Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Republicans and the religious right are working to outlaw abortion -- one small step at a time.
Nov 12, 2003 | Unnoticed by much of the public, the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress have been laying the groundwork for a repeal of abortion rights. The effort to ban late-term abortion was just the beginning -- anti-abortion activists expect the president to sign several landmark pieces of pro-life legislation next year. Meanwhile, in the wake of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, John Ashcroft ordered the Justice Department's civil rights division -- attorneys responsible for prosecuting anti-abortion terrorism, among other crimes -- to go after doctors performing late-term abortions, a move that sources inside and outside of the Justice Department say is meant to endow the fetuses with civil rights. Abroad, unfettered by domestic scrutiny, the Bush administration has slashed away at funding for family planning programs that have failed to renounce the mere mention of abortion.
Even as Bush placates moderates by saying that the country isn't yet ready for a total abortion ban, he's doing his best to prepare for that eventuality. And except for committed pro-choice activists, American women aren't mounting much of a defense. Roe vs. Wade might stand a while longer, but it's being hollowed out, termite style. Another Bush term augurs its eventual collapse.
Backed by a crescent of beaming congressmen, Bush signed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban on Nov. 5, marking the first time since Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973 that the government has outlawed an abortion procedure. According to Cynthia Gorney, a University of California at Berkeley professor of journalism and author of "Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars," the ban was "the biggest victory that the abortion opponents have had in a long time," and the fruit of a strategy that began even before Roe vs. Wade.
Just hours after the ban's passage, though, three separate courts enjoined the federal government from prosecuting it, and it will likely take years for it to work its way through the appeals process. For the time being, then, abortion is unlikely to command much public attention, even as Republicans push a host of other anti-abortion legislation, federal appointments and policy.
That's just how the anti-abortion movement wants it. "People really don't imagine that Roe could be overturned, and anti-choice groups continually try to reinforce that sort of complacency," says Susanne Martinez, vice president for public policy at Planned Parenthood. The anti-abortion movement is making tremendous progress, she says, but "they're doing it below the radar."
The anti-abortion movement has grown savvy, chipping away at the margins of reproductive rights, laying siege to their foundations, but leaving the edifice apparently intact. None of the anti-abortion measures being pushed by the Bush administration is in itself significant enough to stir the public, and many, such as the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, have wide public support. Yet they add up to an attack on a right that a generation of women has taken for granted.
This is a source of profound frustration to pro-choice activists, who see the rights they cherish slipping away with hardly any public outcry. An April 7 survey commissioned by the Center for the Advancement of Women, a feminist group, found that only 41 percent of women see keeping abortion legal as a top priority for the women's movement. Activists, then, are in a difficult position: They're trying to warn quiescent American women, many of them pro-choice but morally uneasy about abortion, that their rights are being eroded. But so far, they can point to no specific rights that actually have been lost.
Right now, several bills that would either curtail abortion or confer personhood on fetuses are wending their way through Congress. Laci and Conner's Law, also known as the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, will punish attacks on a fetus separately from attacks on a pregnant woman. (It's named after Laci Peterson, the murdered California woman, and her unborn son, Conner. Whenever possible, Republicans title their legislation after high-profile victims.) When a pregnant woman is attacked, "the pro-life movement says there is a second victim, therefore there should be two victims recognized as being murdered," says Jim Backlin, director of legislative affairs for the Christian Coalition.
Laci and Conner's Law has 133 co-sponsors in the House and is expected to be signed into law next year. "There's momentum behind it," says Backlin. "Realistically, it will probably pass in the spring of next year, definitely before the election."
According to the text of the bill, it is meant "to protect unborn children from assault and murder" and applies at "any stage of development." Though it makes an explicit exception for abortion, within the rhetoric of a law that defines killing a fetus as murder the exception seems absurd -- and that's precisely the point.
Meanwhile, even as attorneys for pro-choice organizations were in court to block the Partial Birth Abortion Ban on Nov. 5, Reps. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., introduced a bill to suspend the FDA's approval of RU-486, the abortion pill. They're calling the bill "Holly's law," after Holly Patterson, an 18-year-old who died in September, a week after taking the pill, making her the second American woman to die from RU-486 complications. In comparison, according to the Food and Drug Administration, as of 1998, 130 Americans died after taking Viagra.
Accusing the Clinton-era FDA of "questionable" practices in approving the drug, Bartlett said, "RU-486 is unrelated to healthcare and anyone who prescribes or administers it shouldn't be described as a healthcare worker. RU-486 is designed to kill a healthy baby. Now, we know that it kills healthy women such as 18-year-old Holly Patterson who was barely the age of majority and still living with her parents."
Also high on the anti-abortion lobby's agenda is the Child Custody Protection Act, which would punish any adult accompanying a minor across state lines for an abortion. It's meant to stop minors who live in one of the 33 states that mandate parental notification from circumventing those laws by having their abortions in more lenient states. Under the law, anyone who takes a girl to another state for an abortion, including an older sister, aunt or grandmother, is liable to be fined $100,000 and sentenced to up to a year in prison, and may also face civil penalties. The bill, a priority of the anti-abortion movement at least since the Clinton administration, has the White House's endorsement.
Meanwhile, statewide restrictions on abortion keep multiplying. These include parental involvement laws, mandatory waiting periods and costly regulations governing everything from the landscaping on clinic lawns to the temperature air conditioners must be set to. When challenged, these laws are reviewed by Federal Appeals Courts, which Bush is stacking with zealously anti-abortion judges.
Abroad, assaults on reproductive rights have been even more profound. Bush last year cut funding for the United Nations Population Fund based on the allegations of a radical anti-abortion fringe group that the fund was involved with coerced abortions in China, allegations that an investigative team sent by his own administration found to be false. The freeze on American aid led to cutbacks in reproductive health services worldwide, from Vietnam to Bangladesh to Kenya.
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