Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 1, 1995                   TAG: 9503010047
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PRO-LIFE

Those advising the president have encouraged him to use the nomination of Henry Foster to be surgeon general to undermine the GOP's ``big tent'' strategy.

Fresh out of good ideas and afraid that the new Republican congressional majority reflects a mood in the country that could shut them out of power, Democrats have returned to an old standard they believe is the Achilles' heel of the Republican Party.

So desperately do the Democrats wish their strategy can win that New York Times columnist Frank Rich last Sunday attempted to make the case for Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. - a pro-choicer - as a presidential winner. ``Mr. Specter bears watching as the increasingly attractive alternative who could shape his party's most explosive internal debate,'' wrote Rich.

Forget it. Specter won't win a single delegate. The momentum is headed the other way.

Not one pro-life incumbent, Democrat or Republican, lost in the 1994 congressional races. In the past, when pro-choicers won, much of the media and their ideological soul mates in the abortion lobby hailed the election results as proof of a national mood swing. They are silent about the 1994 election because it produced evidence of a swing in a different direction.

Republicans can, and should, take advantage of this new momentum by enthusiastically embracing the pro-life position but with a new focus: on women.

At the party's 1996 convention in San Diego, Republicans should feature women in crisis situations who have had their babies. Women could tell of their struggles and how deciding in favor of another life enhanced their role as life-givers and enriched their own lives. One speaker should be Gianna Jessen, the teen-age girl who survived a saline abortion and goes public in a new book, ``Gianna: Aborted and Lived to Tell About It.''

Couples who adopted children could laud birth mothers' selflessness. Women who regret their abortions could say what many have told me: ``If I had only known, I would never have done it,'' and ``If someone had told me about alternatives, I would not have had an abortion.'' Life would be seen as a beautiful, and right, choice.

The strategy would be simply to tell the truth, which exposes the philosophically empty position of ``choice'' as bogus and indefensible in light of the momentous issue of life and death.

As long as Republicans remain reluctant to trumpet their pro-life stand, and the reason for it, Democrats will dictate the grounds of the debate and keep Republicans on the defensive. This will allow Democrats to mislabel and manipulate public opinion. By emphasizing women, Republicans can counter the pro-choice propaganda at the very point of attack.

The chairman of the Texas Republican Party, Thomas Pauken, has it right in his new book, ``The Thirty Years War'': ``You cannot talk seriously about American politics without dealing with the deeper questions of what set of basic values should frame our culture. ... For better or worse, the time for the final showdown between the conservatives and the New Left is drawing near.''

How appropriate that this showdown should come over the fundamental issue of human life. Republicans should accept this challenge from Democrats (and from pro-choicers within the Republican Party) as they once accepted the slavery issue as their own.

Coupled with their plans to fix what's wrong with government and the rest of the virtue agenda, Republicans can take the Democrats' ``wedge'' and over it march a Republican president into the White House on Jan. 20, 1997.

- Los Angeles Times Syndicate