The Pro-Life Movement in Disarray
Low, Charlotte
Charlotte Low THE PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT IN DISARRAY Lessons in political ineptitude. rr he hullabaloo over the nomination 1 of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court is in many respects a referendum...
...The right-to-life movement lost face and momentum as a national force...
...They may learn that politics is not only a moral activity, but also the art of the possible...
...McFadden has no use for the seamless garment or for liberals...
...Enclosed find my tax-deductible contribution...
...Her complaints: the bill does not go far enough and its funding prohibitions contain life-of-the-mother exceptions...
...Catholic Conference, the secular arm of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops...
...Judie Brown," as she always calls herself, "because I'm very proud of the fact that I'm married and have three children"), was once director of public relations for the National Right to Life Committee...
...We're a single-issue group," says David O'Steen, National Right to Life's executive director...
...Mrs...
...We could have explained to Hatch how much trouble we were going to cause him," she says...
...Mildred Jefferson, now a pro-life activist in Boston (the Committee says Dr...
...Mrs...
...Lack of adventurousness is one charge that cannot be leveled at the American Life League, Inc., a 1979 spinoff from the National Right to Life Committee that has become its chief opponent on the anti-abortion front...
...The final product, called the Human Life Bill, declared that a human life begins from "the moment of conception...
...Today she claims more than 240,000 members for the American Life League, down somewhat from the 300,000 the group said it had late last year but still many more than NOW's 160,000...
...Please don't turn the page until you've opened your heart...
...Since 1980 the Afghanistan Relief Committee has been sending medical aid, food and support for schools to villagers inside Afghanistan...
...With resignations and replacements over the past fourteen years, the number of justices who can be counted on to reaffirm Roe is now down to four...
...In 1983, Bernardin formulated his seamless garment theory, which has become the prevailing U.S...
...In California, for example, a Democratic-dominated state legislature has approved a ban on state-funded abortion for the past six years, only to have the ban overturned each year by Chief Justice Rose Bird's liberal state supreme court...
...The fighting among pro-life lobbyists was so bitter that, according to one lobbyist close to all sides, "the pro-life movement is now dead in the water as a political element...
...It ignores all other social issues, such as birth control, promiscuity, AIDS, teenage sex, and homosexuality, and takes no stand on capital punishment or nuclear war...
...If Bork wins confirmation and Roe v. Wade falls, that will, of course, be a de facto endorsement, at least for a while, of the states-rights approach to the abortion question...
...Furthermore, says Mrs...
...To this day both the National Right to Life Committee and the American Life League, in their competing literature, claim to be the only true spokesman forthe anti-abortion movement...
...But we can't do it alone...
...As a national entity, the committee is somewhat analogous to the U.S...
...In retrospect, that might not have been a good idea," says Brown of the picketing...
...The Judie Brown group is for perfection or forget it, and that might have scared some Democrats off," complains Hyde...
...It raises money from a mailing base of 20,000 to 30,000 and distributes an acerbic, savvy Hill newsletter called Lifeletter...
...Americans as a group are highly ambivalent about abortion...
...No more...
...Brown, "the bill doesn't say exactly when life begins...
...This proposed constitutional change would declare that the right to life, starting at the moment of fertilization, is "paramount" over all other rights guaranteed by the Constitution...
...Soft" reasons for abortion—the mother's youth, embarrassment, stress, marital problems, commitment to zero population growth, staying on the career fast-track, or poverty—are not in favor with most of the American public, according to polls...
...Her proposition that loose morals and abortion are intertwined seems unimpeachable, but the American Life League's distinctly religious perspective automatically limits its membership to those who share Mrs...
...Its attempt to maintain broad-based support has garnered the organization criticism for lack of adventurousness...
...Earlier versions contained provisions for Congress to oversee abortion legislation, but the final version was a pure states-rights creation...
...Without broad public and media backing, however, such activists tend to be classified in the public mind with Amy Carter rather than Rosa Parks...
...The most prominent is the National Right to Life Committee, founded in 1973...
