The Molding of a Pro-Choice Advocate : Abortion: Once complacent, Kate Michelman now heads an increasingly effective national drive to keep abortion legal.

One day almost 20 years ago, Kate Michelman’s husband announced that he had fallen in love with another woman and was leaving her and their three small daughters.

It is an old, sad story, but in Michelman’s case, it had an additional twist. A few weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant.

At a loss to figure out how she was going to support the children she already had, Michelman sought an abortion. Others might call it murder, but she insists that her choice was “one of the hardest, but also one of the most right and moral decisions I ever made.”

In those years before the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision made the procedure easily available to most women, Michelman was shocked, however, to learn that choosing to have an abortion was not her decision to make.

She had to convince a panel of doctors she had never met before, relating the most intimate, humiliating details of her private life. And, in one final indignity, she had to get written permission from the man who had walked out on her.

“One of the most important decisions of my life was out of my hands,” Michelman recalls. “I finally understood how little control women really had over their own lives.”

Now, with abortion rights once again under siege, Michelman, the product of nine years of Catholic school, is one of the most visible leaders in the national drive to keep abortion legal.

Since 1986, she has been the executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the rapidly growing political arm of the abortion rights movement. This year alone, its membership has increased to 350,000, up from about 200,000; its budget has more than doubled, to $9 million.

NARAL plans to pour that money into political races nationwide to help elect candidates who will protect legalized abortion. It also is employing the most sophisticated campaign techniques of the 1980s--phone banks, mass mailings, focus groups, training sessions for candidates and activists--to develop and spread its message.

“They’ve launched a campaign the likes of which I’ve never seen. It’s the Wall Street approach: All money, money, money,” says Susan Carpenter-McMillan, president of the Right to Life League of Southern California, an anti-abortion group.

Michelman, 47, also has mastered the art of the sound bite, assuring her name and face a spot in virtually every news account that touches the subject of abortion.

This week alone, Michelman--once an early childhood development specialist and former executive director of Planned Parenthood in Harrisburg, Pa.--is personally carrying her campaign to Missouri, New Jersey, Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania and California.

As part of nationwide pro-choice protests planned this weekend, including a giant demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Michelman will fly coast-to-coast Sunday, from Kennebunkport, Me., to San Francisco, for candlelight vigils and speaking stops, including an appearance at a Rancho Park rally.

“She’s very articulate. She’s pleasant. She’s very well read and certainly a formidable opponent,” says one of her frequent foils, American Life League President Judie Brown. “If you are not in complete command of your position on the killing of babies, she can make short work of you in a debate.”

Before her abortion, Michelman admits, her own views on a woman’s role in her family and in society had been more Donna Reed’s than Betty Friedan’s.

Against War

She had marched for racial equality in Selma. She had demonstrated to end the Vietnam War and to ban the bomb. But when the women’s movement came along, she decided to sit it out. Married at 20 to her high school sweetheart, Michelman--who has remarried--had had three babies in as many years.

“You believe this myth that you live happily ever after, so you build your whole identity on that,” she says. “You get married, and that is your crowning achievement, to be chosen by a man, and to join with him.”

When she sought her abortion, Michelman got it more readily than did others at the time, when thousands of women risked their health and even their lives by going to illegal abortionists; the really desperate tried to do it themselves.

The experience of having an abortion was the most traumatic of her life, says Michelman, adding, “Women weren’t valued very much for anything beyond our reproductive capacities and our status as wives.”

Her approach now is to play strictly within the political system, a strategy that is somewhat controversial among feminist groups. In July, some of this tension surfaced when Michelman publicly chastised Molly Yard, president of the National Organization for Women, for suggesting the idea of forming a third party based on women’s issues.

Michelman complained in an interview with the Washington Post that such a move was naive and certain to fail. Yard accused Michelman of timid “company town thinking” and added, “If NARAL had real grass-roots membership, they’d know what people think.”

Pro-choice activists say they think that the tide on the abortion issue is turning their way, as indicated by Tuesday’s elections, in which NARAL had campaigned vigorously. The group invested $350,000 in newspaper and television advertisements in the Virginia governor’s race, and almost that much in New Jersey. In both races, abortion rights became a dominant issue; in both, NARAL-backed candidates appear to have won.

The morning after the election, Michelman stood in the glare of television lights and triumphantly announced to reporters: “This morning’s election results are a wake-up call for (abortion opponent) George Bush. To politicians everywhere, we say with conviction: If you’re out of touch with the pro-choice majority, you’re out of office.”

Some might say it was the abortion-rights movement that was out of touch and complacent--until it was jolted into action by the Supreme Court’s July 3 decision upholding new abortion restrictions in Missouri.

That decision was a clear signal that the court might further narrow the availability of legal abortions and ultimately overturn Roe vs. Wade, giving states the right to decide who may get an abortion.

Pro-choice advocates concede they may share part of the blame for allowing the shift on abortion rights. For years, their opponents have been able to strike fear in the hearts of elected officials. Few political lobbies can match the potency or tenacity of the National Right to Life Committee and other anti-abortion groups. “The other side has defined this debate,” Michelman says.

Meanwhile, NARAL had struggled, often ineptly, to find a way to get its point across, to cut through the complexity and ambiguity surrounding the abortion issue. Until April, for example, NARAL relied on a slogan--”Millions of voices silent no more”--that could just have easily have been a battle cry in the anti-abortion crusade.

“The question was, ‘When does life begin?’ Our answer was, ‘A woman needs to control her own body.’ It just didn’t work,” says Tony Podesta, a NARAL media consultant.

But last spring, testing various themes on a focus group of typical voters in Tampa, Fla., NARAL finally found something that worked. It would stop trying to give the answers. Instead it would ask one question: “Who decides?”

“Who decides?” was short enough to fit on a bumper sticker, and it framed abortion rights as an issue of government intrusion into women’s private lives. It has become the central message of NARAL’s campaign and is being hammered at in political campaigns and state capitals nationwide.

Opponents dismiss the theme as a diversionary tactic. The real issue, they say, is that abortion is murder, plain and simple. “What are you going to argue when you’re trying to persuade the people to give women the right to destroy human life?” Carpenter-McMillan asks. “You have to take the focus off the baby, the fetus, and put it on the woman.”

The approach also has been criticized within the abortion rights movement. Some say that NARAL is losing the idea that abortion rights should be an issue of social justice. They note that it has failed to attract much participation from the poor and racial minorities, people whose lives are most affected by the availability of abortion.

“My concern about the direction of the movement is that it’s too narrow,” says one longtime activist, who asks not to be identified. “It ignores that idea that even when you have a choice, it is often not a good choice. You have to have an abortion, because you are economically strapped and cannot afford to have a baby. Or you have a child, because there’s nothing else meaningful to do with your life.”

Michelman is sensitive to the suggestion that NARAL has not advanced the entire agenda of women’s issues and says she hopes to expand its campaign to include sex education, birth control, prenatal and child health care and other concerns.

A ‘Central Right’

But for now, “we build our strengths on what we have,” she says. “If we lose the central right to make a choice about abortion, we will never gain in any of the other areas. We will lose in all of them.”

The next big challenge, she says, will be in court cases testing whether teen-agers can get abortions without their parents’ knowledge or consent. The issue divides many even in the pro-choice movement because it pits the rights of parents against those of their children.

NARAL’s focus groups have yet to produce a winnable message on this one, Michelman admits: “It’s hard, because the issue of parental notification and consent raises the fear that parents have of losing control over their children’s lives, of having less and less important influence over their children.

“The question is, can government mandate and legislate family relations? No, we know it doesn’t work.”