between rich and poor, white and black, the privileged and the underprivileged, married and single.”

Women who couldn’t get therapeutic abortions resorted to self-abortion or sought out illegal providers. Another minister in Florida once called upon Moody to help a parishioner get an abortion, he writes in his book. He travelled with the woman to see a New Jersey doctor operating out of his house, only to be turned away because they didn’t have the code word. After a number of other leads didn’t pan out, a church member finally found the woman a provider doing abortions in an apartment in Manhattan. Moody “never forgot this first glimpse of that dark, ugly, labyrinthine underground into which women were sent alone and afraid.”

Moody compared the initial reluctance of some of his colleagues to get involved to the early days of their work in the civil-rights movement, when some had believed their communities didn’t have a race problem because they didn’t have any black people. He insisted that if the clergy made themselves available to women, they would discover how great the need was and understand their obligation to address it.

The first order of business was “self-education.” Moody and founding members of the CCS met with women who had had illegal abortions to learn what the experience was like and what would have made it better. On another occasion, a physician demonstrated the abortion procedure using a pelvic model; Moody and Carmen called it “the day the clergy went to medical school.”

Once they launched the referral service, the members of the CCS came to see themselves as consumer advocates in addition to pastoral counselors. The organization created a kind of pre-Internet Yelp for illicit abortion providers. When a physician willing to provide abortions was recommended to the CCS, Carmen would pose as a woman seeking an abortion to investigate his office and bedside manner and inquire about his technique. The counselors encouraged all women to report back about their experiences, and after a woman was referred to a new doctor, her counselor would follow up for her review.

CCS members realized early on that price was as great a barrier to safe abortion as illegality. They shared information about pricing with women and negotiated with doctors to drop their rates. As what was thought to be the largest referral service in the country, which referred an estimated half million women for abortions in its six years of existence, the CCS had significant market power that it leveraged to reduce the going rate for an abortion. When a doctor charged more than the agreed upon price or added fees, the CCS would stop referring to him, cutting off a lucrative source of patients until he agreed to their terms.