Kate Michelman is former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America and the author of the memoir With Liberty And Justice For All: A Life Spent Protecting the Right to Choose, published in December 2005 by Hudson Street Press/Penguin.
After all the plotting and planning, the time was thought to be propitious. It was to be the conclusion of a carefully crafted, long-term effort that had been the right’s fundamental ideological objective for decades.
These opponents of reproductive rights were poised to for their grand moment—the evisceration of a woman’s right to privacy and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
2006?
No, 1989.
Republicans held the Senate and the White House. In reviewing Webster, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade . As the Court seemed poised to roll back privacy rights nationwide, anti-choice activists passed measures criminalizing abortion in Louisiana and Utah.
But none of that came to pass, and what had seemed a watershed moment for abortion opponents turned into a key rallying point for the pro-choice community across the country.
The situation today is perhaps even grimmer. Conservatives control the White House and all of Congress; they have just appointed two clearly anti-choice justices in John Roberts and Samuel Alito; and their activists are charging hard in a number of states.
Two weeks ago, South Dakota lawmakers passed a ban of all abortions and defined life as beginning at fertilization. Now it sits on the governor’s desk awaiting signature. In Kansas—as well as Indiana and Ohio—state officials are trying to gain access to the medical records and personal information of women who have abortions.
And the Supreme Court has agreed to review a 2003 federal ban on so-called “partial birth” abortion. If this ban were upheld, it would result in a chill across the whole practice of reproductive medicine. The standard is so broad that doctors will find it difficult to know what is legal and what is not. It would ban a range of abortion methods used as early as 12-15 weeks of pregnancy; and it offers no exception for the life or health of the woman, or in the case of severe birth defects. In short, it would eviscerate a woman’s right to privacy without requiring the Court to overturn Roe .
The similarities to 1989—down to the surname of the president—are quite striking.
Then, pro-choice Americans feared quite rightly that a woman’s right to privacy was about to be taken away. And we reacted.
The pro-choice movement went back to its roots, into the streets and onto the airwaves. We spoke strongly, clearly and confidently. And we made the issue of choice—“Who Decides?”—one of the central questions of the day.
The results speak for themselves: in 1989, two new Democratic governors, Doug Wilder of Virginia and Jim Florio of New Jersey, were elected to succeed Republicans. The election of several key pro-choice senators in the mid-term election of 1990 severely weakened President George H.W. Bush and led the Democrats to recapture the Senate. And, after the unpleasant but galvanizing spectacle of the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991, Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992.
But as women’s rights leaders consider how to make lightning strike twice, there are key differences we need to keep in mind.
One is timing. The Court will not hear arguments on the federal abortion ban until this fall, which makes it highly unlikely that there will be a ruling before spring of 2007—well after the midterm elections.
But it will be challenging to put the issue of reproductive liberty front and center for more reasons than timing. Unlike 1989, when the Cold War was winding down, national security and the war in Iraq are taking up a huge proportion of the public debate.
Moreover, the movement itself has been weakened by our own success. After political victories like those of the early 1990s, it has become challenging to convince Americans that this time there really is a fundamental threat. We will need a compelling and persuasive message to overcome the “crying wolf” test. South Dakota’s ban on abortion may be the wake up call that Americans need to understand the serious threat to personal privacy and the right to choose.
And, even as nationwide support for a woman’s fundamental right to choose has remained steady over time, our political friends in the Democratic Party have grown less comfortable with a strong and forthright defense of choice.
So, it would be a mistake to say with confidence that the far right has overreached—although it may well have done so with the extreme and punitive South Dakota law.
To seize the moment, the pro-choice movement will have to become a movement again.
Since 1992 and the election of Bill Clinton we have attempted to transition into the politics of governing. Now it is time to move out again. We have been in the opposition in Washington for more than five years. We must begin acting like it.
The compromises to which we have become accustomed—especially looking the other way as our putative allies either betray our values or remain silent as they are attacked—are the stuff of governing. A movement in power can accede to compromises in order to be assured of a larger gain. We are not getting that. Nor, for that matter, are we even succeeding in guarding against larger losses. That Justice Alito was confirmed without even a real challenge—scarcely a year after the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee warned that anti-choice nominees would be politically impossible to confirm—is a sign that we are still compromising in the name of phantom future gains.
An opposition movement is far better with the integrity of clear beliefs and politics of conviction and principle even when it must sustain some short-term losses—losses, it must be said, that we are sustaining anyway. It would be far better to lose Congressional votes with a reliable core of clearly defined support than to wonder, on every fight, whether that core will be with us. When supposedly moderate Republicans retain our movement’s support even after voting in near-lockstep for Alito, we cannot make a coherent case to the American people for our beliefs. A movement with integrity may lose battles in Washington. But it can inspire in the heartland—and in so doing, reclaim the majority. A movement with unclear beliefs and a too-quick proclivity to excuse the betrayals of our friends can do none of these things—and it loses, anyway.
It’s time to reassert our presence—and give voice to a new generation of pro-choice women. It’s time to put abortion into a larger context that rings true now and translates back into electoral politics in a way politicians cannot ignore.
I believe that the larger context concerns the economic and social position of women. Too often, the choices women thought they had earned the right to make are blocked, whether they desire to stay home, support themselves and their families with a living wage, or choose for themselves the number and spacing of their children.
It is time for a re-ignited public movement to hold its leaders accountable—to insist that politicians, like citizens, find the ability to speak in comfortable, forthright voices about the principles that make them pro-family, pro-values and pro-choice.
I fear that we are in for a rude awakening from the Supreme Court. But fear alone will not recharge this movement. To be successful, we ultimately must act from hope for what women’s rights, roles and opportunities in our society can be.
