Party of choice?
How pro-choice groups are hurting the Democrats- -- and their own cause
By Amy Sullivan | September 25, 2005
IT'S NOT EASY being pro-choice these days. The issue, for people like me, isn't certitude--we don't question that the decision to end a pregnancy should be left up to a woman and her doctor. And it isn't that we represent a minority view--55 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. No, the problem is abortion rights groups themselves, who can always be counted on to say or do something sufficiently extreme that it makes it just that much harder for the rest of us to defend our position out in the public square.
The most recent example, of course, was the television ad that the leading abortion rights organization, NARAL Pro-Choice America, chose to run against Supreme Court nominee John Roberts this summer, which strongly implied that Roberts found common cause with abortion-clinic bombers. An independent fact-checking organization run out of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center quickly determined that the ad was ''misleading" and ''false." Even pro-choice senators called it ''not helpful to the pro-choice cause."
This was not a rare misstep. The Roberts ad was rooted in an ongoing strategy on the part of the choice movement to demonize their pro-life opponents and energize those supporters who believe abortion should always be legal, with no restrictions. Unfortunately, that's not how abortion politics works.
As William Saletan explained in his 2003 book ''Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War," ever since Roe v. Wade became law in 1973, the side that has held the advantage in the abortion debate has been the one that figures out how to turn the issue into a wedge that divides their opponents. Abortion foes realized this almost immediately, and worked with newly mobilized religious conservatives to raise moral objections. The pro-choice movement fought back in the late 1980s by using a privacy argument to split libertarians from social conservatives. In the 1990s, conservatives used the issue of so-called ''partial-birth" abortion to make Americans queasy about how abortions are actually performed, and public support of abortion began to plummet.
Now, however, the momentum may be shifting back to the pro-choice side. Their unlikely hero is the pro-life Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who has won support for a strategy to lower abortion rates by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. But abortion rights groups are blowing this opportunity, using inflammatory rhetoric that alienates moderates and imposing a litmus test on the political party that is, for the foreseeable future, the one most closely aligned with their interests.
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According to a recent analysis by the centrist organization Third Way, a consistent 62 percent of voters are what Third Way calls ''Abortion Grays"--people who don't want abortion to be illegal, but who would like fewer abortions to take place. These voters have cast their lot with Republicans in the last three presidential elections, but could be recaptured by an effort that promised to make abortions rare, as Bill Clinton famously put it.
Reid has introduced legislation he calls ''Prevention First," which aims to reduce unwanted pregnancies by improving access to birth control and making it more affordable. The approach is far from new--choice groups have promoted it themselves for years. It provides a lifeline to Democrats, who finally have a win-win issue. If Republicans oppose it, they risk being labeled extremists; if they support it, and it passes, Democrats can rightly claim to have done more to cut abortion rates than their political opponents.
And yet, as the ad against Roberts showed, abortion rights groups have the impressive ability to marginalize themselves in the public debate even when they represent a majority position.
The groups' most common tactic is to label the pro-life position ''intolerant" and ''misogynistic" at best, and in cahoots with violent extremists at worst. And when they're not demonizing their opponents, they're busy mocking them. Although many religious Americans consider abstinence an acceptable moral and personal choice, in the rhetoric of abortion rights advocates it becomes prudish and unnecessary. Earlier this summer NARAL's Washington affiliate held what was advertised as a ''Screw Abstinence Party"; last year, the Pennsylvania affiliate urged members to send ''chastity belts" to state legislators in protest of the state's ''Chastity Awareness Week."
In addition to alienating moderates, choice groups also make it hard for their friends to trust them by relying on misleading appeals and arguments. When the partial-birth abortion debate first emerged, they insisted that the procedure in question (dilation and extraction) was used only a few hundred times each year, and only in the most tragic of caseswhen a fetus had severe abnormalities that threatened its mother's health. Democratic senators dutifully trotted out and repeated these arguments, only to learn several months later that the procedure is in fact used thousands of times each year (usually in the second trimester) and for any number of reasons.
Earlier this year, with the possibility of a Supreme Court vacancy looming, abortion rights groups zeroed in on a new target: the Democratic Party.
Following defeats at the polls in last year's elections, leading Democrats started to say publicly what many had suggested in private for years: The party needed to make an effort to welcome pro-life voters. In mid-December, John Kerry reportedly told a gathering of Democratic activists that they needed to ''welcome more pro-life candidates into the party." (The room reacted with a gasp of horror.) Hillary Clinton addressed a pro-choice rally on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and suggested that abortion was a ''sad, even tragic choice." Howard Dean, then the presumptive chair of the Democratic National Committee, told Tim Russert, ''I have long believed that we ought to make a home for pro-life Democrats."
But the final straw came when Senate Democrats acted on this advice and recruited pro-life Democrat Bob Casey to run against Rick Santorum for Pennsylvania's Senate seat in 2006.
Pro-choice advocates lashed out. National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy called out Kerry and Dean by name, and declared: ''If that's what it means to have a big tent, if it means abandoning the core principles of our party, if it means throwing women's rights overboard like so much ballast...then I say let's keep the skunk out of the tent." The political director of Emily's List, the fundraising group that has been one of the biggest sources of support for many Democratic candidates, complained, ''We fought like mad to beat back the Republicans. Little did we know that we would have just as much to fear from some within the Democratic Party."
The word soon went out that Casey would get no support from women's groups, and powerful donors were encouraged to refrain from giving to his campaign. The race appears to have become a test case for many in the pro-choice community. They would rather see Casey lose than defeat Santorum, perhaps the Senate's most vociferous abortion opponent.
As if to underline their point, NARAL took the unusual step of endorsing Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, a full year and a half before the 2006 election. The message was clear: a pro-choice Republican is always preferable to a pro-life Democrat.
It didn't take long for NARAL to regret the move. Less than three weeks later, Chafee voted to support the nomination of radically conservative judge Janice Rogers Brown. NARAL issued an angry press release, warning Chafee that they would be ''watching closely his future votes on judicial nominees, including...those for the Supreme Court." Now, of course, Chafee has announced he will vote in support of Roberts. Meanwhile, the pro-life Reid--exactly the type of Democrat these groups would see defeated if they had their way--has announced that he will vote against Roberts's confirmation.
Someday--perhaps as soon as the next Supreme Court nomination--there will be a serious threat to the right to choose. When that day comes, abortion rights groups are going to need all the help they can get, not just from their loyal base of abortion absolutists, but from moderates, from the Democratic Party, and from average Americans who simply don't want to see abortion rights disappear. If they're not careful, though, the next time they cry ''danger!" no one will be listening.
Amy Sullivan is an editor of The Washington Monthly. |
