‘89 Campaigns Turning Up the Heat on Abortion Issue

Louise Flannery’s loyalties and her votes have always gone one way: Republican.

In Tuesday’s election, though, she has vowed that her party will come second. What will matter most is electing people who support a woman’s right to choose an abortion, she said.

The 51-year-old registered nurse even put it in writing at a recent National Organization for Women rally here, eagerly signing a card pledging: “I will only vote for candidates who will keep abortion legal and accessible.”

“I’ve always felt strongly about it, but I never did anything,” Flannery said. “Now’s the time.”

Now is the time for her because the U.S. Supreme Court has begun giving states more power to chip away at abortion rights. Flannery is part of a newly energized bloc of voters--the size and stamina of which has yet to be tested--who are making it their top priority to elect lawmakers who will work to keep abortion legal.

Although few people cast their ballots solely on the issue, abortion has cropped up this fall as the dominant question in many elections ranging from governorships to local offices. In the most closely watched of these races--Tuesday’s gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey--candidates appear to be proving wrong the old political wisdom that abortion is a treacherous issue, to be avoided at all costs.

The edge in both races appears to be going to candidates who are selling themselves to voters as protectors of abortion rights. And in both, their opponents appear to have suffered from failing to respond or from appearing inconsistent.

“There’s no question that (the Supreme Court decision) really did galvanize the pro-choice community. It shocked people into the realization that there really is a threat,” said Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League. Membership in her organization has grown to more than 350,000, up from about 200,000 at the beginning of the year, she said.

What they are up against is a well-organized army of abortion opponents, who have learned the hard way how to muster and wield political clout. In the 16 years since the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision made abortion a national right, abortion foes have tirelessly built a single-minded network of local, state and national organizations that few politicians can afford to ignore.

Presidential candidates backed by anti-abortion groups have won three successive elections, and put into place a conservative Supreme Court majority that many believe will ultimately overturn Roe vs. Wade and hand the entire abortion issue back to the states.

Their candidates have also won a majority of the special legislative races since the decision, although abortion was not in the forefront in many of those contests.

“ We’re the ones on a roll,” insisted Sandy Faucher, political action committee director for the National Right to Life Committee, the nation’s largest anti-abortion group.

Last summer’s Supreme Court decision in the Missouri case of Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services was their greatest victory to date--but it could prove a costly one, at least in the short term, because it has mobilized long-complacent abortion rights activists.

It has made voters such as Flannery, the New Jersey nurse, reconsider how they choose their candidates. When she supported former President Ronald Reagan and President Bush, Flannery gave little thought to their anti-abortion stands, she said. “I’m not proud of it. I’ll never do it again.

“I don’t believe in abortion as such,” Flannery added. “It’s the choice that’s so important.”

No statewide candidate has embraced abortion rights as fervently as Virginia Lt. Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, who decided in August to make the issue a focal point of his campaign to become the nation’s first elected black governor. “After Webster, Doug started hearing about it (from voters). He sensed that it was very important,” said Frank Greer, Wilder’s media adviser. Greer said roughly one-third of Wilder’s media budget has been spent emphasizing the candidate’s stance in favor of abortion rights.

Wilder’s position is an appeal both to abortion rights sentiment and to Virginia’s wide streak of libertarianism. In his rhetoric and in his advertisements, he frames abortion as an issue of government intrusion in people’s private lives.

“Marshall Coleman wants to take away your right to choose and give it back to politicians,” the announcer says in one of Wilder’s television spots. “He wants to go back to outlawing abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.”

Thus far, this tactic appears to be paying off. In a recent Washington Post poll that showed Wilder with a 15-point lead, 54% of Virginians ranked abortion as “very important” in their voting decision. Among the one-third of voters who listed abortion as their only criterion for selecting a candidate, Wilder won 55% to 37% over Republican J. Marshall Coleman.

University of Virginia political scientist Larry J. Sabato said Wilder’s biggest advantage is that he is running as “the heir apparent to eight successful years under a Democratic governor.”

Nonetheless, he estimated that the abortion issue has added as many as three percentage points to Wilder’s margin--and just as important, that those votes are coming “directly from Coleman’s base, Republican-leaning women in the suburbs.”

Coleman compounded the damage, many on both sides say, by making what is a near-fatal mistake in politics. When Wilder raised the issue, his opponent failed to respond, hoping that it would go away.

“Once again, an attack unanswered is an attack agreed to,” Sabato said.

Last week, with only days remaining before the election, the GOP nominee finally aired a television ad spelling out his own position on the issue. It was a clear effort to touch on the ambivalence that most people feel about abortion; although the majority of Americans tell pollsters they want abortion to remain legal, they also advocate making it much harder to get in all but the most dire circumstances.

“I’m not going to restrict abortions for rape and incest,” Coleman says in the spot. “But should a teen-ager seeking an abortion get the permission of her parents? I say yes. Should an abortion be performed because a parent wants a boy or a girl? I say no.”

In the vicious gubernatorial contest being fought in New Jersey, abortion has also emerged as a critical issue--primarily, some say, because it is virtually the only substantive difference that voters can see through all the mud that is being slung by both sides.

Although New Jersey faces serious fiscal and environmental crises, the most memorable campaign advertisement from each candidate has depicted the other as Pinocchio, his nose growing as he lies. Their televised debates have disintegrated into personal attacks.

