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April 24, 2004

For Abortion Rights Cause, a New Diversity

By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

WASHINGTON, April 23 — When Kalpana Krishnamurthy rallies supporters here this weekend at a march for abortion rights, the first such national gathering in 12 years, she will be doing so as director of the Third Wave Foundation, a nationwide feminist group.

But Ms. Krishnamurthy's perspective on the issue is shaped by far more than domestic debate. Her parents immigrated to the United States from India, where most of her large extended family still lives and where although abortion is legal, the right to it is intertwined with continuing battles over other women's issues, including domestic violence and economic opportunity.

And when she marches on Sunday, she said, she will also be representing women across South Asia whose access to social services has been limited by an American policy that bars financing to international organizations that perform or provide information on abortions.

"The impact of these laws is intensely personal and far-reaching to me," said Ms. Krishnamurthy, 27. "What we need to do is find a way to talk about reproductive rights so it hits as deeply and personally to other young women in the United States."

As abortion rights advocates prepare for Sunday's event, which they call the March for Women's Lives, veterans of the movement say they have been striving to address a decline in support among women under age 30. But young first-generation Americans and recent immigrants, many of whom maintain connections to countries where reproductive rights are part of a still-burgeoning struggle over women's issues, are bringing new energy and broader perspectives to the cause.

This weekend Ms. Krishnamurthy will be joined in a youth-focused coalition by other new leaders like Silvia Henriquez, 29, the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants who is now director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and Crystal Plati, 30, born in Cyprus, raised in Queens and now director of Choice USA, a multiethnic outreach organization started by Gloria Steinem.

These young leaders are far from the only newcomers to the movement, however. Of more than 1,400 groups that have signed up to send delegations to the march, dozens are just starting to lend their efforts, among them Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority and South Asians for Choice, an organization founded last month by two recent Brown University graduates who have organized 150 people to participate in this weekend's activities.

Longtime abortion rights advocates lament what they view as a growing complacency among women who have come of age in the 31 years since the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure.

"Women today assume rights," said Kate Michelman, president of Naral Pro-Choice America. "They don't feel a sense of urgency."

New leaders acknowledge the challenge in mobilizing the post-Roe generation. But they believe that their understanding of issues concerning younger women among a variety of ethnic groups can help the movement expand its reach.

The word "abortion" is spoken sparingly by the younger advocates, who say it can restrict outreach and allow anti-abortion groups to wage a single-issue debate. Many of these organizers, using terms like "reproductive rights" and "reproductive justice," say their agenda must include issues like comprehensive sex education, emergency contraception, affordable prenatal care for low-income women and, for immigrants, improved access to reproductive health care by providers who speak their patients' native languages.

The youth-focused coalition in which Ms. Plati, Ms. Henriquez and Ms. Krishnamurthy are participating will sponsor a workshop on Saturday called the 10 in 10 Gathering, a reference, organizers say, to the fact that while not all young women will have to confront a decision about abortion, 10 in 10 will have to deal broadly with their sexual health.

"When we define choice," Ms. Plati said, "it's about a woman's right to decide if and when she will have sex, if and when she will get pregnant, if and when she will carry a pregnancy to term, and if and when she will raise a child."

Veteran abortion rights supporters generally welcome the new diversity of thought, though some caution that the movement cannot let down its guard on abortion specifically.

"These new issues reflect the reality of women's lives," said Ms. Michelman, who has visited dozens of college campuses in recent months to build support for the march. "But the fundamental right to choose, as recognized in Roe, is really at great risk, and that could change the reality very severely and suddenly. We have to maintain focus on that."

That is an argument not lost on Leila Balali, a software engineer who stopped by Naral Pro-Choice America's organizing center here this week. Ms. Balali, 35, who was born and raised in Iran but has been in the United States since 1986, said that although she would be unable to attend the march, she wanted to help make posters as a show of support.

"This shouldn't even be an issue in this country," she said. "Women in this country need to realize that if they don't raise their voices, slowly, slowly they may lose their voice."