...A substantial number of pro-lifers have lately gone in for civil disobedience (or "direct action," as they call it), courting arrest by blocking the doors of abortion clinics or dismantling clinic equipment...
...I'd like more information...
...An annual national convention open to the entire anti-abortion movement draws big-name politicians and (Republican) presidential hopefuls...
...Bird and three other liberals were ousted last year, making possible an about-face in that court's attitude towards abortion...
...They are not just Catholics...
...Ever since Roe came down, state legislatures have looked for ingenious ways to get around the ruling —banning abortions for minors without their parents' consent, requiring cooling off periods, and so forth...
...Soviet reign of terror has killed nearly a million civilians and driven five million out of the country...
...Jefferson simply failed to win enough votes for re-election...
...her no-nonsense style also appeals strongly to fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants...
...The League's president, the 43-year-old Judie Brown (or "Mrs...
...The Supreme Court has used Roe to strike down most of these laws, but still they keep coming...
...The U.S...
...But she has circulated a statement of objections to her supporters, leading the National Right to Life Committee-to charge that her opposition has made it difficult for the Senate version's Republican sponsor, Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, to find a Democratic co-sponsor...
...In 1978, his political action committee scored a significant victory by helping to unseat ultra-liberal Democratic Senator Dick Clark in Iowa, but in 1980 the PAC took an eccentric turn, promoting Morton Downey, an Irish-American poet and songwriter, for the Democratic presidential primary in Massachusetts (Downey subsequently abandoned his presidential aspirations and is now a talk-show host in Chicago...
...Other anti-abortion groups, including the Browns' American Life League, McFadden's Ad Hoc Committee, and the 40,000-member Protestant-oriented Christian Action Council, weighed in against the Hatch amendment...
...If something doesn't originate with them, they're not going to be involved," says a lobbyist...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 nor had cast some ambiguous votes on abortion issues as a member of the Arizona legislature...
...Name Address City State Zip AS3 AFGHANISTAN RELIEF COMMITTEE INC...
...for such "hard" reasons as rape, incest, threat to the mother's life or health, and severe deformities in the fetus...
...You have to settle for what you can get and try to save some lives...
...Brown says these are no longer necessary with today's advanced obstetrics, and, anyway, "you can't base a law on hard cases...
...Hatch tried to drum up interest in a school prayer amendment, then got out of the constitutional amendment business...
...It only says that life begins in the womb, and that could enable the Supreme Court to say when life begins...
...A solid majority of Americans, moreover, do not want to fund abortions with their tax dollars, polls likewise show...
...Chamber of Commerce...
...Brown currently devotes most of his efforts to running a financial consulting firm for the American Life League and similar operations...
...Part of the pro-life movement has turned, along with random verbal sniping at Willke, to more desperate measures, clinic bombing being the most extreme example...
...Biden, like all Democrats who seek national office these days, is currently courting the ferociously pro-abortion National Organization for Women and has vowed to fight the Bork appointment...
...The organization says it has no figures on its total membership including affiliates, but estimates the number to be "at least 2 million...
...The Browns and some others started the American Life Lobby, and later the League, its tax-exempt affiliate...
...If a new poll shows most Americans favor abortion under some circumstances, Mrs...
...Brown's entire congeries of views...
...In 1978, says Mrs...
...East and Helms drafted a bill that would have stripped federal courts of their power to issue injunctions against enforcement of state antiabortion laws...
...The Hatch amendment is said by some critics to have been the brainchild of the U.S...
...The Catholic Church leadership got out, too...
...anti-abortion laws have historically contained life-of-the-mother exceptions...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 25 terms with Willke to begin with, condemned the National Right to Life Committee and declared that it had no authority to speak for the right-to-life movement...
...W orse still, 1982 could easily replay itself with a slightly different alignment of players...
...it is an umbrella organization for local and state affiliates in all fifty states...
...The bill, whose House version was introduced on April 9 by Hyde, also contains several preliminary provisions suggesting that unborn children are living human beings and that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided...
...Those who refuse to flee need your help desperately...
...Brown, would have caved in...
...Brown sees them: promiscuity, contraception, pornography, divorce, homosexuality, and so on...
