New York Times, June 14, 2006
Clinton Opens Debate on Family Planning
Author: RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
WASHINGTON — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton moved on Tuesday to shift the debate over abortion rights to the subject of access to family planning services, saying that the nation's focus should be on preventing unwanted pregnancies.
Mrs. Clinton's remarks, made to members of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association in Washington, reflect the degree to which Democrats around the country are trying to find a middle ground on the polarizing issue of abortion rights since their party's defeats in the November 2004 elections.
"Let us unite around a common goal of reducing the amount of abortions," the senator said. "Not by making them illegal as many are attempting to do, or overturning Roe v. Wade and undermining the constitutional protections that decision provided, but by preventing unintended pregnancies in the first place through education, contraception, accessible health care and services, empowering women to make decisions."
Mrs. Clinton, a potential candidate for the presidency who is up for re-election in the Senate from New York this year, also used her speech to take a jab at Republicans who, while adamantly opposed to abortion rights, have resisted efforts to pay for programs providing greater access to contraception and other family planning services.
Specifically, Mrs. Clinton criticized the Bush administration for failing to provide adequate money for government family planning programs, as well as for refusing to approve over-the-counter sales of Plan B, an emergency contraceptive.
Mrs. Clinton said that the Food and Drug Administration's refusal to approve the Plan B contraceptive was a prime example of the "Washington Republican war on contraception."
"Let's really understand what we're up against," she said. "This is not just about Roe, this is not just about choice, this is about contraception, family planning and, most profoundly, women's roles and responsibilities and rights."
Mrs. Clinton's advisers say that shifting the debate to family planning is a way for the Democratic Party to gain an upper hand over Republicans. "It's time to go on the offensive," one of Mrs. Clinton's advisers said. Her advisers noted how Republicans have put Democrats on the defensive in the debate on this issue, particularly on a procedure that anti-abortion groups call partial-birth abortion.
But the campaign of one of Mrs. Clinton's Republican opponents in the New York Senate race, John Spencer, a former mayor of Yonkers, accused her of engaging in empty political rhetoric.
"It's very good to be talking about a middle ground in the abortion debate," said Kevin Collins, a spokesman for the Spencer campaign. "But she has never supported any limit or restriction on what can be a gruesome procedure, partial-birth abortion."
Mrs. Clinton began talking about a need for compromise more than a year ago, shortly after the 2004 elections, when some Democrats began arguing that the party's poor showing stemmed from the fact that it was seen as too liberal on social issues.
Speaking to abortion rights supporters in Albany in January 2005, Mrs. Clinton said both sides in the debate needed to work together to prevent unwanted pregnancies and ultimately reduce abortions, which she called a "sad, even tragic choice to many, many women." Mrs. Clinton made her remarks on the same day as the annual anti-abortion campaigners' rally in Washington marking the Roe v. Wade anniversary.
On Tuesday, she echoed that sentiment. "There is a lot of common ground we can find together," she said.
In making the case for reducing abortions, rather than outlawing the procedure, Mrs. Clinton noted that her husband's administration managed to reduce teenage pregnancy by nearly one-third through an ambitious campaign that focused on family planning.
"Why did that happen?" Mrs. Clinton said. "Well, it happened because people came together instead of pointing fingers at each other and, you know, walling each other off in our respective camps.
"But today," she continued, "the U.S. continues to have one of the highest rates of unintended pregnancies in the industrialized world. Half of the six million pregnancies are unintended, and nearly half of those end in abortion every year."
Citing a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, which is a nonprofit corporation with headquarters in Washington and New York that researches reproductive health, Mrs. Clinton noted that a poor woman is four times as likely to experience an unplanned pregnancy as a higher-income woman.
"High-income women have quick, convenient access to contraceptives; low income women do not," she said. "And the result is often and increasingly becoming unintentional, unintended pregnancy."
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