Cover
story
Politics and the pro-life movement
By JOE FEUERHERD
Washington
John Cavanaugh O’Keefe -- a 52-year-old Harvard graduate,
Vietnam War conscientious objector, and longtime pro-life activist -- fervently
believes legalized abortion in the United States will end. But not in his
lifetime.
“The pro-life movement is going nowhere,” says
O’Keefe. “After 30 years of work, the movement is dead.”
O’Keefe is not alone. “It would be both untrue and
overly dramatic to say that the pro-life movement has lost,” according to
Teresa R. Wagner, former antiabortion lobbyist and editor of the forthcoming
Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement.
“But we are not winning. And the sooner we face it, the sooner we change
it.”
O’Keefe and Wagner are realists. Thirty years and 40 million
legal pregnancy terminations after the Supreme Court’s Roe v.
Wade decision on Jan. 22, 1973, abortion competes with laser eye surgery
for the distinction of being the most common surgical procedure performed in
the United States.
While legislative fights over high-profile abortion-related issues
continue to grab headlines -- a proposed ban on “partial birth
abortion” is the most recent example -- the effort to overturn Roe
is as far from reality today as it has been at anytime since Justice Harry
Blackmun penned the landmark decision.
The venues for debating Roe change over time. At the center
of today’s storm are judicial nominees, whose appearances before the
divided Senate Judiciary Committee are designed to ferret out their views on
the decision. Even here, President Bush’s nominees wave the white flag.
Asked at a recent hearing if Roe was “settled law,” meaning
that it should not be overturned, Bush nominee Miguel Estrada agreed that it
was.
Legal abortion in 2003, it seems, is as American as apple pie.
And yet.
American ambivalence over abortion is legendary -- and maddening
to the lobbies that have grown up on each side of the debate. Americans
“think abortion should be legal, but they think it should be
regulated,” says Catholics for a Free Choice president Frances Kissling,
“and they’re much more comfortable with it remaining legal if they
feel it is being regulated. And that, of course, is an unsatisfactory position
to those who are either deeply committed to the antiabortion cause or to the
pro-choice cause.”
Where pro-life and pro-choice antagonists see black and white,
most Americans view grey: willing to restrict and regulate the practice in some
cases (late-term abortions and parental consent for minors who seek abortions,
for example), but unwilling to require a woman to carry a “defective”
child, or one created through the violence of rape or incest.
How do Americans view legal abortion? A necessary evil, say the
public opinion polls, lying somewhere on a fuzzy continuum between birth
control and infanticide. The nuance expressed by the public -- nearly half of
Americans call themselves “pro-life” though most favor some version
of the legal status quo -- is not shared by their elected leaders. With
exceptions that prove the rule, modern Democrats are “pro-choice,”
while Republicans -- especially those outside the Northeast -- are
“pro-life.”
That wasn’t always the case.
The shifting politics of
abortion
In the late 1960s and ’70s, before positions hardened and the
lines were clear, elected Democrats favored abortion restrictions in roughly
the same numbers as their Republican counterparts; Republican governors Ronald
Reagan (his libertarian instincts winning out) and Nelson Rockefeller
(population control was a family cause) signed the most liberal pre-Roe
abortion laws in the country; Jesse Jackson compared abortion to slavery, while
Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt was a “Democrat for Life.” Five
of the seven justices joining in the Roe opinion were Republican
appointees.
It was in this muddled environment that the U.S. Catholic
church’s heaviest hitters visited Capitol Hill, just 14 months after
Roe.
Seated before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments
on that day in March 1974 were Philadelphia Cardinal John Krol, then-president
of the U.S. bishops’ conference, and Cardinals John Cody (Chicago),
Timothy Manning (Los Angeles) and Humberto Medeiros (Boston). It was time, the
four argued, to nationalize a ban on abortion through a constitutional
amendment that would “re-extend the protection of law to the
unborn.”
Even by post-Sept. 11 standards, it was an era of turmoil. In
short order, a president would resign, the United States would lose a war, and
lengthy lines at filling stations would provide a visible symbol of a battered
U.S. economy. But those were secondary concerns to the bishops, understandably
perhaps, as the hierarchy of the U.S. Catholic church had provided over the
previous decade the only significant institutional opposition to liberalized
state abortion laws. The Roe decision only intensified that
commitment.
The subcommittee’s consideration of a constitutional
amendment banning abortion, said Krol, “is an encouraging sign of forward
movement which, we hope, will soon lead to congressional enactment …”
Continued Krol: “I emphasize the word ‘soon,’ for this issue has
an urgency shared by few others now confronting the nation.”
By the bishops’ reckoning, the pre-Roe legal changes
promoted by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the
American Civil Liberties Union, and the Planned Parenthood Federation of
America amounted to nothing less than state-sanctioned killing on a potentially
massive scale. It had to be stopped, and the political arena was the mechanism
to halt the slaughter.