...O'Con41(ii AtAkttll IOW Dissension and infighting in pro-life circles was probably the prime reason congressional efforts to nullify Roe became derailed and died during the early 1980s...
...Playing a "spoiler role," as he calls it, he also took out advertisements urging Californians to vote for Democratic Senator Alan Cranston over Republican challenger Edward Zschau on the theory that the 72-year-old Cranston, who has never cast a pro-life vote, had a better chance of a short tenure than the younger, apparently equally pro-choice Zschau...
...Meanwhile, Weyrich went to Rome and persuaded Edouard Cardinal Gagnon, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, to write a letter endorsing the notion of "imperfect" antiabortion legislation that Catholics can legitimately support...
...One longtime Brown ally, University of Notre Dame law professor Charles Rice, who earlier wrote a column in the conservative Catholic newsweekly, the Wanderer, opposing the White House bill as too weak, recently changed his mind and now says he will support the measure...
...Afghanistan Relief Committee Room 4100, 345 Park Ave...
...A conference spokesman says this is not unusual for a bill in early stages...
...The bishops enlisted the support of the National Right to Life Committee, which pushed the amendment vigorously...
...These appropriation amendments bar federal Medicaid spending for abortions, with certain "hard case" exceptions, usually just to save the mother's life...
...I just walked away from all that," says Curt Young, executive director of the Christian Action Council...
...Jim McClellan, then chief counsel for East's separation of powers subcommittee and now head of the Center for Judicial Studies in Lynchburg, Virginia, says the Human Life Bill rested on the power that the Fourteenth Amendment gives Congress to enforce its provisions...
...There have been no serious efforts to placate it ever since...
...The primary pro-life opponent to date has been Judie Brown...
...The National Right to Life Committee also says it backs the bill, but some critics say the Committee's support is less than enthusiastic...
...Henry Hyde—have passed Congress every year since 1976...
...There are plenty of factors to blame, but one of them is the pro-life movement itself...
...They're so pure, they can't stand it," says McFadden of the Hyde opponents...
...According to Hyde's office, the amendments have been a fiscal success as well as a legal one: the federal government paid for about 300,000 Medicaid abortions (at a cost of about $50 million) in 1975 but only 227 in 1986...
...The National Abortion Rights Action League, however, claims 280,000 members...
...Grassroots pro-life groups may learn something from the dithering of their Capitol Hill analogues over the last decade and a half...
...Some right-to-lifers were left permanently shaken by the 1982 contretemps...
...Its young victims become crippled reminders of the high cost of resistance...
...We're very Christian-oriented," she says...
...National Right to Life condemns abortion clinic bombings and sit-ins, but it also declines to endorse such legal forms of activism as picketing clinics and trying to talk prospective clients out of abortions (although local affiliates engage in some of these legal activities...
...Dissension and infighting in pro-life circles was probably the prime reason congressional efforts to nullify Roe became derailed and died during the early 1980s...
...For one thing, bipartisan support for state restrictions is easier to obtain...
...On the other side, the American Life Lobby, not on the best It's a bomb loaded with just enough explosive to mutilate...
...the Committee confines its efforts to public education and lobbying...
...although it may be a good litmus test for the abortion views of 1988 congressional candidates, it will have a tough time getting through the Senate, most agree...
...They're very pure about what they're doing, but they haven't accomplished much...
...This organization is very powerful...
...She wishes the pro-life groups, including her own, would stop airing their differences in public, as they did during the Hatch-Helms controversy, when the American Life League sided with Helms...
...but it would also have meant a sweeping national prohibition on abortion...
...The American Life League used to support the Hyde Amendments...
...In the middle are the remaining 60 percent, which seems to approve of legal abortions, but only during the first trimester of pregnancy and then only Charlotte Low is a senior editor of Insight magazine...
...Brown claims she is routinely snubbed by the National Right to Life Committee, which refuses to invite her to its meetings and won't send representatives to hers (the Committee denies this...
...Nonetheless, back in the early 1980s, when the Helms and Hatch measures competed head-on for congressional support, McFadden took a somewhat purist high-ground of his own...