This has left abortion “the only real issue, but that’s in large measure because the candidates have not taken the occasion to paint many differences between themselves on any other issue,” said Richard V. Sinding, president of the Center for Analysis of Public Issues, a public interest group in New Brunswick.

The GOP nominee, Rep. Jim Courter, made what many believe was a critical blunder early on. Although his congressional voting record puts him squarely in the anti-abortion camp, Courter sought to portray himself as a moderate on the issue. He promised, despite his own opposition to abortion, not to recommend any changes in New Jersey abortion policies, which are among the nation’s most liberal.

His vacillation did little to appease the more than two-thirds of New Jersey voters who say they oppose any new restrictions on abortion and outraged the anti-abortion groups that had counted Courter as one of theirs.

“Jim Courter has given us a fine example of how not to handle the abortion issue, or any other issue,” the National Right to Life Committee’s Faucher said.

As in Virginia, the issue may be winning Republican votes for the Democratic nominee, Rep. James J. Florio, whose record is on the side of legalized abortion.

Florio pollster Celinda Lake said her surveys show Florio running 40 points ahead of Courter among young working women--a group that in past elections voted for GOP Gov. Thomas H. Kean, a supporter of legalized abortion.

“Clearly, the politics of abortion are different than we’ve ever seen before,” Lake added.

Faucher insisted that developments in these two races do not foreshadow ultimate victory for those who support abortion rights. “There’s a lot of hype out there. People are looking at the initial hype and not the facts,” she said. Abortion opponents have won seven out of the 10 legislative races since the Webster decision, she said, and two out of the four congressional seats that have opened.

Most of these victories came in the conservative South, where the anti-abortion movement enjoys some of its strongest support.

And at least some were in races where abortion has been overshadowed by other issues. For example, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s anti-abortion stance is believed to have had almost no impact in the special Florida election that made her the first Cuban-American in Congress; that race was dominated by ethnic rivalry.

The apparent success of Wilder and Florio in promoting abortion rights has emboldened the Democratic Party, which supports legal abortion in its platform. It now plans to take a stronger, more prominent stand in favor of abortion rights--despite the fact that many party stalwarts are on the other side.

“Earlier in the year, there was an inclination on the part of the Democratic Party not to jump into the fray,” said Democratic National Committee spokesman Michael McCurry. “What we now know is that it’s a more salient issue than many imagined in the weeks after the Webster decision.

“The more we look into the issue, the more we are (viewing it) as a way to stand up and say, ‘Look, Democrats do stand for something,’ ” McCurry added. “For the most part, the Democratic Party is a pro-choice party, and the Republican Party is an anti-choice party. For the Democrats, (emphasizing that difference) is an important element of strategy.”

But Democrats have no monopoly on the loyalties of abortion rights supporters.

San Diego registered nurse Tricia Hunter, promoting herself as the only advocate of legal abortion in a field of six GOP candidates, won a special primary election last August to fill a vacant Assembly seat in the conservative and heavily Republican 76th District. A significant measure of her support in the primary, which all but assured her subsequent victory in the general election, came from those who normally vote Democratic.

“We don’t care whether the candidate is Republican, Democratic or independent,” NOW President Molly Yard insisted. “What we care about is how the candidate stands on women’s rights to control their reproductive lives.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater discounted the idea that the Democrats stand to gain from their stand on abortion rights.

The Republicans, at the instigation of their religious fundamentalist wing, have since 1980 included an anti-abortion plank in their platform. However, Atwater said, “you take a Lynn Martin and a Claudine Schneider (Republican congresswomen who support abortion rights), they’re running as pro-choice candidates. We’ve got a lot of people running from a lot of different positions on this issue.”

Further, he predicted: “From a purely political standpoint, it is not the best issue to be involved in one way or the other, because it is a gut-wrenching issue for people. . . . I do not think it will be a driving issue in the 1990 campaign, particularly, and I certainly do not think it will be a driving issue in the 1992 campaign.”

Some of those who are running, however, appear to think otherwise. At least two 1990 Democratic gubernatorial candidates--Illinois Atty. Gen. Neil Hartigan and former Massachusetts Atty. Gen. Francis X. Bellotti--announced only a few days after the Supreme Court decision that they support legal abortion. Both had previously fought to restrict abortion, and their apparent defection came as a shock to abortion opponents who had long counted the two among their allies.

A shift is also being felt in Congress. The House last month voted for the first time to allow welfare funds to be used to perform abortions for rape and incest victims. Although they failed to override President Bush’s veto, supporters of the largely symbolic measure picked up an additional 15 allies in the two weeks between the initial vote and the effort to override.

“All these people who are jumping off the fence are jumping on our side,” the National Abortion Rights Action League’s Michelman said.

However, these have been early skirmishes in a state-by-state war that will last for years, even decades.

It is still an open question whether abortion rights groups can sustain the type of momentum their opponents have demonstrated for almost two decades.

“When rights are threatened, people will dig deep, they will work hard and they will make abortion a top priority when they go to vote,” Michelman said. “But I have the fear that as we do succeed, people will think we are winning the war. The greatest challenge we have is to keep our political army mobilized, and to keep people in for the long haul.”