April 25, 2004

Shift in Fight Over Abortion

By ROBIN TONER

WASHINGTON — Twelve years ago, the last time abortion rights supporters rallied in the nation's capital, the political struggle was raw and fundamental.

The Supreme Court was reviewing Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision on the constitutional right to abortion, and nobody knew whether the law would survive. Anti-abortion protesters had been conducting a series of mass demonstrations, blockading clinics in Wichita, Kan., and elsewhere. Abortion rights leaders said they did not have to struggle to build a sense of urgency in their ranks, or to make the case to the more ambivalent voters in the middle that basic reproductive rights were at stake.

Today, as they assemble on the Washington Mall, the movement faces a far more complicated and in some ways more challenging political landscape. The anti-abortion movement is more confident, more sophisticated and far more ensconced in the government, with allies now in control of the House, the Senate and the White House.

Its legislative goals are incremental, careful and popular with Americans who would oppose an outright ban on abortion, even if this agenda is considered by its opponents to be a stealthy chipping away of rights. The anti-abortion movement has, in many ways, become part of the establishment.

Nobody has made a serious effort to push a constitutional ban on abortion through Congress in many years. The Republican Party platform still calls for such a ban, as it has since the ascendancy of the Reaganites, and that plank is expected to be reaffirmed this year.

But President Bush, who opposes abortion except in cases of rape and incest and to protect the life of the woman, tried to defuse the fears of moderate voters early on. He said that he did not believe the country was ready for a ban, and talks more generally about creating a "culture of life."

Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who also works for Naral Pro-Choice America, said her research showed that Mr. Bush rarely even used the word "abortion" for months at a time.

The current Congressional agenda of the anti-abortion movement is a series of steps aimed at restricting abortion and recognizing the "personhood" of the fetus. Legislation already passed includes the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, aimed at a procedure performed in the second or third trimester, and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which makes it a separate offense to harm a fetus in a federal crime committed against a pregnant woman.

Some say the anti-abortion movement looks so successful because it has essentially ceded defeat on the broader goal of ending legal abortion. When the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in 1992, it upheld the Roe decision, albeit narrowly and allowing for some new restrictions. Bill Clinton was elected president later that year and appointed two additional supporters of abortion rights to the Supreme Court.

By the mid-1990's, "everyone was recognizing on the pro-life side that the debate was shutting down," said James Davison Hunter, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and the author of "Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture War." The prospect of overturning the broad constitutional right had slipped away, he said.

"The pro-life movement has come to terms with this political reality," Mr. Hunter added, "and having done that, they have adopted a very different strategy, one that is incremental in nature."

Its leaders say they have simply recognized that they are in a long-term struggle to change hearts and minds - and to reduce the number of abortions along the way. It was clearly a painful epiphany for some.

"I recognize this incremental strategy is not universally embraced in the pro-life movement," Dr. James C. Dobson wrote last year in a collection of essays, "Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement." "Our goal must always be to bring about a decisive end to this evil practice, with public policy that matches public sentiment."

But Dr. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, a conservative group, added, "That time has not yet come." He warned, "If we hold out for only the purest legislative approach, we will be left in the dust."

Abortion rights leaders argue that these incremental laws are just another means to the same end; they do not see a defeated anti-abortion movement, but a smarter one.

"There are many different assaults, and it's incredibly important for people to connect the dots and recognize that they are all part of an overarching plan to eliminate reproductive rights," said Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. But they find themselves fighting legislation that, in and of itself, seems unobjectionable to many moderates - among the voters and in Congress.

David O'Steen, executive director of the National Right to Life Committee, asserted, "Fighting things like the partial-birth ban shows an extremism that the American public rejects."

In fact, many voters who describe themselves as "pro-choice" are still open to restrictions like parental notification laws, or the ban on "partial birth" abortions, known medically as intact dilation and extraction, some analysts say. Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, said, "The percentage of people who say they're for the woman's right to abortion at all times under any situation is very small, as is the percentage who say women should not have abortions for any reason."

