Where does Elizabeth Dole really stand on abortion?

The question won't go away.

By Daryl Lindsey

Mar 24, 1999 | If there's one issue Elizabeth Dole is expert at ducking, it's abortion. So when CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked her what her position was, during a January interview to hype her presidential hopes a day after her resignation as Red Cross chief, she had an evasive sound bite ready. "It's an important issue. There are many other important issues. But I do feel that's for another day, Wolf," she said.

Blitzer let Dole off the hook, saying, "We can respect that." Two months later, she was still dodging abortion questions: "We're going to be laying out positions on all of these issues. But we want to do it in a thoughtful way, right?" she told supporters at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa. She then scrapped the traditional post-event press conference, just as she did when announcing her campaign exploratory committee in Manchester, N.H., a fortnight ago.

Abortion is to moderate Republicans what tax increases are to Democrats -- the gift that keeps on giving to the wrong party. It's a no-win issue: Candidates who fall short of a fire-breathing anti-abortion stance incur the wrath of the GOP's most committed conservative organizers and voters, but those who adopt that stance risk losing the national election. It isn't surprising, then, that both Dole and her chief rival for the 2000 Republican nomination, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, have historically held wishy-washy positions on abortion, and both have squirmed when prodded for their current abortion views. Until last week, both had gotten away with their fence-sitting -- but no more. Bush's stance recently drew searing criticism from anti-abortion crusader James Dobson, director of Focus on the Family. "Bush claims to be pro-life, but so have other people who've gone before him and wound up showing no commitment to defend unborn children ... Don't give us double-talk. Tell us if you'll support pro-life judges."

The heat isn't just coming from the pro-life forces. This week the pro-choice National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League will begin airing television spots in Iowa and New Hampshire criticizing the murky pro-life stances Dole and Bush have taken to date. The NARAL media campaign will move to New York and California soon. "The freedom to choose stands among the most important freedoms in our nation, and today that fundamental freedom of American women is under serious attack," says NARAL executive director Kate Michelman. "We cannot allow a single American to be fooled about the potential positions of a presidential candidate."

The high-profile pressure is forcing Dole to address an issue she'd rather avoid. Her reticence about abortion is legendary. During a 30-year career in public service -- including stints at the Federal Trade Commission in the '70s, as an aide to President Ronald Reagan and, later, as one of the few female Cabinet secretaries in the Reagan and Bush administrations -- Dole has avoided discussing abortion in interviews, as if prescient about how immortal and easily retrievable a politician's words would become with the rise of the Internet and ubiquitous electronic archives.

"I think it's just about the most difficult question there is and one I'm still wrestling with," Dole told a New York Times reporter in 1980. With droning precision, she repeated the same line (or slight variations) for nearly a decade.

Abortion "does not impact my area," she told UPI in 1981. "I don't have a neat answer to that one ... I feel it's one of the most difficult questions I've had to face."

In 1984, she went a little further in another UPI interview: "The ERA and abortion are not issues that create a gender gap. Interestingly, men and women do not divide sharply on those issues." But she declined the opportunity to elaborate on her own stance. Three years later in the Washington Monthly, she continued her apparently endless, Hamlet-like struggle with the issue. "It's the toughest question I have ever had to wrestle with, and frankly I am still wrestling with it."

Finally, that same year, the wrestling was over, and she was ready to go public with her abortion views. She told Newsday in 1990 that, like then-President George Bush, "I'm pro-life," but asserted that, as labor secretary, "It wasn't an issue." Abortion didn't come up again until Dole joined her husband on the '96 campaign trail. That year, she gave a New York Post reporter her most candid remarks yet. Asked whether she supported a constitutional ban on abortion, she replied: "Yes, uh-huh. There are three exceptions [that we support]: life of the mother, rape and incest. I have been pro-life. That's it. There's nothing more to say." Dole publicly embraced the Republican Party platform in 1996, which included a plank calling for a constitutional ban on abortion. She told the New York Times she shared her husband's stance: "I'm where he is -- I'm pro-life."

Next Page: Abortion wasn't an issue in the '80s?

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