In 1971, the bishops organized the National Right to Life
Committee as an arm of their Family Life office. Following the court’s
decision, the committee would be spun-off into a separate organization, and
today is the largest antiabortion organization in the country.
Pre-Roe America
“The rights that were upheld in Roe v. Wade are
hanging by a very tenuous thread at best,” Planned Parenthood president
Gloria Feldt wrote in a November 2002 fundraising appeal. The questionable
presumption of that statement -- that Roe faces extinction in the near
future -- is forgivable, perhaps, in the hyperbole inherent in direct mail
money-raising appeals. But it also obscures Planned Parenthood’s history.
In fact, the organization founded by Margaret Sanger as the American Birth
Control League in 1923 has faced much tougher battles than it does today.
In 1955, when abortion was illegal in all but the rarest of cases,
Planned Parenthood organized a conference on “Abortion in America.”
That meeting spurred a movement that would knock down restrictive state
abortion laws and in just 18 years provide a constitutional right to the
procedure. It was a remarkable victory.
The time was right: Supporters of abortion liberalization were
aided by the sexual revolution (the birth control pill was approved by the FDA
for wide distribution in 1960), by the tragedy of the thalidomide and rubella
babies of the era, and by growing antipathy toward powerful institutions, the
Catholic church not least among them.
Access to legal abortion was promoted primarily as a woman’s
health issue -- it would eliminate back alley abortionists whose procedures,
the advocates said, killed thousands of women each year. Plus, there would be
additional benefits, among them a reduction in the number of unwanted children
(those most likely, the reasoning went, to suffer from abuse and neglect),
improved population control (Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population
Bomb, hit home with policymakers), and reduced social spending on the
children of the poor.
In 1970, the National Organization for Women would make abortion
rights a priority, formally linking the emerging feminist movement to the
growing effort to repeal state abortion laws. By the end of that year, seven
states -- including New York and California -- had overturned their bans and
adopted laws based on a model promoted by Planned Parenthood and its allies in
the legal and medical professions.
And then, in January 1973, the Supreme Court -- ruling in Roe
v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton -- found
that the 14th amendment provides a fundamental right of privacy, that a
decision to have an abortion should be made by a woman in consultation with her
doctor.
The following day, the bishops’ pro-life committee issued a
statement: “Every legal possibility must be explored to challenge
the opinion of the United States Supreme Court decision that withdraws all
legal safeguards for the right to life of the unborn child.”
Post-Roe politics
In November 1975 the full body of bishops approved a Pastoral Plan
for Pro-Life Activities, which called on each diocese to establish a pro-life
office and supported political efforts to reverse the court’s opinion. It
was a detailed strategy, one that called on the bishops to expend political
capital and place abortion at the top of their social agenda, where it has been
ever since.
Beginning in 1981, the mainstream right-to-life movement would
place its hopes on an antiabortion president -- Ronald Reagan’s conversion
to the pro-life position preceded his 1980 victory. Combined with the first
Republican Senate in a generation, pro-lifers sensed that a constitutional
amendment was within their grasp. The effort was bolstered by new recruits --
conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, the Christian right,
had been energized by Reagan’s campaign and joined with Catholics in
opposing legal abortion.
But pro-lifers split on tactics (should abortion policy be
relegated to the states or should the fetus be declared a person?) and, in any
case, didn’t have the votes to override the court.
While the mainstream movement pursued political objectives, others
chose another course: nonviolent civil disobedience. The goal as they saw it:
convert the public and its elected leaders through their witness, as Ghandi had
done in India and Martin Luther King in the United States.
John O’Keefe -- who has worked for many pro-life groups,
including the National Right to Life Committee, Human Life International and
the American Life League -- was a proponent of “direct action.” Early
on, he recalled, “It seemed obvious to me what you needed was a campaign
of nonviolence.” A pamphlet he authored -- A Peaceful Presence --
described how pro-lifers could use the tools of nonviolence to change the
status quo.
For more than a decade, O’Keefe and others would lead
demonstrations and sit-ins at abortion clinics. Arrests were made and media
attention garnered. Noticeably absent from this effort, however, were the
mainstream pro-life movement and the U.S. bishops.
O’Keefe is bitter that the leaders of his church chose
legislation and politics over civil disobedience. Their actions -- lobbying and
political maneuvering -- fell short of their rhetoric, which welcomed unborn
children as “members of the human family” worthy of the same legal
protections as those who had passed through a birth canal.
“By the end of 1973,” O’Keefe said, “every
American bishop should have been in jail, the cardinals first. The reason for
the red [hat] is that you are a leader following the martyrs of the first
centuries of the church. That means that when the lion is eating people, you go
first.” Several bishops would take up the banner of nonviolent resistance
and protest, New York auxiliary Austin Vaughan most prominently. But, in
general, the bishops discouraged such activity -- doubtful of its impact and
fearful of the consequences such organized illegal activity could bring upon
the church.