For the supporters of abortion and reproductive rights, though, each additional restriction - making an abortion harder to get, limiting the type of procedure a doctor can perform, eliminating public funds - renders the fundamental right less meaningful. Ms. Feldt compares it to losing a finger at a time.

Still, the abortion rights camp might not be able to rouse the American center again until there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The next president may be able to name two or more justices to the court, given that there has not been a vacancy since 1994. The fight could become raw and fundamental again, very quickly.


OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Issue That Never Went Away

By WILLIAM SALETAN

WASHINGTON

Tens of thousands of people are expected to descend on Washington today for the first major abortion-rights march in more than a decade. With chants and placards, they will warn that Roe v. Wade is at risk. Most Americans have heard this alarm so many times that they've tuned it out. They can't imagine going back to a world in which women's medical records are introduced at trials of doctors to determine whether the abortions they performed were necessary.

But that world is already upon us. For months, in federal courts in several states, abortion has literally been on trial. The catalyst for these trials is the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which President Bush signed into law last fall. Abortion-rights supporters, citing a four-year-old Supreme Court ruling on a similar statute in Nebraska, argue that some of the procedures banned by the new law may sometimes be medically necessary. The Justice Department, citing Congressional "findings of fact" to the contrary, disagrees.

To prove its case, the Justice Department says it needs to look at the evidence: women's medical records. It has subpoenaed thousands of records related to abortions at six metropolitan hospital centers and six Planned Parenthood centers around the country. The subpoenas covered all second-trimester abortions involving medical complications or chemical injections into the womb. They also sought the name of every doctor who had performed an abortion at any of the hospitals.

Aren't such records private? Not according to the Justice Department. Its court filings claim that federal law "does not recognize a physician-patient privilege" and that patients "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential." In some of these trials, judges have rejected these arguments. In others, judges have ordered hospitals to hand over the records. Last week, a New York hospital became the first to be fined for refusing to comply.

Attorney General John Ashcroft says the subpoenas respect patients' privacy by allowing hospitals to black out "identifying characteristics." An assistant United States attorney explained: "The government is not interested certainly in the private names and addresses and Social Security numbers of these patients. That is not the purpose here."

Indeed, that is not the purpose. The purpose of these inquiries is to try to prove that the so-called partial-birth procedure is never medically necessary, because that's what Congress asserts and the plaintiffs deny. But once this question is resolved, the next round of subpoenas will have a different purpose. It won't be to determine whether partial-birth abortion is ever necessary. It will be to determine whether each partial-birth abortion was necessary.

If the ban is upheld, any doctor found to have performed the procedure will be subject to a two-year prison term unless he or she can prove that the procedure was "necessary to save the life of a mother whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury." To settle that question, the court will need details about the patient.

Alternatively, if the ban is struck down, Congress will have to add to it what the Supreme Court demanded four years ago: a clause allowing the procedure when necessary to protect the woman's health. That, too, will require details about the patient.

As Mr. Ashcroft puts it, "If the central issue in the case, an issue raised by those who brought the case, is medical necessity, we need to look at medical records to find out if indeed there was medical necessity." That's why the government subpoenaed the records of the doctors who challenged the law. And that's why the government will subpoena the records of any doctor who, having been charged with performing a partial-birth abortion, argues that the procedure was medically necessary. This is what it takes to enforce an abortion ban.

That's the lesson of these trials. For years, Republicans have used Congress and the White House to showcase the ugliness of late-term abortions. The public, naturally repelled, endorsed the so-called partial-birth ban, and Congress enacted it.

But an abortion ban isn't just a moral statement. It's a pledge to prosecute, and prosecution introduces a different kind of ugliness: the public investigation of personal tragedies. That's the ugliness that lies ahead. If Americans won't take that warning from today's marchers, maybe they'll take it from John Ashcroft.

William Saletan, chief political correspondent for Slate, is the author of "Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company