ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 6, 1996 TAG: 9603060083
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: ELLEN NAKASHIMA AND SPENCER HSU WASHINGTON POST
note: below
THE TWO WOMEN are polar opposites on abortion, but bonded by mutual respect.
Karen Raschke wears a tiny coat hanger on her necklace. Anne Kincaid wears a garnet cross.
The symbolism is telling and passionately felt. The two women are dueling foot soldiers in Virginia's 17-year battle over teenage abortion, a battle as much about morality as it is about politics.
Every winter they come face to face in Richmond, pressing lawmakers to restrict or maintain a teen-ager's access to abortion. This year, though, abortion opponents finally may prevail and claim their biggest win in the General Assembly since the U.S. Supreme Court established the right to an abortion.
That possibility has focused even greater attention on Raschke and Kincaid, lobbyists who bring vastly different personal views and histories to the cause but deeply respect each other's commitment.
"I see her as a formidable opponent," Kincaid says of Raschke. "She's not in it for the money. She's not in it for the glory."
"She's a worthy opponent," Raschke says of Kincaid. "She's intelligent. She's savvy."
Raschke is on the abortion-rights side of the debate, a corporate lawyer who as a teen-ager volunteered for George McGovern's presidential campaign. Today, she works for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia.
Kincaid, by contrast, is a born-again Christian who came to the abortion fight years after she nearly died from an abortion - an event she hid from her mother. She now works as Gov. George Allen's point person on the issue.
All their effort will come to a head this week as proponents of a parental notice bill maneuver to get it onto the Senate floor, probably by attaching it to other legislation. The measure would require that a parent be informed before a teenager's abortion, although a judge could waive that requirement if the girl came from an abusive family. And with the rise of conservative Republicans in the legislature, even Raschke acknowledges it could pass - by one vote.
Last week, she and Kincaid were only chairs apart in the front row of a packed hearing room as the Senate Education and Health Committee - for years, the major obstacle for parental notice - debated whether to send the bill on. Chairman Warren Barry, R-Fairfax County, offered an amendment that sounded like a key concession on the part of abortion foes: to allow family members other than a parent to be notified. Kincaid sat biting her lip, hoping the Democrats would go along with the change.
Raschke suddenly looked up from her copy of the bill and rushed up to a Democratic senator. "Look at where the amendment is" she whispered frantically. "It's in a place where it means nothing. It doesn't add anything!"
In fact, the amendment was a ruse. The Democrats didn't understand that until later. But alerted by Raschke, they were suspicious enough to defeat the amendment, 8 to 7.
"We came real close," Kincaid said, somewhat amazed. "We missed it by one vote."
(On Monday, the committee finally voted 9 to 6 to block the bill altogether, thus setting up this week's attempts to revive it on the Senate floor.)
Neither woman rose through traditional ranks to her current position. Kincaid, 49, describes herself as a child of the '60s. Born in Richmond to a Baptist minister, she began to question her faith when he died during her teen-age years. She later moved to San Francisco and, among other things, studied transcendental meditation and the occult.
She became pregnant as her first marriage was breaking up, sought an illegal abortion through friends and hemorrhaged. To this day her mother does not know.
"It would have been a traumatic experience for all involved," she said, seeing no irony in light of the current debate. "Knowing what I know now, and seeing how, unless you come from a truly dysfunctional family ... parents are supportive of their children ... My mother probably would have supported me, and I would have had the child."
Kincaid came back to Richmond in the mid-1980s. By then the one-time staunch abortion supporter had remarried and returned, she says, to God. She co-founded the Family Foundation in 1987 and joined the Allen administration after the governor's inauguration in 1994.
Raschke is eight years Kincaid's junior, a Chicago native raised in a Catholic family. Early on she was a feminist, she says.
At law school in the late 1970s, she became interested in gay rights and recalls arguing in a family law class that she would rather see a marriage license go to a loving same-sex couple than a physically abusive heterosexual one.
Still, she considered herself apolitical and steered toward a corporate career. She became a labor and nuclear insurance lawyer in Richmond for Virginia Power and married in 1984.
The following year, she spent one lunch hour watching a General Assembly debate on abortion and parental notice. It was dominated by men, and "I was repulsed," she said. Raschke, who joined Planned Parenthood in 1990, will concede that the idea of notifying parents sounds good. But for her, the issue is making that a legal requirement.
"Do we want laws that let governments into our bedrooms?"
LENGTH: Long : 104 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP Anne Kincaid (right) takes a peek at what Karenby CNBRaschke is writing during a legislative session Thursday, Feb. 1,
1996. color KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1996