‘No One Wants to Demonstrate’ : Abortion: In Europe, It’s Low-Key Issue

By American standards, the political atmosphere in Belgium should be crackling. It isn’t.

This staunchly Roman Catholic nation is one of only two countries in Europe that still legally prohibit abortion, yet it looks on a parliamentary struggle to lift the prohibition with indifference rather than emotional fervor.

The country’s only sizable anti-abortion pressure group, Pro Vita, has dusted off 10-year-old posters for its campaign. It plans no big rallies or demonstrations. People wouldn’t turn out for them, group leaders said.

And those who are pressing to lift the ban recognize the same limitations.

‘It Gives a Bad Image’

“No one wants to demonstrate,” feminist organizer Anne-Sophie Van Neste said. “It gives a bad image. Letters, meetings, discussions--that’s the way to influence.”

The abortion issue, which generates passion and vehement protest in the United States, tends to be a low-key affair in Europe.

In both the mainly Protestant north and the Roman Catholic south, the abortion issue has rarely ignited the sustained public fervor or spawned the grass-roots interest groups that have made national power brokers of America’s pro-choice and anti-abortion lobbies.

“In the U.S., it is an issue on its own; here, it’s just one more element of party politics,” said Achille Diegenant, a member of the Belgian Senate and a key spokesman for retaining the ban on abortion. “It’s not something people will go into the street for.”

Diegenant’s Christian Democratic Party has lost two important committee votes on the bill that would legalize abortion on demand in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. The party faces an uphill battle to defeat the proposal when it hits the floor of Parliament’s upper house for a crucial vote this fall.

The bill’s defeat could mean trouble for the country’s Christian Democrat-led coalition government, yet any groundswell of public protest seems highly unlikely.

Tension in Some Countries

To be sure, Europe has had its abortion debates: Protest and social tension have accompanied the lifting of abortion bans over the past 15 years, especially in Roman Catholic nations such as France, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

But in most cases the change has been absorbed with only isolated pockets of resistance. Only in Italy has the issue persisted on a national scale.

An 11-year-old Italian law permits abortion in the first 90 days of pregnancy. It has been the target of public protest and has survived a national referendum, waves of demonstrations and enough parliamentary infighting to topple one of Italy’s 49 postwar governments.

But even in Italy, American-style tactics such as boycotts against doctors who perform abortions or sabotage raids on abortion clinics are unknown.

In part, the failure of West European anti-abortion groups to mobilize greater grass-roots support reflects the different type of democracy practiced in Europe--a form of democracy dominated by parliamentary politics, with popular pressure groups operating only on the fringes of political debate.

Environmental awareness, for example, may have come to Europe later than to the United States, but once this awareness began influencing the political agenda it quickly spawned the so-called Greens parties. These parties now press for change directly on the floors of nine parliaments in Europe.

“Special-issue pressure groups in the U.S. have enough political muscle to dis-elect or block the nomination of key people,” Eldon Griffiths, a veteran British member of Parliament, said recently. “That’s just not a part of our political life.”

The inability to ignite public fervor on the abortion issue also reflects the relative weakness of church-based power in Europe. There is no politically powerful evangelical Protestant movement, no Moral Majority-type of coalition to mobilize national public opinion on such issues.

The Roman Catholic Church is in the vanguard of the anti-abortion fight in Europe, but it has not been able to stir its rank and file to effective, sustained action.

Only in the Irish Republic have voters in recent years responded to the church message, voting by a 2-1 margin in a 1983 national referendum to approve a constitutional ban on abortion.

After two decades of gradual liberalization, Ireland and Belgium are still the only two European countries with legal bans still in place.

“Those favoring legalized abortion in Europe are by no means as well organized as their American counterparts, but they don’t have to be, because they hold the mainstream of political opinion here,” Griffiths said.

With rare exceptions, sensitive moral issues are viewed more as subjects of private choice than fierce public debate. Unlike American presidents, European leaders are not forced by voters to take sides on matters that are frequently considered outside the public debate. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher may preach her homespun homilies of thrift, hard work and clean living, but she sidesteps controversial moral questions.

Fifteen bills dealing with some aspect of abortion have been debated in the House of Commons since Thatcher took over as leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, yet few know where she stands on the issue.

“There’s a division between politics and moral issues here,” said George Gaskell, a leading social psychologist at the London School of Economics. “Politicians try to steer clear of specifics.”

What protest there is at the grass-roots level in Europe often involves the United States. A group of 30 women who recently appeared outside the U.S. Embassy in London, protesting the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling restricting abortion, was made up of more Americans than Britons.

And when Greece debated a liberal abortion bill two years ago, it was the American Pro-Life Society that helped organize rallies and distributed pamphlets in a vain attempt to block it.

Many European anti-abortion advocates see the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision as a development that could finally swing developments in their favor.

“We’ll look back one day and appreciate the significance of that decision in Europe,” predicted David Alton, a British member of Parliament who failed last year to win passage of a bill limiting Britain’s liberal abortion law.

There is little evidence of a public eager to take up the cause, however.

In Belgium, both sides seem drained by 10 years of haggling, stale argument and the fact that abortion is already commonplace in the country. Abortions are performed even in respected medical facilities, though technically in violation of the law.

In Britain, bills to limit the liberal abortion law have sparked heated debate in the House of Commons, but little else. There is no mass movement, little in the way of major protest and, so far, no change in the existing law.

Well-Financed Operation

Britain’s most vocal anti-abortion pressure group, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, runs a well-financed operation from an office behind London’s Westminister Abbey, but organizers reject as ineffective such tactics as mass rallies and public protests.

“If we hold a rally, we get no media coverage,” Paul Tully, the society’s development officer, complained. “We’ve spent a lot of effort in the past organizing them and gotten nowhere.”

Instead of mass demonstrations, the group plans a low-key leaflet distribution campaign to mark the country’s 3-millionth legal abortion since the law was enacted in 1967.

“It’s the type of tactic we have to use,” Tully said.

The French government faced no serious domestic political backlash earlier this year after ordering the pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclef to resume marketing its controversial abortion pill RU 486, a product that anti-abortion militants have labeled “chemical warfare on the unborn.”

Roussel-Uclef officials said privately that the decision to suspend marketing the pill initially had more to do with the strength of American anti-abortion protest groups than any domestic difficulties. Roussel-Uclef’s parent company, the West German chemical giant Hoechst, felt that its $6-billion U.S. business interests were jeopardized by threats of consumer boycotts, they said.

Roussel-Uclef now sells the pill in France and next year may consider marketing it to hospitals and clinics in Scandinavia and Britain. But sale of the pill in the United States is regarded as highly unlikely.

Even those who deal directly with the abortion issue in Europe find it difficult to grasp the intensity of America’s debate.

On a recent U.S. visit, Diegenant, the Belgian senator, was astounded at the high voter interest in the abortion question.

“Legislators there said the voters’ first question wasn’t about taxes, new roads or nuclear waste,” he said. “It was whether they were pro-life or pro-choice. That doesn’t happen here.”

Times researchers Janet Stobart in Rome and Christine Courtney in London contributed to this article.