On the political front, pro-choice Catholics such as New York Gov.
Mario Cuomo and vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro proved an
embarrassment to the bishops. If they couldn’t control their own flock --
polls showed Catholics viewed abortion with the same ambivalence as their
non-Catholic neighbors and that Catholic women had abortions at roughly the
same rates as non-Catholic women -- how could they change national policy?
Meanwhile, having failed to secure the magic bullet of a
constitutional amendment, the political effort focused on the next best thing:
reshape the Supreme Court into an anti-Roe majority. Here, too, the
effort fell short. In Casey v. Planned Parenthood, Reagan-Bush
appointees Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and David Souter formed a
critical block to preserve the essential findings of Roe.
Enter Bill Clinton. Abortion, said the 1992 candidate, should be
“safe, legal and rare.”
With masterful precision, the poll-tested phrase conjured up
consensus just as the most extreme elements of the right-to-life movement moved
beyond peaceful demonstration to highly publicized violence against abortion
clinics and doctors who performed the procedures. The stigma of violence --
eight abortion clinic staff were killed in the 1990s, and more than a dozen
injured in bombings and shootings -- placed the pro-life movement on the
permanent defensive.
Clinton would make protection of abortion rights a hallmark of his
presidency, reinstituting U.S. funding of international family planning efforts
(which included abortion services), appointing pro-Roe judges, and
vetoing a ban on so-called “partial-birth abortion.”
Lessons learned
Thirty years later, what has the pro-life movement learned? Some
of its leaders still seek the magic bullet: “We need to have a court that
will look at the Constitution and examine it and recognize the incredible
inadequacy of Roe v. Wade,” says National Right to Life
Committee president Wanda Franz. Pro-choice and pro-life groups are gearing up
for the next session of Congress, where legislation to ban partial-birth
abortions will be considered, as will measures to promote parental notification
and to provide distinct criminal penalties for harming the unborn child in an
attack on a pregnant woman.
While acknowledging the need to push legislation -- if only to
highlight the least publicly palatable aspects of legal abortion -- the
pro-life movement has settled in for the long haul. There is a concerted effort
among some pro-lifers to return to the 19th-century solution, where states
banned abortion largely on the basis of the harm it did to women.
In a memo circulated among pro-life forces, Concerned Women for
America Legislative Director Michael Schwartz spelled out the concept:
“The reason [the public is] … not in favor of
eliminating legalized abortion is that they also believe abortion somehow is
necessary for the well-being of the mothers of those babies. We must break
through this mother-versus-baby framing of the issue by bringing to public
consciousness in every conceivable way the fact that abortion hurts
women.”
The memo continues: “Once the public is disabused of the
notion that abortion is good for women, it will no longer face a conflict
between two compelling claims. When the well-being of mothers and their babies
is balanced only against the well-being of abortionists, then public opinion
will be solidly behind our position. Litigation, research and even the
legislative battles we choose should all be designed to show how abortion hurts
women.”
That approach is highlighted most recently in an advertising
campaign timed to coincide with Roe’s 30th anniversary.
“Abortion is a reflection that we have not met the needs of women,”
say the ads, sponsored by the U.S. bishops and the Knights of Columbus.
“Women deserve better than abortion.”
A recent daylong conference at Georgetown University hammered at
the theme. Speakers at the event highlighted the ills they claim befall women
who undergo an abortion: higher rates of breast cancer, increased risk of
depression and suicide, and death by botched procedures among them.
Other tactics underway include promoting, both as a public
relations tool and as a means to reduce the number of abortions, the work of
the nation’s 3,000 pro-life pregnancy centers. In addition, pro-life
forces want to reduce access to abortion by stigmatizing the relatively few
doctors who perform the operations, and by burdening abortion clinics with
costly regulation.
In their statement commemorating Roe’s 30th
anniversary, the U.S. bishops call for Roe’s demise. Yet they also
see progress: The number of abortions is down from a high of 1.6 million in
1990 to 1.3 million in 2000, an increasing number of Americans view themselves
as “pro-life,” and advances in ultrasound technology make fetal life
visible. These, and other trends, are hopeful signs, the bishops said, as
“we work to bring about a society that recognizes abortion for what it
truly is.”
That approach is a far cry from the day when pro-life forces
thought their goals were within their grasp. It’s a new era, which has an
eye to the law, but is more concerned with changing public perceptions.
“So much for ordinary politics,” writes one-time
abortion provider turned pro-lifer Bernard Nathanson. “An America capable
of passing a pro-life amendment would not need one; an America that needs one
cannot possibly pass it.”
Joe Feuerherd is NCR Washington correspondent. His
e-mail address is jfeuerherd@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, January 17,
2003
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