ON APRIL 22, pro-choice advocates will march on Washington to demand that protections for reproductive rights remain in place. Organized by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), the National Organization for Women (NOW), and Planned Parenthood Federation of America, among others, the march will kick off a four-year lobbying campaign designed to last the duration of President George W. Bush’s first — and, pro-choice activists hope, last — term in office.
The campaign is already galvanizing support on area campuses. At Boston University, for instance, students are donning hot-pink sandwich boards that read keep your laws off my body and ru 4 reproductive rights, while collecting petition signatures in support of legal abortion. Over at Northeastern, they’re planning teach-ins on the need to “defend women’s lives.” Across town, at Harvard, they’re papering dorms and dining halls with abortion-friendly messages. And at MIT, they’ve resuscitated a once-defunct pro-choice group. The issue has yet to acquire the appeal of such popular campus causes as the anti-sweatshop-labor and anti-globalization campaigns. (Hundreds of young activists will flock to Quebec on April 22 for another demonstration against free trade, outside the Summit of Americas.) But most of these students hadn’t bothered to think about reproductive rights even 365 days ago. It’s as if the Bush administration has inspired a whole new generation of campus activists. Observes Gina Sartori, a Northeastern senior organizing students there: “The movement was practically dead before Bush got elected. Now you have Bush, and everybody hates Bush. He’s really mobilizing us.”
Which raises a question: are these abortion-rights organizations, nearly dormant during the past eight years, capitalizing on Bush’s presidency in order to raise money, increase membership, and alleviate fears? Or are reproductive rights now vulnerable in a way they weren’t when Bill Clinton led the nation?
IT’S A FAIR question. Abortion, after all, is still legal in this country. The 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade guarantees women a constitutional right to abortion free from government interference during the first and second trimesters of pregnancy — before fetal viability. And access to the procedure hasn’t changed since President Bush assumed office.
That is to say, if you happen to be middle-class and live in the city, you have access to abortion. But if you’re middle-class and living in a rural area, your access is diminished. And if you’re poor almost anywhere, you effectively have no access. The same can be said about women who are under 18, who do not speak English, or who need an abortion after 18 weeks of pregnancy.
These gradations are clearly evident in Massachusetts, a state many think of as liberal. According to the Cambridge-based Abortion Access Project, 62 hospitals across the state have obstetrics/gynecology departments. Yet only 12 of them actually offer abortion services. Meanwhile, no more than 11 abortion clinics exist statewide. At least half of these 23 hospitals and clinics are located in and around Boston. That means huge swaths of Massachusetts — Cape Cod, the North Shore, and all but Springfield in the west — lack any local abortion provider, let alone a provider that accepts Medicaid funds for low-income women. (Twelve percent of Massachusetts women age 15 to 44 live in poverty.) The trend mirrors the state of abortion access nationwide, where 86 percent of US counties — 95 percent of rural ones — have no known abortion provider.
Says Susan Yannow of the Abortion Access Project, “Abortion may be legal, but who can get one? If you’re a poor, rural, or young woman, you already have trouble.”
If access was a problem even under Clinton, why did it not become an issue until a pro-life Republican moved into the White House? Primarily because the political landscape has changed. Bush used his first full day in office, which happened to fall on the 28th anniversary of the Roe ruling, to reimpose a ban on federal aid not only to international organizations that perform abortions, but also to those that merely discuss it as an option. (The “global gag rule” was initiated by Ronald Reagan in 1984 and maintained by the first President Bush. Clinton repealed the rule.) Not only did Bush set the new administration’s tone with this immediate anti-choice salvo, but for the first time since 1973 the pro-choice movement faces an overwhelmingly anti-choice climate on Capitol Hill. A solid pro-life majority in Congress has existed for the past six years, with as many as 217 abortion foes in the House and another 47 in the Senate. And now they have a pro-life president who is sure to sign some of the bills vetoed by Clinton, including the ban on the controversial procedure opponents call “partial birth” abortion. The phrase, coined by the National Right to Life Committee, refers to a number of late-term-abortion methods that bring the fetus partly into the vaginal canal; abortions performed early in pregnancy take place entirely within the uterus. According to the Washington, DC–based Alan Guttmacher Institute, only one percent of all abortions conducted in 1996 (the latest year for which statistics are available) took place after 21 weeks; an additional four percent took place after 15 weeks. More than half of the five percent of women who have abortions beyond 15 weeks of gestation say they delayed the procedure because they had trouble finding or paying for the services. The rest cite personal medical reasons like diabetes, or say they discovered problems such as extreme fetal malformation later in the pregnancy.
