COLUMN | February 19, 2001
KATHA POLLITT
No Olive Branch: Subject to Debate
How many times did we hear during the endless campaign that Bush wouldn't go
after abortion if elected? Republicans, Naderites and countless know-it-alls
and pundits in between agreed: Pro-choice voters were too powerful, the
country was too divided, the Republicans weren't that stupid and Bush didn't
really care about abortion anyway. Plus whoever won would have to (all
together now) "govern from the center." Where are all those smarties now, I
wonder? Bush didn't even wait for his swearing-in ceremony to start repaying
the immense debt he owes to the Christian right, which gave him one in four
of his votes, with the nominations of anti-choice die-hards John Ashcroft for
Attorney General and Tommy Thompson to head Health and Human Services.
On his first full day in office, Bush reinstated the "gag rule" preventing
international family-planning clinics and NGOs from receiving US funds if
they so much as mention the word "abortion." (This action was widely
misrepresented in the press as being a ban on funding for performing
abortions; in fact, it bans clinics that get US aid from performing abortions
with their own money and prohibits speech--whether lobbying for legal changes
in countries where abortion is a crime or informing women with life- or
health-threatening pregnancies about their legal options.) A few days later,
Thompson announced he would look into the safety of RU-486, approved by the
FDA this past fall--a drug that has been used by half a million European
women over twelve years and has been more closely studied here than almost
any drug on the market. In the wake of Laura Bush's remark to NBC News and
the Today show that she favored retention of Roe v. Wade, both the President
and the Vice President said the Administration has not ruled out a legal
challenge to it, placing them to the right of Ashcroft himself, who told the
Judiciary Committee he regarded Roe as settled law (at least until the makeup
of the Supreme Court changes, he did not add).
Don't count on the media to alert the public. The press is into champagne and
confetti: Who would have thought "Dick" Cheney would be such an amiable talk
show guest! Time to move on, compromise, get busy with that big tax cut. "Who
in hell is this 'all' we keep hearing about?" a friend writes, "as in 'all
agree' that the Bush transition has been a smashing success?" An acquaintance
at the Washington Post, whose executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., claims to
be so objective he doesn't even vote, says word has come down from "on high"
that stories must bear "no trace of liberal bias"--interestingly, no
comparable warnings were given against pro-Bush bias. So, on abortion, look
for endless disquisitions on the grassiness of the anti-choice roots, the
elitism of pro-choicers and the general tedium of the abortion issue. Robin
Toner could barely stifle a yawn as she took both sides to task in the New
York Times ("The Abortion Debate, Stuck in Time," January 21): Why couldn't
more anti-choicers see the worth of stem cell research, like anti-choice
Senator Gordon Smith, who has several relatives afflicted with Parkinson's
(but presumably no relatives unwillingly pregnant); and why can't more
pro-choicers acknowledge that sonograms "complicate" the status of the fetus?
In an article that interviewed not a single woman, only the fetus matters:
not sexuality, public health, women's bodies, needs or rights.
Now is the time to be passionate, clever, original and urgent. I hate to say
it, but pro-choicers really could learn some things from the antis, and I
don't mean the arts of arson, murder and lying to the Judiciary Committee.
Lots of right-wing Christians tithe--how many pro-choicers write significant
checks to pro-choice and feminist organizations? Why not sit down today and
send President Bush a note saying that in honor of the women in his family
you are making a donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds to pay
for a poor woman's abortion (NNAF: Hampshire College, Amherst MA 01002-5001)?
March 10 is the Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers--send your local
clinic money for an abortion "scholarship," flowers, a thank-you note, a
bottle of wine, a Nation subscription for the waiting room! (Refuse & Resist
has lots of ideas and projects for that day--call them at 212-713-5657.)
The antis look big and powerful because they have a built-in base in the
Catholic and fundamentalist churches. But (aha!) pro-choicers have a built-in
constituency too: the millions and millions of women who have had abortions.
For all sorts of reasons (privacy concerns, overwork, the ideology of
medicine) few clinics ask their patients to give back to the cause. Now some
providers and activists are talking about changing that. "My fantasy," Susan
Yanow of the Abortion Access Project wrote me, "is that every woman in this
country gets a piece of paper after her procedure that says something like,
'We need your help. You just had a safe, legal abortion, something that the
current Administration is actively trying to outlaw. Think of your sisters/
mothers/daughters who might need this service one day. Please help yourself
to postcards and tell your elected representatives you support legal
abortion, join (local group name here), come back as a volunteer' and so on."
If every woman who had an abortion sent her clinic even just a dollar a year,
it would mean millions of dollars for staff, security, cut-rate or gratis
procedures. Think how different the debate would be if all those women, and
the partners, parents, relatives and friends who helped them, spoke up
boldly--especially the ones whose husbands are so vocally and famously and
self-righteously anti-choice. If women did that, we would be the grassroots.
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