...National Right to Life has also refused to join the rest of the antiabortion movement in condemning the erstwhile pro-life Surgeon General Everett Koop, who said he would refer women with AIDS seeking abortions to doctors willing to provide them...
...Its political action committee raises about $1 million a year, partly through direct mailings...
...New York, N.Y...
...Brown has built up an impressive number of fiercely loyal supporters who can be counted on to flood Congress with letters at her request...
...Politicians discovered that they need not fear the pro-life movement...
...Both measures went down in flames...
...Koop has been a very good friend of children for the last few years...
...Members of Congress such as Delaware's Joseph Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, who took their anti-abortion THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 23 constituents seriously and voted 100 percent pro-life before 1982, "threw up their hands in disgust," says the lobbyist, and now vote unpredictably on abortion-related measures...
...From Mrs...
...The problem with the Hatch amendment, from a movement point of view, is that it was a compromise," says McFadden, "and when you start with a compromise, it goes downhill from there...
...McFadden is a conservative Catholic whose other newsletter, Catholic Eye, blasts dissident theologians and clerical liberals and yearns nostalgically for a return to fish on Friday and the Latin Mass...
...Brown's point of view, this means that Hatch, not Mrs...
...Brown has since pretty much abandoned lobbying...
...Even lawmakers who would not vote to overturn Roe regularly cast their ballots against federal funding...
...The Browns support what they call the Paramount Human Life Amendment, versions of which have been knocking around Congress since 1974 without ever actually being reviewed by any committee...
...All fifty states limited abortion in 1973, although some ofthe laws were extremely permissive...
...The bill is anything but a sure winner...
...Brown will promptly buy an advertisement in a religious periodical questioning the whole science of statistical sampling...
...A parental consent law for California is also in the offing...
...Hatch favored turning the issue back to the states, while Helms wanted a sweeping declaration that a fetus is a "person" under the Constitution, entitled to the same legal protections as a human being already born...
...McFadden is also a staunch Hyde loyalist, and his newsletter regularly blasts the American Life League and others who don't care for the Hyde Amendments because of their exceptions...
...Jefferson, and when the doctor left, the Committee bureaucracy "challenged my loyalty" to the incoming president, Dr...
...That would have thrown the matter back to the states, which could then devise their own abortion restrictions or not...
...I decided I would never be involved in internecine fighting again...
...The court not only removed the abortion issue from legislative purview but rejected arguments that an unborn child is a person subject to the same protections the Fourteenth Amendment offers those already born...
...he admits, however, that "there was no precedent for this position...
...The Hatch-Helms controversy "was a real disaster," says the lobbyist...
...Brown's husband Paul is an even more quixotic figure...
...The movement split down the middle on two competing Senate measures offered by North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms and Utah Republican Orrin Hatch...
...Observers universally agree that any constitutional amendment on abortion, which would require two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states, would be virtually impossible to pass given current public attitudes, and that the high-standard Paramount amendment would be the toughest of all to pass...
...I decided that in the future I would concentrate on constructive action rather than bloodying the other pro-life groups...
...The Senate voted 47-46 to table it...
...he is a Reagan loyalist who supports aid to the contras and other aspects of a tough foreign policy...
...Brown quit...
...Carolyn Gersten Made to feel highly uncomfortable, as she tells it, Mrs...
...The Committee's Willke then threatened to muster a Senate filibuster to defeat the Helms measure...
...The Hatch amendment got to the Senate floor, where it failed to get the two-thirds majority it needed...
...Brown was devoted to Dr...
...The Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendments' constitutionality on a 5-4 vote in 1980, in one of its few decisions agreeing to some restriction on abortion...
...Hedoesn't favor abortion for AIDS victims and he won't do one," says O'Steen...
...It may not be politically practical to push for a law telling mothers they might have to die in order to bear their children...
...In the state forums, Americans might have the chance, denied them for fourteen years, to figure out what to do about the moral unease it is clear most of them feel about abortion...
...It concentrates on just three issues: abortion, infanticide (such as the "Baby Doe" killings of defective newborns), and euthanasia, active and passive...
