Deena Mitchell is the kind of voter who scares abortion rights activists. The Wilmette mother of two supports their cause. If she were to cast her presidential vote based on that issue, she would be a certain vote for Vice President Al Gore.But she is not certain. She is leaning toward Gore, but also is considering a vote for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, an abortion opponent. Her father is Egyptian, and her concerns for Palestinians’ rights in the Mideast give her pause about the ticket of Gore and Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
“I guess if I felt that Roe vs. Wade were threatened, I would feel differently,” said Mitchell, 39. “But I don’t feel like there’s a threat. It’s a non-issue to me.”
That sound you hear is abortion rights activists gnashing their teeth. “There really is a threat here. We’re not just Chicken Little saying the sky is falling,” said Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.
“George Bush . . . is one of the two most anti-choice governors in the country. He signed into law in 1999 more anti-choice provisions than any governor, other than (John) Engler in Michigan. . . . George W. Bush will de facto end legal abortion.”
Abortion opponents consider this election equally critical, although what Michelman sees as a threat, they regard as a profound opportunity.
“With George W. Bush in the White House, we know that millions of unborn children will be saved,” said Carol Tobias, director of the National Right to Life Committee’s political action committee.
The next president could exert a momentous influence on the status of abortion, activists say, because he is expected to nominate two or more justices to the Supreme Court, according to some estimates; one justice according to others. For 27 years, the court has maintained a basic constitutional guarantee of a woman’s right to get an abortion; a future court could rule differently.
But voters appear to be taking little notice, poll takers say. Most, like Deena Mitchell, have other issues on their minds.
They are more concerned about education, Social Security, Medicare, health care, taxes and moral values, said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
“Abortion is way down on the list,” he said.
“I don’t think it will be an important issue,” said Republican pollster Linda DiVall, who recently helped run a nationwide series of focus groups with women voters for the Center for Policy Alternatives, a non-partisan progressive public policy institute in Washington, D.C.
“Abortion is certainly important to a certain segment of the population, but you don’t see it as a top priority with women.”
The issue seems distant from their daily lives, said Linda Tarr-Whelan, president of the Center for Policy Alternatives and a former board member of Voters for Choice.
“Not a lot of women wake up in the morning and say, `Will abortion be legal when I need it?”‘ she said. “They wake up and worry about health care, child care and `Will I be able to pay the bills this month?”‘
Most women simply feel no sense of urgency about abortion rights, say observers of abortion politics. After all, there have been warnings about the imminent demise of Roe for years, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif., but the decision is still standing.
“Women may have gotten complacent,” she said.
Even young women who might be presumed to have a greater personal concern don’t seem worried, said DiVall.
“They simply don’t see that abortion policy is threatened in this country today,” she said.
With occasional exceptions, mostly in Gore’s case, the candidates haven’t been emphasizing the abortion issue.
“I don’t think either of these candidates wants to talk about it. It’s a bit of a hot potato,” Kohut said. “The Republicans don’t want to be seen as conservative in a social way as they have in the past, so one of the early things Bush did in defining himself was to say, `No litmus test for political appointees.’
“On the other hand, I don’t think it’s something Gore wants to raise, either; he doesn’t want to alienate social conservatives.”
At this point, there really aren’t any undecided voters to be won over on the subject, said Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist who has studied abortion politics.
“This has been going on for so long . . . Anyone who cares about the issue has probably chosen sides,” he said.
But activists beg to differ with those who downplay the issue. In fact, they say, abortion and the two candidates’ starkly differing stands have the potential for deciding the election.
“Pro-choice people don’t like to talk about this issue, but it is their litmus test,” said Ann Stone, national chairwoman of Republicans for Choice Political Action Committee. “If all other things are equal, it is going to be the deciding issue.”
“There is a large segment of the population that really does care about this issue,” said Tobias, of the National Right to Life Committee.
The difference between the two candidates could not be more clear.
Bush opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest or when a woman’s life is in danger. He opposes the late-term abortion procedure known as “partial birth.” He filed a court brief defending Texas’ constitutional right not to use taxpayer funds to pay for abortions for poor women. He has called the Roe ruling a constitutional “reach.”
And though he has said he would not use abortion as a litmus test in naming Supreme Court justices, he said he would appoint judges who would interpret the Constitution strictly.
“He has also said his models for justices were [Antonin] Scalia and [Clarence] Thomas,” both of whom have voted to overturn Roe. “That’s enough to give us hives,” said Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which is so concerned about the election that it has launched its first voter education campaign.
Gore is considered to be a solid supporter of abortion rights, although he was not always; in the early 1980s, he consistently voted against federal funding of abortions, saying that he opposed government participation in “the taking of what is arguably human life.”
He has since said that he would rephrase his remarks today, and that, after wrestling with the issue, he now believes that denying Medicaid funding for abortion amounts to discrimination against poor women.
