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Newsday (USA), February 9, 2005 Abortion in the crosshairs With
the GOP in firm control, supporters of Roe
v. Wade fear a rollback of rights is just a
matter of time Spectators outside a California courthouse cheered when Scott Peterson was convicted in November of killing his wife and unborn son, but women's groups are less than gleeful over fallout from the case, saying conservatives are using it to promote anti-abortion laws as they shun legislation to stem violence against women. Rarely has a family murder provided such political fodder - it even crept into the presidential campaign - and the timing couldn't have been worse for abortion rights groups: conservatives control Congress, and President George W. Bush is poised to retool the U.S. Supreme Court with justices who could overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which opened the door to abortion on demand. Women's groups say abortion rights are more vulnerable than they have been since that decision. Asked if Roe v. Wade would outlast Bush, the president of the National Organization for Women, Kim Gandy, responded, "I don't know," and described its future as "bleak." Four months after Peterson's arrest for the killing of his wife, Laci, and their unborn son, Conner, Bush last April signed into law the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, making it a crime to harm a fetus during a federal offense. A Bush campaign ad slammed Sen. John Kerry for opposing the legislation, dubbed Laci and Conner's Law. Abortion activists and many Democratic lawmakers, including Kerry, said it undermined abortion rights by giving fetuses separate legal status. Conservatives, who had tried for five years to pass the law, acknowledged that the Peterson case provided the momentum to overcome opposition. "That clearly helped to pass the law," said the president of the conservative Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, who doesn't argue with those who say the law's true intention is to weaken abortion rights. "It does," Perkins said. "It puts a crack in the legal reasoning for Roe v. Wade, so yes, it is ultimately laying the groundwork for a significant reduction of abortions in this country." Were it not for California's own version of the law, Peterson could not have been charged with his unborn son's killing, an aggravating circumstance that makes him eligible for the death penalty when he is sentenced next month. Twenty-nine other states have similar laws, and at least four of them passed the laws in the wake of the Peterson case. About a dozen more states are considering such legislation. In addition, Congress this month took up the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, which would require doctors performing abortions on women at least 20 weeks pregnant to tell them that fetuses feel pain, and to offer mothers pain-relievers for the fetuses. "The end of abortion on demand has started in America," said one of the bill's sponsors, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas). Infuriating women's groups is what they consider the dichotomy of conservatives' support of laws to prevent abortions, coupled with their opposition to laws targeting violence against women. "It's unsettling that there is so much concern for the fertilized egg and so little concern for the battered woman," Gandy said. Congress and most of the state legislative bodies that have approved laws to protect unborn victims of violence, for example, have rejected alternative legislation that would have strengthened penalties for crimes committed against pregnant women. Perkins said that's because the alternative laws, invariably introduced by pro-abortion-rights legislators such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), do not specifically recognize fetuses as living beings. "They want to stand with the women but deny the children," he said. Neither side disagrees that groups like Perkins' have had great success in eroding abortion rights. Anti-abortion activists say cases such as Peterson's and that of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, the Missouri woman who was killed in December by an assailant who stole her nearly full-term fetus, have galvanized supporters by putting a "human face" on unborn children. Both sides, though, attribute most changes to a disciplined and methodical campaign by conservatives that began immediately after Roe v. Wade and never lost sight of its goal of ending abortion. "They've had a long-term strategy of electing people at the local level. Then at the state and federal level we saw these very extreme conservatives being elected whose only purpose was to overturn Roe v. Wade," said Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "Now they're in control of both houses of Congress, and they have Bush leading the charge." At the same time, they acknowledge that women's groups let down their guard, particularly during the pro-abortion-rights administration of President Bill Clinton. "The anti-choice movement ... started this very long march that we somehow think is a latter-day development. It is not," said Faye Wattleton, a former Planned Parenthood president who now heads the Center for the Advancement of Women, a New York nonprofit. "This started after Roe v. Wade was handed down - immediately after." The cumulative effect over the past 30 years has been to cripple Roe v. Wade, she said. Among the most striking changes have been various federal and state laws denying Medicaid funding to cover abortions; requiring parental notification for minors seeking abortions; and outlawing late-term abortions such as those in the late second or third trimesters. Debate about whether fetuses feel pain spawned the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, said Perkins, underscoring the incremental but effective methods he said abortion foes have employed. Later this year, Republican leaders hope to pass another law that would make it more difficult for minors to obtain abortions without parental notification. There also has been a loss of support for abortion rights among women, Wattleton said. A survey of 1,500 women conducted recently by the center found that 70 percent thought that abortion was mostly or always morally wrong. "When people give up on the notion that women can be morally upstanding and end a pregnancy, you've got a very long way back to where we were," she said, accusing abortion-rights groups of failing to respond aggressively enough to conservatives' progress. Indeed, when anti-abortion groups praised the decision to charge Scott Peterson with murdering his unborn son, abortion rights advocates stayed quiet. Though the move clashed with their conviction that a fetus is not a person, they let the issue pass, apparently fearing a backlash. Abortion foes, meanwhile, enlisted the family to help push through the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Such moves have put abortion-rights groups on the defensive, leaving their foes free to focus on passing new legislation and on swaying judicial appointments to ensure that Roe v. Wade is someday overturned, and that constitutional challenges to the ban on late-term abortions are rejected. "I think this is one of the most difficult political climates we have ever had, and I think as long as we have George W. Bush in the White House and a very, very ideologically conservative Congress, women's right to choose is more tenuous than ever before," Keenan said. << Newsday -- 2/9/05 >> Home About Us Newsletters News Archives Donate
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