Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (31 page)

There are surely fans, men and women seen cheering wildly on that tape, who would be appalled to discover that they are part of such an effort. Deborah Kent, a hypnotherapist who was once such a megafan that she was profiled in the sports pages of this paper and who was sent a copy of the video after complaining to Mr. Mara about it, now says, “Whenever I see Mark Bavaro I hope he drops the ball.”

Of the players who made
Champions for Life
, only Mr. Bavaro will play Sunday. Phil Simms is injured, Jim Burt plays for San Francisco, and the other three are retired. But Mr. Mara remains co-owner of the team, and he remains devoted to this cause. So while you may look out over the field and see a spectacular pass, a tragic fumble, a triumphant run into the end zone, he may envision a colorful and lively backdrop for another ten-minute sermonette linking athletic prowess and moral superiority. It’s his right to do that. I just think it’s out of bounds.

RUST, ROE, AND REALITY
July 17, 1991

I never thought I would have a good word to say about
Rust
v.
Sullivan
, the ridiculous Supreme Court decision upholding regulations barring doctors in federally financed clinics from discussing abortion with pregnant patients.

But the advantage is in the adjective. It seems to me that many Americans who paid no mind to abortion rights have been perplexed by the ridiculous nature of the ruling. (It has also generated terrific editorial cartoons, cartoonists being among our finest commentators. I can’t decide which I prefer, the one of the doctor with a gavel in his mouth, or the one of the clinic sign: The Supreme Court has prohibited us from informing you that having an ABORTION IS A LEGAL ALTERNATIVE.)

The universe that once consisted only of those of us who might need an abortion or have friends and relations who might need one was enlarged to include those who have asked a physician for complete information. “I don’t like the idea of abortions,” one
elderly woman said, “but a doctor should have to tell you the truth, even if there’s politics involved.”

This expansion of the universe, this recognition that politics has no place in a doctor’s office, this appreciation of the ridiculous provisions of a federal gag rule, may come in handy in the future. What was once a what-if has now become a how-soon: the Supreme Court as constituted by Ronald Reagan and George Bush is a total loss in terms of reproductive freedom, and next term there is considerable likelihood that it will overturn
Roe
v.
Wade
. Whether Clarence Thomas is confirmed or not probably makes little difference. The president is not going to turn around and nominate Laurence Tribe instead.

If it is true, as polls tell us over and over again, that the American people believe abortion is a private matter, they will now have to prove it in the voting booth. They will have to press their elected representatives for federal law ensuring the right to an abortion. Failing that, they will have to push legislators to make abortion legal in their states, and elect legislators who will do so.

State courts have begun to move into the breach. Eight have found a right to privacy that includes reproductive choice within their state constitutions. In New York the Court of Appeals will consider that issue this fall when it hears arguments in a challenge by the New York Civil Liberties Union of Medicaid-funding bans. The case is
Hope
v.
Perales
: Hope for short, and for sure.

Alternatives to constitutional protection will be neither easy nor ideal. The courts are meant to be places of principle, but the legislatures are bastions of compromise. Legislative guarantees are likely to come with strings attached. Parental notification. Waiting periods. With state-by-state action, geography is destiny. A state constitutional right to privacy in New York is cold comfort to a girl in Louisiana who doesn’t have bus fare. All the jockeying, the lobbying, the campaigning will be quietly enraging for those who believe that what may be growing within them is uniquely their own business, not the business of a lot of men in suits.
The what-if is upon us. You’d think the Republican leadership, which incorporated opposition to legal abortion in the party platform in 1980, would be jumping up and down. The reaction has been somewhat different. The uproar over
Rust
v.
Sullivan
has been so considerable, and the House rejection of clinic restrictions by a 353-to-74 vote so decisive, that the president said last week he might be amenable to some compromise. And just a few days ago the Young Republican National Federation considered removing an anti-abortion plank from its platform. Many delegates at the group’s convention thought the position was a political liability.

Interesting that that should happen now, that some political opposition softens as the removal of the constitutional protection draws nearer. Many women have thought of
Roe
as an umbrella, sheltering our rights. But it has protected politicians, too, from the necessity of taking a stand anywhere but behind the podium. It will be interesting to see if George Bush will maintain his manufactured opposition to legal abortion if it means not merely appointing conservative jurists to the country’s highest court, but vetoing federal legislation and thereby directly, conclusively denying the right of choice to millions of women. Who vote.

HIDDEN AGENDAS
August 10, 1992

At first glance there is something terribly confusing about what is going on in the life of Patrick F. Kelly, a federal judge in Wichita, Kansas, who may be wondering why he didn’t go to dental school. Judge Kelly has forbidden members of Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion search-and-destroy group, to block access to abortion clinics in town.

