TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102389/10238900.053

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                                                                                NATION, Page 35

The Shifting Politics of Abortion


With two major victories, the pro-choice majority shows that it
is not so silent


    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.