Focus on women gives hope to U.S. abortion foes
By Robin Toner The New York Times
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
For many years, the political struggle over abortion in the United States was often framed as a starkly binary choice: the interest of the woman, advocated by supporters of abortion rights, versus the interest of the fetus, advocated by abortion opponents.
But a Supreme Court decision last month that upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act marked a milestone for a different argument advanced by anti-abortion activists, one they are increasingly making in state legislatures around the country.
They argue that abortion, as a rule, is not in the best interest of the woman; that women are often misled or ill-informed about its risks to their own physical or emotional health; and that the interests of the pregnant woman and the fetus are, in fact, the same.
It is an argument that has been building for a decade or more, advanced by groups like the conservative Justice Foundation, the National Right to Life Committee and Feminists for Life. “We think of ourselves as very pro-woman,” said Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee. “We believe that when you help the woman, you help the baby.”
It is embodied in much of the imagery and advertising of the “pro-life” movement in recent years, especially the “Women Deserve Better Than Abortion” campaign by Feminists for Life, a group that counts Jane Sullivan Roberts, the wife of the chief justice, among its most prominent supporters.
This focus on women is also at the heart of an effort — expected to escalate in next year’s state legislative sessions — to enact new “informed consent” and mandatory counseling laws that critics assert often amount to a not- so-subtle pitch against abortion.
Abortion rights advocates, still reeling from last month’s Supreme Court decision, argue that this effort is motivated by ideology, not women’s health.
“Informed consent is really a misleading way to characterize it,” said Roger Evans, senior director of public policy litigation and law for Planned Parenthood. “To me, what we’ll see is an increasing attempt to push a state’s ideology into a doctor/patient relationship, to force doctors to communicate more and more of the state’s viewpoint.”
Nancy Keenan, president of Naral Pro-Choice America, is more blunt: “It’s motivated by politics, not by science, not by medical care, and not for the purposes of compassion.”
The Guttmacher Institute, a research group and an affiliate of Planned Parenthood, said recently that “a considerable body of credible evidence” over 30 years contradicts the notion that legal abortion poses long-term dangers to women’s health, physically or mentally.
But Allan Parker, president of the Justice Foundation, a conservative group based in Texas, compares the growing anti-abortion campaign aimed at women to the long struggle to inform Americans about the risks of smoking. “We’re kind of in the early stages of tobacco litigation,” Parker said.
All sides agree that the debate reached a new level of recognition — and significance — when Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the majority opinion in the “partial birth abortion” case last month, approvingly cited a friend-of-the court brief filed by the Justice Foundation.
The foundation, a nonprofit public interest litigation firm that has handled an array of conservative causes, has increasingly focused on abortion through its project called “Operation Outcry.”
Parker said the group began hearing from women in the late 1990s who considered themselves victims of legalized abortion — physically and emotionally — and wanted to tell their stories.
“Operation Outcry,” which grew to include a Web site, a national hotline and chapters around the country, eventually collected statements from more than 2,000 women, officials said.
In its friend-of-the-court brief, the group submitted statements from 180 of those women who said that abortion had left them depressed, distraught, in emotional turmoil. “Thirty-three years of real life experiences,” the foundation argued, “attests that abortion hurts women and endangers their physical, emotional and psychological health.”
The case before the Supreme Court involved a specific type of abortion, occasionally used after the first trimester, that involves removing a fetus intact after collapsing its skull. Kennedy upheld that ban on narrower, legal grounds, but he used the Justice Foundation brief to write more broadly about the emotional impact of abortion on women.
“While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained,” Kennedy wrote, alluding to the brief. “Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.” Given those stakes, the justice argued, “the state has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed.”
Many, on both sides, viewed that as an invitation from a newly conservative court to pass tough new counseling and informed consent laws aimed at women seeking abortions — “a green light for enhanced informed consent,” in the words of Clarke Forsythe, president of Americans United for Life, a leader in that legislative effort.
The abortion rights side was caught off guard, in part because they believe the scientific debate has been so decisively settled against the Justice Foundation’s argument over the years. “We thought that brief was so extraneous that we didn’t even bother coming up with a response to it,” said Evans of Planned Parenthood. “It was totally gratuitous.”
In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed: “The court invokes an anti-abortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence.”
But Parker at the Justice Foundation said that this argument — backed up by statements from the women — has already had an impact in states like South Dakota debating informed consent and other abortion regulations.
That state’s law, currently being challenged in federal court, requires women seeking an abortion to be told that the procedure will terminate a “whole, separate, unique, living human being,” and that it carries a variety of psychological and physical risks to the woman.
Other new “informed consent” proposals in the states would require women to receive an ultrasound before their abortion; according to Naral, 10 states have considered such legislation this year. South Carolina has been debating proposals that encourage, if not require, a woman to go a step further and review the sonogram.
This focus on women by the anti- abortion movement has real power, many experts said. Reva Siegel, a Yale law professor and a supporter of abortion rights who recently conducted a study of this effort said it combines “the modern language of trauma and women’s rights” with “some very traditional ways of understanding women.”
But Geoffrey Garin, who polls for abortion rights groups, said, “Once you get past the verbiage, women get that the motivation here is political as opposed to medical.” History suggests that the way the abortion struggle is framed has a significant effect, over the years, on legislative and political outcomes. In the late 1980s, the Naral slogan “Who Decides?” was widely credited with helping the abortion rights movement capture the voters of the center. A decade later, the campaign to outlaw “partial birth abortion” — symbolizing a broader argument that the right to an abortion had gone too far — helped the anti-abortion movement widen its support and win significant victories in Congress, state legislatures and the court.
The “pro-life” movement clearly hopes this emphasis on women as victims of abortion has similar influence, although some of its strategists acknowledge it is a huge task; there are 1.3 million abortions a year in the United States.
Parker said his organization planned to make its legal argument, and the accompanying testimonials from women, available to more state legislatures. Every time he speaks on the issue, he said, he gets more phone calls from women who have had abortions. Both sides predict an intensifying clash in the states.
Dear St Joan Of Arc Pray For Us.
This is the last portrait of the Madonna and Child acomplished by Bellini. This subject was his particular favourite as can be seen in the tenderness apparent from the painting.