Without the threat of a presidential veto, House Republicans have launched a coordinated campaign to impose further restrictions on abortion:
• Last month, the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a bill that would punish people who harm a fetus during an assault on a pregnant woman. The proposal, known as the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, would make it a federal crime to injure or kill a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus during an attack. Abortion-rights supporters view the bill as a step toward declaring separate, legal status for a fetus and ultimately outlawing abortion.
• Representatives such as Richard Armey (R-Texas) and Christopher Smith (R–New Jersey) plan to reintroduce legislation that would prohibit “partial-birth abortion” procedures, despite the fact that “post-viability” bans already exist in 41 states, including Massachusetts. (These laws often ban abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy except when a woman’s life is endangered; the nine states without “post-viability” bans tend to have other procedure bans that limit late-term abortions.)
• House Republicans expect to push for limitations on who can administer the “abortion pill” RU-486, or mifepristone, which the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved last fall.
• Another anti-abortion measure, known as the Teen Endangerment Act, would make it a federal crime for anyone except a parent to transport a minor across state lines to obtain abortion services rather than abide by her home state’s parental-consent requirements. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, one-third of teenagers who do not tell their parents about a pregnancy are also victims of parental violence — physical or sexual — and fear the news will prompt abuse.
• Representatives such as Lindsey Graham (R–South Carolina) and Tom DeLay (R-Texas) have hinted that they will add abortion language to spending bills — for example, imposing parental-consent requirements on federal family-planning funding.
Beyond these legislative assaults, Bush has appointed not only a pro-life attorney general, but also a pro-life secretary for health and human services. Attorney General John Ashcroft has made a career out of opposing abortion, even in instances of rape, incest, and risk to a woman’s life. While serving as a US senator from 1995 to 2000, the Missouri politician penned legislation providing fetuses with constitutional protections. He sponsored the controversial partial-birth-abortion ban that Clinton subsequently vetoed in 2000. And in 1999, he supported a Missouri ban passed by that state’s legislature (and later vetoed by its governor) that would have imposed second-degree-murder charges on women who have abortions, with penalties that included life imprisonment.
Now that Ashcroft has become the country’s lead attorney, he could make a lasting impression on women’s reproductive rights. As attorney general, he has the power to enforce — or not — those laws safeguarding abortion providers from violence. He has sole discretion over which cases are filed by the government with the Supreme Court — cases that could challenge the precedent established in Roe v. Wade. And if the past is any guide, he will be the president’s top adviser on nominations to the federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court on down.
That an extremist like Ashcroft has this much power terrifies pro-choice activists. Explains Boston NOW president Andrea Lee, “Here is a person in a position of incredible authority who wants to take away abortion completely. It’s hard not to feel threatened.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson takes a more moderate position on abortion. Still, the former Wisconsin governor has backed restrictions on the procedure, as well as on contraceptives — stances that aren’t especially encouraging given that Thompson oversees the FDA. He has already indicated his intent to reopen the issue of RU-486, even though the FDA spent more than a decade investigating the drug before approving it.
Despite Bush’s actions thus far, some Republican insiders doubt he would actually lead the charge on the abortion front. Marshall Whittmann, who works at the Washington, DC–based Hudson Institute, a moderately conservative think tank, maintains that Bush will approach this issue gingerly because, he says, “it will divide the Republican coalition.” Religious conservatives — who vehemently oppose abortion — constitute as much as 30 percent of the Republican Party. Yet Whittmann notes that the party’s “big givers” — those who are fiscally conservative yet socially moderate — are overwhelmingly pro-choice. Given these divisions, Bush’s actions make political sense. “He must keep his base content,” Whittmann explains, “and he has done so in the cheapest way.” Because the current gag rule doesn’t affect American women, for example, the president has managed not to anger his pro-choice backers. “This is a pro-life administration,” he concludes, “but hysteria is not warranted.”
