TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121189/12118900.014

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.5 KB | 239 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 82

Nothing Less Than Perfect


With style, grace and cold fire, FAYE WATTLETON, president of
Planned Parenthood, champions a woman's right to choose

By Richard Stengel


    When the red light of the television camera winks on, most
people also light up, becoming warmer and more animated than
their everyday selves. But when Faye Wattleton, the president
of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, sits before the
camera's eye -- something she is doing with ever greater
frequency these days -- she turns chillier and more controlled
than her already well-disciplined self. Her speech becomes
stricter, her smile tighter. Wattleton monitors herself closer
than the camera does, for she is intent on being nothing less
than perfect, as though a single dangling modifier or wayward
statistic will bring her down, and with her the movement in
which she so fervently believes.

    Wattleton wears the burden, though she would call it the
honor, of being a role model. As a black woman, divorced mother
and crusader for family planning, she feels the pressure of
being held up as a symbol, and she is determined neither to let
up nor to let anyone down.

    But she feared that all she had worked for was in danger
when the Supreme Court handed down its Webster decision this
past July, permitting states to narrow a woman's access to
abortion. Planned Parenthood, the nation's oldest and largest
family-planning organization, is also the premier institution
providing abortions around the country, and Wattleton is
fiercely dedicated to protecting that service. She had visions
of Roe v. Wade being overturned, and spoke darkly of a return
to the era of back-alley abortions.

    "Since Webster," she said to a group of suburban supporters
at a fund raiser recently, "we now must fight this battle in 50
states." Cold fire stirs in her voice. "If we can't preserve
the privacy of our right to procreate, I can't imagine what
rights we will be able to protect. It's a temptation to grow
weary with all the battles still to be fought. But it's also an
opportunity to show the finest we can be."

    Webster turned out to be just such an opportunity. The
decision had the unintended consequence of rousing the moribund
pro-choice movement. Wattleton had long maintained that a silent
majority of American women did not want anyone tampering with
their reproductive freedom. "Now the majority is getting noisy,"
she says. Witness the recent national Mobilization for Women's
Lives and the elections in New Jersey and Virginia in which
voters selected pro-choice Governors. Wattleton asserts that she
does not want her teenage daughter to be fighting the same
battles she is. To that end, this woman who looks like a
Hollywood version of a corporate queen is bringing her signature
style of passionate rationalism and measured indignation.

    Wattleton, the only child of a woman who was a
Fundamentalist minister in St. Louis, was appointed head of
Planned Parenthood eleven years ago, at age 34. She was a plucky
choice for an institution traditionally headed by button-down
white men, an organization that had become as all-American as
the Girl Scouts and debutante parties. Within her first three
years, Wattleton, a former nurse and midwife whose primary
bureaucratic experience had been running the Dayton affiliate,
shifted the organization's structure to a crisply corporate one,
reshuffling more than half of the national office's employees.

    Slowly, cautiously, she also began to mold Planned
Parenthood in her own image. As the political climate turned
hostile to abortion rights during the Reagan years, she became
more outraged and outspoken. Under Wattleton, Planned Parenthood
took off the white gloves and became one of the nation's most
vocal and aggressive advocates of abortion rights. The
organization will soon launch a political action fund headed by
Wattleton that will allow it to endorse political candidates.
Today the public image of Planned Parenthood is Faye Wattleton.

    Her natural reserve is in contrast to the effusiveness of
the dozens of newspaper and magazine articles about her.
Publicity is a principal part of her brief; Wattleton's main job
as president of Planned Parenthood is to be the organization's
spokeswoman. Thus promoting herself is advancing Planned
Parenthood. Even when she is being interviewed by Vogue or Ms.,
she rarely neglects to mention Planned Parenthood's 177
affiliates and 850 clinics in 46 states, which served 3.8
million people last year, offering everything from infertility
counseling to prenatal care. But it is abortion that is at the
very top of her agenda these days and, like a presidential
candidate, she travels the hustings campaigning for choice.

    On a single day in Washington recently, Wattleton testified
before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee (she tangled with
Representative Christopher Smith of New Jersey, a zealous
pro-life advocate), planned pro-choice strategy with
Representatives Don Edwards of Florida and Pat Schroeder of
Colorado (she urged them to introduce a federal pro-choice
statute), had a get-acquainted session with Democratic National
Committee head Ronald Brown (she told him that Webster backlash
will help the Democrats) and then capped off the day by
conferring with Republican Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon (she
pressed him about a pro-choice constitutional amendment, a dream
of hers that other pro-choice groups privately consider a waste
of time).

    At each appearance during her long day, Wattleton looked
immaculate, as though she had just emerged from a beauty salon.
In effect she had, for she spends a good 25 minutes before most
public occasions "freshening up," as one of her aides calls it.
Wattleton has a healthy dose of vanity. Her nails, makeup and
hair are always just so. She maintains that grooming is part of
her job, "as people make judgments about youbased on your
appearance." Nearly 6 ft. tall, imperially slim and sleekly
dressed, she is usually the cynosure of attention at any
gathering. Harper's Bazaar named her one of their eight "Over-40
and Sensational" women last summer, and she is a stunning
refutation of the cliche of the dowdy feminist. In an era when
nonprofit organizations seek out celebrity spokespeople to get
their message across, she is the public relations ideal, a
spokeswoman who has become a celebrity.

