ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, September 13, 1996 TAG: 9609130191
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CANDACE C. CRANDALL
BOB DOLE managed to finesse the abortion issue at the Republican Convention. Dole may see that as good politics, but an "I'm OK, You're OK" party platform - which he denies having read - does little to challenge the Democrats and the usual bland slogans about "freedom," "tolerance" and "choice."
We used to think, in the years before the U.S. Supreme Court "settled" the matter on privacy grounds with its 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, that legalizing abortion would result in broad benefits to society.
Feminists touted abortion as a virtual cure-all for every social ill plaguing the country. Every child would be a "wanted" child. Illegitimacy would become a thing of the past. Rates for divorce and child abuse would drop because couples would no longer be forced into loveless marriages and an unplanned pregnancy. The numbers of Americans living in poverty and on welfare would shrink because women would remain in the work force instead of leaving to care for an infant. Women would be free to "choose," and their lives would be infinitely better as a result.
But one problem with forecasting broad social change in the short term is that the numbers eventually catch up with you. Divorce and illegitimacy rates continued to rise, which means that one in four women is now rearing her children alone, up from one in 10 in 1973. Poverty and welfare are up, and so is child abuse.
And what of the more immediate aims, like "freedom" and "choice"? Isn't the decision to terminate a pregnancy a matter between a woman and her doctor? Not if her doctor is among the two-thirds of the ob-gyns (and three-quarters of the women ob-gyns) in the United States who refuse to perform abortions, overwhelmingly on moral and ethical grounds. In truth, abortion is increasingly a matter between a woman and a specialized abortion clinic, one that offers little support, follow-up care or counseling.
Didn't legalizing abortion make it safe? Safer than childbirth? Abortion-rights activists have so convinced the public of this that women today routinely enter unregulated clinics and submit to abortion - a surgical procedure - without discussing it with the doctor, without asking about possible complications and long-term health risks, or, in too many cases, without even knowing the doctor's name.
Partly because of such unwariness, the Centers for Disease Control estimate that hundreds of thousands of women since 1973 have suffered potentially life-threatening complications, including hemorrhage, massive infection, embolism, perforated uterus, missed tubal pregnancy, and injury from anesthesia administered by untrained or incompetent technicians. Each year, some 10 to 20 women die, many of them because the clinics were filthy or the doctor didn't adhere to standard surgical procedures.
Yet most state public-health agencies and medical licensing boards show little interest in tightening regulations and setting health-care standards at abortion clinics, largely because any attempt to do so - even to prevent 13-year-old kids from walking in to these clinics alone - invites a placard-waving demonstration by pro-choice activists. Besides, local officials complain that they already have their hands full policing picketers from the pro-life side.
Do Americans really believe that a woman should have carte blanche to do what she wants with her own body? Ask those who hold the view if they support abortion as birth control, and watch most of them recoil. Yet a dismaying number of women, old enough to know better, are using abortion for just that. Of those women who ended their pregnancies last year, half had had at least one previous abortion, nearly one in five had had at least two previous abortions. I've personally met white-collar professionals who've had four, five, even nine. For these women, abortion is less a difficult, thought-through decision than a useful escape clause for a lot of bad "choices" made, and made repeatedly, before they ever got pregnant.
Perhaps the abortion-related issue that most needs to be addressed, certainly the one most avoided by both the pro-choice and pro-life camps, is the responsibility of the women themselves.
I supported reforming the state abortion laws 25 years ago; I still think there are crisis pregnancies where abortion should remain an option. But mixing ideology into what should be, at its base, a public-health issue has resulted in self-deluding, even dangerous, social and health-care policies. And basing one's pro-abortion-rights position on constitutional grounds is becoming harder to defend with any credibility.
There are those - party leaders, for example - who would argue that a political convention is not the place for an open forum on abortion, that what we need, in fact, is to take politics out of this discussion. I suspect that what such people really hope for is an end to the discussion altogether.
So, what a disappointment. What a wasted opportunity. Overrun as it was with bored reporters, the San Diego convention was a chance for Republicans to initiate a long-overdue forum on this contentious issue, and perhaps make real progress toward resolving it. Instead, the abortion debate will continue through this election year, as it has year after year, polarized by emotion and distorted by a wrong-headed constitutional spin. Completely obscured is the fact that almost everything the public believes about abortion is demonstrably untrue.
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENTby CNB