The Shifting Politics of Abortion

Was it only last July that pro-life forces were cheering themselves hoarse? After years of battling in the streets, the legislatures and the courts, they had won their greatest victory: a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, Inc. that gives states enhanced power to restrict abortions. It was only a matter of time, pro-lifers predicted, before abortions were severely restricted, if not banned.

Three months later, pro-lifers must be wondering what hit them. Abortion- rights groups, perhaps with their fingers crossed, had promised that the Webster decision would galvanize a silent pro-choice majority. Last week, as pro-choice activists won stunning victories in Florida’s legislature and the U.S. Congress, that promise began to be fulfilled. With the political landscape seeming to undergo a seismic shift, many antiabortion politicians have concluded that the only way to maintain their footing is to tiptoe away from their former positions.

Nothing better illustrated the growing fear of a pro-choice voter backlash than the special session of the Florida legislature. Just days after the Supreme Court’s Webster ruling, first-term Republican Governor Bob Martinez, a staunch pro-lifer, called the session to consider new antiabortion laws. In a state with a fast-growing G.O.P., it appeared to be a politically astute move.

But polls quickly showed that more than 60% of Floridians opposed further restrictions and that only 24% would vote for Martinez again. Even members of his own party, worried that an antiabortion label would hurt Republicans among suburban and women voters, began denouncing the special session as a costly waste of time. Just days before the session opened, Florida’s supreme court ruled that abortion was protected by the state constitution, which contains a right-to-privacy clause approved by the voters in 1980. The court went on to overturn a state law requiring that parents be notified when their teenage daughters seek abortions.

The session, scheduled for four days, collapsed after only two, during which pro-choice legislators turned back 14 antiabortion bills — three of them proposed by the Governor. Abortion-rights activists were jubilant. “This has gone better than we hoped,” exulted Eleanor Smeal, president of the Fund for the Feminist Majority. “It should encourage state politicians everywhere who are pro-choice to take a stand.”

It has already encouraged several in Florida. Though he had expected to be easily renominated by his party for next year’s gubernatorial race, Martinez must now overcome a primary challenge from pro-choice Republican State Senator Marlene Woodson-Howard. Anxious not to revive old charges that he is an indecisive leader, Martinez has vowed to reintroduce the defeated bills when the legislature meets in regular session next April. He dismisses the notion that he may have suffered politically. “When you’re functioning out of conviction,” he says, “you can’t think of politics.”

In Washington, where they rarely think of anything else, enough Congressmen read the political winds to hand right-to-lifers another reversal on the very day the Florida session ended. After voting for eight straight years to ban Medicaid funding for abortions except when the mother’s life is in danger, the House voted 216 to 206 to allow payments for poor women who become pregnant through rape or incest. Twenty-six House members who opposed such funding in 1988 changed sides.

The proposed change in the law would affect few women. Rape and incest accounted for less than 1% of the 1.6 million pregnancies that ended in abortion last year. Only about one-quarter of those women — roughly 4,000 — were poor enough to qualify for Medicaid payments. Though Bush is hinting that his position is negotiable, he is on record as promising to veto the measure, a gesture to the pro-life groups he has been courting since he switched to their camp after joining the Reagan ticket in 1980.

Democratic leaders in Congress acknowledge that they do not have the votes to override a presidential veto. But Senate majority leader George Mitchell urged Bush to reconsider, pointedly recalling his vacillating stands on the issue. “The President has already changed his position on abortion once, in 1980,” Mitchell observed dryly. “He can do so again.” Democrats might even prefer a veto. After being outmaneuvered in recent weeks on tax cuts and the American flag, they relish the prospect of watching Bush explain why he rejected federal help for poor women facing a horrible predicament. “This isn’t about teenagers getting pregnant in a car at the drive-in movie,” says a top aide to the House Democratic leadership. “This is about rape and incest and poor women.”

Republican strategists have long feared that abortion could be the issue that divides the affluent, younger suburbanites from the hordes of fundamentalists and right-to-lifers who jointly swelled the G.O.P.’s ranks in the 1980s. Excited Democrats are testing out pro-choice positions to see whether they can lure away pro-choice Republicans and independents. Such strategies could prove especially damaging if they lead to the defeat of Republicans in state legislatures, which next year will begin reapportioning congressional districts on the basis of the 1990 census.

Perhaps to signal right-to-life groups that the Administration is not backing away from them, the Justice Department last week filed a brief in one of the three abortion cases facing the Supreme Court this term. It calls for the court to uphold a Minnesota law that would require a teenage girl to obtain the permission of both parents before having an abortion — even if they have never lived together.

Abortion-rights groups boast that since the Webster ruling, their membership has skyrocketed and their war chests have filled to bulging. They have shrewdly appealed to conservatives by framing the issue in terms of whether government or the woman should decide about abortion. They are also resorting to what was once a favorite weapon of right-wing organizations, the election hit list. Last week the National Abortion Rights Action League unveiled the NARAL Nine: nine antiabortion lawmakers it vowed to help defeat at the polls. The list included Florida’s Martinez, South Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Connecticut Governor William O’Neill. “We will do everything possible to bring these politicians down,” promises Kate Michelman, NARAL ‘s executive director.

Lawmakers who try to dodge by soft-pedaling their antiabortion positions run the risk that their inconsistency may itself become an issue. In New York City’s mayoral race, G.O.P. candidate Rudolph Giuliani has pronounced himself personally opposed to abortion, but promises if elected to defend the right to choose. That prompted a thinly disguised rebuke from New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor. Without singling out Giuliani by name, O’Connor said politicians who practice such “evasions” were “irrational and deceitful” — criticisms that could discourage the ethnic Roman Catholic vote that Giuliani desperately needs to defeat Democrat David Dinkins.

Pro-life groups, licking their wounds and refiguring their strategies, draw some encouragement from polls showing that voters opposed to blanket restrictions on abortion rights nevertheless favor certain specific regulations, such as laws that forbid abortion for the purpose of selecting a child’s sex. That is the approach that pro-lifers are taking in Pennsylvania, where the state legislature is considering ten antiabortion measures proposed by Representative Stephen Freind.

But even in Pennsylvania emboldened pro-choice lawmakers are going on the offensive. Early this month, 14 legislators introduced a package of nine bills that would guarantee a woman’s access to abortion and repeal some restrictions passed in recent years. “It was time to stop responding to what was offered by the other side,” says Democratic State Representative Karen Ritter. In the battle over abortion, most of the cheers are coming from the pro-choice side.