    Wattleton can be imperious. She travels first-class while
her aides ride coach. Recently in Chicago, she retired to a
hotel suite for a solitary lunch. As she bit into her sandwich,
she asked an aide to get her a Coke. The young woman returned
with a can of Pepsi. "Is this all right?" she asked. "No,"
Wattleton replied. "I said Coke, not Pepsi. There is a
difference."

    Wattleton's high visibility does not bring out only
admirers. She has had death threats from pro-life extremists,
and is often accompanied by a bodyguard. When she arrived at the
Capitol Hilton in Washington this past fall to receive a
humanitarian award from the Congressional Black Caucus, she was
greeted by a small band of pro-life protesters. FAYE WATTLETON
MURDERS BABIES' BLOOD, read one placard; FAYE WATTLETON:
PRINCESS OF DEATH, read another. Wattleton was accompanied by
her 14-year-old daughter Felicia, her only child. Felicia was
upset by the signs, which Wattleton has grown used to. At least
they consider me royalty, she told Felicia by way of
consolation.

    In one recent debate with a pro-life advocate who looked
barely out of cheerleading togs, Wattleton seemed the soul of
reasonableness. Afterward, she let her irritation show. "You
know, I felt like saying, `Honey, live a little, then come back
and talk. People out there have lives that are living death.'"

    Pro-life advocates talk about women's babies; pro-choice
advocates talk about women's rights. In the wake of polling
data that show a majority of pro-choice voters supporting
certain restrictions on abortion, such as parental-notification
provisions, Wattleton and other women leaders have been shifting
the terms of the debate. Wattleton refuses to engage in
discussions of issues like when life begins or whether a fetus
is a human being. That, she implies, is merely sophistry and
irrelevant. The most she will say is, "Look, abortion is never
a great thing."

    Wattleton functions as an ambassador between the mostly
middle-class pro-choice movement and the women who
disproportionately avail themselves of that choice: poor black
females. "She plays a unique role in bridging white and black,"
says Kathy Bonk, a longtime pro-choice activist who is a
director of a nonprofit communications firm. "She moves between
the two worlds. None of the other pro-choice leaders can really
do that."

    Wattleton tailors her appeal to her audience, and when she
is speaking before a group of black women she unwinds a bit.
Her speech turns more colloquial. If you listen very closely,
you can just make out some of the revivalist rhythms of her
mother's preaching. "The stakes are higher for us as
African-American women," she tells a Chicago group. "It will be
African-American women who will die first. We suffer
disproportionately from poverty. We suffer disproportionately
from despair."

    Nonwhite women, she says, are more than twice as likely to
seek abortions as white women, and are far and away poorer than
their white counterparts. She notes that the percentage of
fertile nonwhite women who do not use any form of contraception
is double that of fertile white women. The Webster decision, she
says, in allowing states to restrict funding for abortion, will
make life even harder for black women by further widening the
disparity in access to abortion for rich and poor. Black women
are her special audience, and she knows she must speak for them
as well as to them. She is well aware of the historical
ambivalence that black women have felt about abortion. She does
not deny that black women are underrepresented in the pro-choice
movement. The explanation, she says, is simple.

    "Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of
the disenfranchised," she says. "The middle class creates
social revolutions. When a group of people are
disproportionately concerned with daily survival, it's not
likely that they have the resources to go to Washington and
march. African-American women are marching with their feet to
get abortions."

    Politics is not an intellectual pursuit for her; her
political education was her own experience as a black woman. She
never marched in the civil rights movement; her parents were
her political models. "I can't separate myself from the fact
that I grew up as a black child. My parents were quietly defiant
of racism. I was born and raised in the North, but my roots are
solidly in the South. In the summers we drove south to Canton,
Miss., where my mother was from. My father would always ask,
whenever we stopped for gas, if they had toilets for colored.
If they said yes, then he would say, `Fill up the tank.' If they
said no, he would say thank you and drive on. Once we were
outside New Orleans, and this day they said yes, so I jumped out
of the car and went around back, and I found nothing except a
hole in the ground. I told my father, and he spoke sharply to
the attendant. `What else do you expect?' the attendant replied.
`Stop pumping the gas,' my father said."

    Quiet defiance. Like father, like daughter. Self-possessed,
imperturbable, smoothly articulate, Wattleton is often hard to
read. But not to Trish Arredondo, the director of an Indiana
Planned Parenthood affiliate. One day, after a speech at a fund
raiser in Munster, Ind., Wattleton stretched out her legs in
the back of a white limousine cruising along Route 20 toward
Chicago. Arredondo reached for Wattleton's note pad and stared
at it intently. Arredondo is a family-planning specialist by
training, a graphologist by avocation. Without taking her eyes
off Wattleton's handwriting, she began to speak. You're
idealistic and self-controlled, she told Wattleton. You're a bit
possessive. You can keep a secret. Wattleton's face was a mask.
You dwell a great deal on the past, Arredondo continued. You are
easily wounded, but you hide it well. When Arredondo finished,
Wattleton was silent. Well, how much of it was true? Wattleton
paused, and then said, very softly, "All of it." Then she
smiled. "Does it say I'm late?" Wattleton asked. "I'm always
late."