In return, his jurisprudence has been attacked by his own government and his life has been threatened. One man reportedly left a message on the judge’s home answering machine, describing how his body would be dismembered after he was killed.

Now, let me get this straight: it’s wrong to destroy an embryo, but it’s O.K. to kill a full-grown federal judge.

Judge Kelly hasn’t had much to do with the abortion issue in his eleven years on the federal bench, but he’s getting a fast and dirty education since Operation Rescue decided to make Wichita a high-profile battleground. And the judge is discovering an essential truth of the movement: things are not always the way
they seem. Getting a death threat from a person who pretends a keen interest in the right to life is the least of the contradictions.

The intervention in this matter by the Justice Department is described by officials as simply a dispute over the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which allows federal courts to protect a class of people from conspiracies to violate their civil rights. Judge Kelly relied on that law when he sent in federal marshals to safeguard entrances at the clinics. He also promised to jail anyone who defied his order—even the governor.

Operation Rescue lawyers argued that the 1871 act doesn’t apply, and the Justice Department supported them in an amicus brief. Amicus means friend, and that’s exactly what Justice is being to the anti-abortion folks, talking jurisdictional disputes and playing politics. President Bush continues to court the right-to-life vote, and Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, who turned in his resignation yesterday, is running for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. Most of what we need to know about Justice Department intervention in this case is contained in election contests, not legal papers.

So many men, so little candor. Randall Terry, who runs Operation Rescue, has been most honest when he has talked about the proper subservient role of women in society. His colleagues wear tiny fetus-feet lapel pins. But what some of them seem to oppose is not abortion but the rise of individualism and the changing roles of women. When they talk about innocent life, they are talking about what they see as a more innocent time, when the same moral strictures applied to everyone, when gay people were in the closet, sex resulted in conception, and women stayed at home.

In her book
Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood
, the sociologist Kristin Liker describes the abortion battle as a referendum, a conflict between those who think raising children is one part of a woman’s life, freely chosen, and those who think it is the center of a woman’s life, her essential destiny. Supporters of legal abortion often say that their opponents are not interested in women,
only the unborn. But some of those opponents are keenly interested in maintaining traditional roles, in pushing back the tide of change.

Like all the other abortion battles, at base the one in Wichita is about how we live now. It’s hard to see how the man who threatens to cut Judge Kelly into little pieces is choosing life. Instead I would imagine that he is enraged that others are choosing a life of which he does not approve.

The administration has chosen to support that sort of rage, and thousands of protesters are throwing one American town into a tumult to vent it. The Justice Department sent them a message; while the entrances to the clinics cleared in the wake of Judge Kelly’s order, the demonstrators were back yesterday, trying their best to inhibit women from exercising a clear constitutional right.

It seems contradictory that liberals are demanding law and order and conservatives are justifying disruptive protests. But that is no more contradictory than the rest of this sorry episode, in which the so-called Department of Justice sides with the law-breakers, and those who march beneath the banners that say
CHOOSE LIFE
deny others their choice and disrupt the lives of thousands.

THE ABORTION ORPHANS
February 19, 1992

The photograph on the postcard is of a Gibson girl, hair piled atop her head, lace on her rounded shoulders, and a face in profile that is not so much pretty as soft and very young. Beneath the picture are these words:

CLARA BELL DUVALL WAS A 32-YEAR-OLD MOTHER OF FIVE WHEN SHE DIED OF AN ILLEGAL ABORTION IN 1929
.

On the other side is written in a strong slanting hand, “My mother in her wedding picture at 18 years of age.”

“The image of her in her casket is seared in my brain,” said Linn Duvall Harwell, who had just turned six when her mother died.

The hospital listed the cause of death as “pneumonia.”

She used a knitting needle.

She had a son and four daughters.

“She was a beautiful mother,” says Mrs. Harwell. “That must be understood. She was loving and affectionate. We were poor and it
was 1929, but we were cared for. The minute she died, it all changed.”

“I can’t help but think how my life would have been different,” says Gwendolyn Elliot, who is a commander in the Pittsburgh Police Department. She was five when Vivian Campbell, her mother, died in 1950; she and her brother were raised by their grandparents. When she was eighteen and ready for college, she tried to cash in some bonds her mother had left her and was told she needed a death certificate. And there it was, under cause of death: the word “abortion,” followed by a question mark.

The abortion orphans may be the shadow of things to come. Those of us who believe that abortion must remain legal are flailing about for a way to make vivid what will happen if it is banned once more. We have had the right so long that we have forgotten what the wrong is. Meant to evoke bloodstained tables and covert phone calls, the term “back alley” does not resonate for women who grew up with clean clinics and licensed doctors.