Why Duke Was Right to Duck

Gov. George Deukmejian is to be congratulated for putting aside his pride and personal irritation in settling the dispute over crucial family-planning funds. The governor did not sign the bill passed by the Legislature to restore $20 million to family planning programs, but he didn’t veto it, either. That means state funding is again available for birth-control counseling, pregnancy testing and cancer, AIDS and venereal-disease screenings for half a million poor and uninsured women.

The family-planning fight had degenerated into a sometimes ugly battle between anti-abortion and pro-choice advocates and between alternately nervous and self-righteous politicians. But the governor managed to rise above it. In his message to the Legislature, he wrote: “I am willing to yield to the majority of the Legislature on this bill to relieve them of a potentially prolonged and difficult process and to continue to maintain the spirit of cooperation between the Legislature and the governor . . . .”

The family-planning fight has also been a prolonged educational process for many. Pro-choice advocates underestimated the discomfort the governor and some conservative legislators felt about some family-planning agencies and the possibility that the state was paying for “abortion counseling.” By the same token, some anti-abortion advocates did not seem to understand that family-planning counseling, by law, must inform a woman of all her options, but that state-funded family-planning clinics never were in the business of abortion.

In the end it may not have been the sensible arguments for family-planning services that settled this controversy but the political realities. After the bills to restore family-planning funding received overwhelming support in both houses, it was not clear that a gubernatorial veto could be sustained. Many Republicans were nervously eyeing pro-choice public opinion polls and taking phone calls from supporters who saw the politically ill-advised stand against family planning as an anathema to those who want alternatives to abortion. U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson, a moderate Republican who hopes to succeed Deukmejian as governor next year, was also not shy about applying political pressure.

Still, in the end, the call was the governor’s, and he could have stubbornly put his shoulder to the door and tried to keep it shut against the oncoming crowd. Instead, when he saw the crowd coming, he opened the door. And that was the wise thing to do.