...T his raises a question: Why hasn't 1 anything been done to date about Roe v. Wade and its endorsement of the clearly unpopular idea of abortion on demand...
...Although many of its leaders are religious, it has no particular religious orientation...
...they were so before Roe was handed down, and they remain so today...
...McFadden calls his Ad Hoc Committee "antiabortion" rather than "pro-life" because the term "pro-life" suggests associations with the "seamless garment" theories of Chicago's politically liberal Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987...
...National Right to Life's president, John Willke, M.D., is probably the most quoted right-tolife spokesman in the press...
...rr he pro-life lobby in Washington is divided into three major camps that do not speak to one another...
...the vote was 50-49, with Helms abstaining...
...The clerical bureaucrats who staff the Catholic Conference tend to be politically liberal, and many undoubtedly felt embarrassed by their church's antiabortion stance, so at odds with the position of the more "progressive" clerics of mainline Protestant denominations...
...The Hatch measure allowed the group, which does not cotton to conservative "hardliners," to distance itself from Helms and his allies...
...McClellan, East's former aide, says the amendment's flaw was that it specifically "constitutionalized" abortion...
...rr hat was the end of serious con-1 gressional efforts to outlaw abortion...
...T rouble began when Hatch, a member of East's separation of powers subcommittee and a crucial pro-life vote, declared he would not vote to clear the Helms bill from committee unless his own amendment received priority treatment...
...Only ten senators, Republicans all, have signed on to date...
...The Helms bill, put together by the senator and his fellow North Carolina Republican, the late John East, was a product of the elation that swept the antiabortion movement with Reagan's victory in 1980...
...Brown insists she does not intend to lobby against the measure...
...O'Connor was confirmed and later "surprised" the League by consistently voting to uphold abortion restrictions...
...Neither, some say, had the votes to succeed, but each running in competition with the other meant doom for both...
...To be fair, some seamless garment advocates, such as the JustLife political action committee in Washington, valiantly strive to live out their no abortion/no nukes/no poverty ethic, but they have trouble finding many pro-life liberals on the national scene to support...
...10154 1=1 I want to help...
...McFadden calls his Ad Hoc Committee "anti-abortion" rather than "pro-life" because the term "pro-life" suggests associations with the "seam-less garment" theories of Chicago's politically liberal Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, who believes opposition to abortion should be part of a general crusade against capital punishment and nuclear war and in favor of more government welfare programs...
...If Bork, a federal appellate judge who has criticized- the Supreme Court for inventing constitutional rights, is confirmed, there could well be five votes for sending Roe v. Wade the way of Plessy v. Ferguson, the famous 1896 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the principle of separate-but-equal...
...The language, deliberately vague, is clearly designed to pull in everyone who can be persuaded to cast a vote against abortion funding, whether for fiscal or moral reasons...
...Brown, the Committee ousted its then-president, Dr...
...Supreme Court is in many respects a referendum on the continued life of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision in which seven out of nine Supreme Court justices said they found a "fundamental" constitutional privacy right that allows women to have abortions during the first six months of pregnancy for any reason...
...Then came the Helms measure, attached as a rider to a debt ceiling amendment...
...The third major pro-life player on Capitol Hill is the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life, Inc...
...The fight got nasty...
...It's highly unlikely that their concerns will result in complete abortion bans in most states (most Americans have a soft spot for the hard cases), but it is likely that some—perhaps even a large number—of them will vote to decrease substantially the number of abortions...
...M rs...
...In 1986, he endorsed pro-life Democrats in the Alabama, Louisiana, and Nevada senatorial races...
...Strictly a lobbying organization, the Ad Hoc Committee is a largely one-man operation started in 1973 by James McFadden, a longtime National Review staffer...
...This philosophical (and tactical) difference, which Hatch and Helms could not resolve and which the U.S...
...Brown, a Democrat, also organized pickets opposing the Senate confirmation of Sandra Day O'Connor for the Supreme Court in 1981...
...Her political approach is simple: no compromises whatsoever...
...The atheist-socialist-lesbian-pacifist is presumably as welcome in National Right to Life as the devout Catholic Republican father of nine...
