Deukmejian Lets Family Planning Bill Become Law

Bowing to pressure from fellow Republicans, Gov. George Deukmejian on Wednesday allowed a $20-million family planning bill to become law without his signature, thus avoiding a veto override attempt and dousing a smoldering political issue.

The bill, passed overwhelmingly by both the Senate and Assembly despite Deukmejian’s veto threats, restores $20 million of the $24 million the governor cut last July from the Legislature’s proposed $36-million funding package for private, nonprofit family planning clinics.

Before the cuts, the 500 clinics annually served 470,000 people--most of them poor women--providing such services as birth control advice and prescriptions, Pap smears to detect cervical cancer, breast exams, screening for sexually transmitted diseases and testing for the AIDS virus.

During the six-month budget battle, more than 40 clinics closed across the state because of fund shortages. Seventeen of these were in Los Angeles County alone. Services were reduced at other facilities and fees were raised. It was not clear Wednesday when services could be restored.

“It’s tough to rationalize going to war over this issue,” said Senate Republican Leader Ken Maddy of Fresno upon hearing of the governor’s action. He echoed the sentiments of most GOP legislators.

“Yahoo!” exclaimed Norma K. Clevenger, a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood. “Can you believe it? The governor is finally paying attention to the support for family planning programs from the public, from the Legislature and from the Republican Party.”

Deukmejian seemed to go through a long, complex maze of conflicting thought processes before arriving at his decision on Wednesday, the final day he could sign or veto the measure without it becoming law absent his signature.

Early last year, the governor worried about the clinics promoting abortion. More important from his view, he felt that the state could not afford the programs. Later he twice indicated a willingness to compromise. But recently he was irked by a court challenge to his authority to cut the funds. And he decided he did not care much for the programs anyway.

In the end, Deukmejian looked into a political abyss and flinched, though somewhat defiantly. Republicans--including the likely GOP gubernatorial nominee, U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson--had pressured him to restore the money, fearing that they could be tagged with being insensitive to poor women and also become vulnerable to the attacks of abortion-rights activists.

“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,” Deukmejian said in a prepared statement, referring indirectly to compromises on several other major issues he had negotiated with lawmakers last year. That spirit of good will recently has been threatened by the simmering fight over family planning funds.

Fiscal Responsibility

Although Deukmejian backed away from his objections to the family planning programs, he sternly declared that “I am steadfast in my commitment to maintain the fiscal health of state government.” Therefore, the governor said, he expects the Legislature “to act in a fiscally responsible manner” and reduce other programs in the next state budget to make up for the added family planning expenditures. He placed these costs at $44 million--$20 million during the current fiscal year and $24 million in the next.

Deukmejian adamantly defended his action in vetoing the funds in the first place, declaring that those and other cuts “were proven to be essential” to provide a reserve for “unanticipated expenditures, such as the (Bay Area) earthquake.”

The lame-duck governor insisted that he was confident that if he had vetoed the bill, he would have escaped his first veto override. GOP lawmakers would have backed him up, he said. While this seemed to be a correct analysis of the situation, Republicans wanted to avoid a Democrat-led override attempt that would focus more public attention on the volatile issue.

Noting that negotiators had achieved compromises in the bill that “satisfied an overwhelming majority” of Republican lawmakers, Deukmejian said he decided against vetoing the measure “in order to put this issue behind us and to enable us to go forward with the ambitious agenda that I have outlined in my recent State of the State Address.”

Actually, Administration officials privately worked with legislators in developing the bill that passed easily with bipartisan support two weeks ago. The bill lists spending restrictions, including a prohibition against using the state money to advocate abortions. Most of those restrictions, however, already exist in contracts between the state and the clinics.

“We think this is an example of democracy in action,” said Marie Paris, public affairs director for Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles. “It made a difference that busloads of family planning supporters came up from Los Angeles last week to meet with their legislators in the state Capitol. And this is just the beginning--not the end. We have discovered the power of the ballot box.”

Nobody was more relieved with Deukmejian’s action then Sen. Wilson, who describes himself as “pro-choice” on abortion and did not relish the prospect of defending the governor’s action this year while campaigning for his job. “We recognize that Gov. Deukmejian is a man of conviction, but we also recognize that some resolution of this matter was needed,” said a Wilson adviser, who asked not to be identified. “We think the conclusion he reached was a good one.”

Deukmejian made no mention in his statement of the lawsuit, now pending in the state Supreme Court, that challenges a governor’s right to use his “blue pencil” to veto money for family planning. The governor previously had fretted that to restore the money now would make it seem as if he were surrendering to the plaintiffs and set a bad precedent.

A Deukmejian adviser, speaking anonymously, said Wednesday that the governor now expects the plaintiffs to drop the suit. “But if they want to pursue the case, we’ll pursue it; we’re very confident,” he said.

The governor figured right. Joel Diringer of California Rural Legal Assistance, one of two public interest law firms that brought the suit, said the case will be dropped. “We’ve had two settlement offers on the table, saying that if funds were restored we’d be willing to terminate the litigation. We’re ready to do that now,” he said.

The bill’s author, Assembly Health Committee Chairman Bruce Bronzan (D-Fresno), praised Deukmejian for not choosing “some very bad options,” including paring down the $20 million to a lower figure. Bronzan said, however, that “it will be difficult” to find the cuts the governor is demanding in next year’s budget to pay for the increased family planning expenditures.

Times staff writers Jerry Gillam and Carl Ingram contributed to this story.