He is now firmly in the abortion rights camp. As a senator, he co-sponsored the Freedom of Choice Act in 1991, which sought to codify Roe vs. Wade into federal law. He voted against “gag rules” preventing doctors at federally funded family clinics from discussing abortion. He opposes bans on partial birth abortion that do not make exceptions to protect the woman’s health. He now supports expanding Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women.
Though he was hammered during the primary by Bill Bradley for changing his position, abortion-rights advocates support Gore.
“There are many pro-choice people who believe that abortion is the taking of a human life” but want to leave that decision up to women, said Michelman, who is stumping for Gore. “I am very proud that he is a thoughtful person who has evolved on this issue and has come to real clarity on the ethical and moral issues, and high on his list is the value of a woman’s life.”
Both sides see the stakes this election as enormous, in large part because of the president’s power to nominate high court justices.
“If a pro-life president is elected, the appointment of just a couple of Supreme Court justices will change the balance of the court considerably,” said Laura Echevarria, spokeswoman for the National Right to Life Committee.
“The next president really holds in his hands the future of Roe vs. Wade,” Michelman said.
That court’s most recent abortion decision was a 5-4 vote that invalidated a Nebraska law banning partial-birth abortion.
What that decision means for the basic constitutional right to abortion is unclear. Only three of the justices–Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas–have specifically voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
Moreover, guessing an appointee’s votes has proved an inexact science. Given the opportunity to overturn Roe in 1992, three Republican appointees–Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter–infuriated anti-abortion activists when they declined to take it.
But Simon Heller, director of litigation for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, who argued against the Nebraska partial-birth ban before the Supreme Court, thinks that if a particular type of abortion can come close to being outlawed, the broader implication is clear.
“It’s our view that if women no longer have the right to the safest procedure, the one that is medically appropriate in the view of their physician,” he said of the partial-birth method, “then really the right to choose abortion is close to the end.”
A president’s influence extends beyond Supreme Court appointments. On President Clinton’s third day in office, he acted to reverse five anti-abortion rulings made by the Reagan and Bush administrations, including a gag rule prohibiting abortion counseling at federally funded clinics. And the issues reach past abortion.
Gov. Bush, for example, opposes federal funding for medical research that uses tissue from living human embryos.
Gore supports research on stem-cells from human embryos, which have the ability to form every tissue of the body.
Recently established federal guidelines allow such research using tissue from frozen embryos that are being discarded by fertility clinics.
Political observers may consider abortion a minor election issue, but activists think it will end up trumping some others.
“As we get closer to Nov. 7, the candidates will try to reach out to the middle on issues like education [and] the economy,” Feldt said. “As they do that, they will look more and more alike. But they’re not going to be able to shift their positions on reproductive rights.”
People cast ballots according to those positions, Tobias said. “In the 1992 election, 13 percent of the voters said [abortion] was one of their top two issues in deciding who to vote for. In 1996, it was 12 percent,” she said, citing Wirthlin Worldwide surveys.
Of the 12 percent in 1996 who considered it a top issue, according to Wirthlin, 45 percent voted for Bob Dole, compared with 35 percent for Bill Clinton.
“Pro-life people turn out in droves,” said Echevarria.
Even if they do, it won’t do Bush much good, countered Stone, chairwoman of the Republicans for Choice committee. Anti-abortion votes, she said, are concentrated in states like Utah, Mississippi and Louisiana, where Republicans customarily win anyway. Democrats do not have an equivalent group of voters that deserts the party over this issue, she said.
Abortion rights activists are counting on their own droves to come to the polls.
Michelman’s group has targeted nearly 3 million abortion rights supporters in key states; once they know more about Bush’s stand and the status of the Supreme Court, Michelman predicted, they will vote for Gore.
“They haven’t paid attention yet,” said Michelman. “That’s the usual status at this point in time.”
The National Right to Life Committee predicts that the issue will cut in the opposite direction.
“I think Gore, inaccurately, thinks this issue can help him,” Tobias said. “I think he has not gotten an accurate reading of the polls.”
PUBLIC VIEWS ON ABORTION
A Los Angeles Times Poll conducted in June found Americans taking complex and sometimes ambivalent views of abortion, and suggested that issue’s effect on the election could be potent, but remains unclear.
The survey found less approval than in the past for the landmark Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right for abortion.
The percentage of respondents who supported the ruling fell from 56 percent in 1991 to 43 percent in this survey.
More than half of the respondents said abortion should either be illegal in all circumstances, or legal only in cases of rape, incest or when a woman’s life is in danger.
However, more than two-thirds said they thought the decision whether to get an abortion should be left to a woman and her doctor.
And while 57 percent said they considered abortion murder, more than half of that group said a woman should have the right to have one.
Concerning the election, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had no clear sense of either candidate’s position on the issue. But 34 percent said that if they learned that a candidate’s position on abortion disagreed with their own, they would change their votes.