...Members of Congress were faced with the anomalous spectacle of pro-life groups actually battling to defeat pro-life legislation...
...Several observers say that during that period the National Right to Life Committee more or less became a Catholic Conference-front for pushing the Hatch amendment...
...The League doesn't just battle abortion but also its "underlying causes," as Mrs...
...It would also bar federal family-planning funds to any organization that performs or refers clients for abortions, settling a dispute that resulted in the recent firing from the Health and Human Services Department of abortion foe Jo Ann Gasper, who refused to renew grants to Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions in a number of its facilities...
...In late 1981, Hatch, like East a member of the committee, decided that the lawmakers had no authority to supersede the Supreme Court, and launched his own strategy for overturning Roe v. Wade—a constitutional amendment declaring that there was no federal constitutional right to abortion...
...We discovered that thousands of abortions were being performed under the exception," she says...
...The National Right to Life Committee tries to appeal to the broadest base of supporters it can find...
...The polls vary, but it can be safely said that about 20 percent of the population favors a total ban on abortion and another 20 percent favors no restrictions whatsoever...
...If the National Right to Life Committee is for something, the American Life League is sure to be against it," says one pro-life activist...
...A White House-initiated bill introduced earlier this year—the first launched by Reagan during his presidency—would make the Hyde Amendments permanent...
...The reason: the exceptions allowing funding for abortions to save the life of the mother...
...Catholic Conference has kept entirely mum...
...Her husband Paul, who was running a political action committee for National Right to Life, also pulled out, with plenty of bad blood flowing on both sides...
...As a procedural matter the Helms bill would have been easier to get through, requiring only a simple majority of votes in Congress and a presidential signature...
...This is the kind of thing you have to do piecemeal...
...We feel it is necessary to be very up-front about our religious beliefs...
...Even some Republicans (who, as a party, have a more consistent antiabortion record than the Democrats, who must contend with vociferous pro-choice groups in their ranks) began to waver, most notably Arizona's Barry Goldwater before his retirement last year and Delaware's Harry Roth...
...Currently, only seven states and the District of Columbia voluntarily pay for free elective abortions with state taxes (five others are under court orders to subsidize abortions, and a sixth, Michigan, is in lirnbo as state courts decide whether to uphold a legislature-imposed funding ban...
...But Mrs...
...The bill had some precedent—the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 limited federal injunctive power in labor disputes—but strong opposition from constitutional scholars, including Bork, led to a revamping of the bill...
...the pro-abortion interest-group pressure on state Democrats is not so severe...
...State legislatures might be the best place to resolve the divisive issue, which many members of Congress wish would simply go away...
...The most enthusiastic promoter of the bill to date has been McFadden's Ad Hoc Committee, although the Christian Action Council, conservative activist Paul Weyrich's Coalitions for America, and the Moral Majority have also signed on...
...The purists are simply killing babies...
...Although the Hatch amendment, being a constitutional measure, would have been difficult to pass, it had broader appeal in that it did not attempt to ban abortion but merely remove it from federal purview—analogous to the repeal of Prohibition...
...Using advertising and direct mailings from her home in Stafford, Virginia, about forty miles south of Washington, Mrs...
...A Catholic Conference spokesman declines to comment on the issue...
...Even Judie Brown is giving the Bork nomination her "cautious" endorsement...
...So-called "Hyde Amendments' named after their chief sponsor, Illinois Republican Rep...
...Catholic Conference ethos and, critics say, an artful way for liberal clerics to get themselves off the hook on the abortion issue...
...And those beliefs can be aggressive...
...One former member of the National Right to Life Committee board says board members received calls from Catholic bishops threatening to withdraw church support from the Committee and to stop sending Catholic representatives to its convention if it supported Helms's Human Life Bill...
...The Browns agree and are staking their hopes on a future, far-reaching religious conversion, perhaps prompted by AIDS devastation...
...Over the last seven years, the...
...pro-life movement itself has never been able to resolve, meant death by suffocation for both measures in 1982 and 1983 when they came up for votes on the Senate floor...
Vol. 20 • October 1987 • No. 10
