No More Denial : Voice of Right to Life League Acknowledges Abortion at 21

Susan Carpenter McMillan was behind enemy lines and her battle was lost. She was hissed and booed for describing abortion as America’s holocaust. One man marched out. A professor’s appeal for deference did little but reduce the Valley College audience to polite fidgeting.

Later, McMillan discussed the cost of being spokeswoman for a view that one 1989 survey showed is held by less than 15% of America women: that abortion should not be a legal choice, not even for victims of rape or incest.

“I’m loved by no one and hated by everyone,” said McMillan, media representative for the Right to Life League of Southern California. “I’m not conservative enough for the right wing. God knows, I’m not liberal enough for the left wing. I’m married to a Catholic and I’m a Protestant. I’m a feminist who is pro-life.

“So I manage to piss off everyone.”

And as a rich, crisp, stylish, sometimes sarcastic and always emotional voice for one side of a volatile, even violent, international issue, Susan Carpenter McMillan also has managed to attract more suggestions of scandal than a Presidential candidate.

A persistent rumor has been that McMillan--who has spent a decade preaching that abortion must be considered illegal, immoral and infanticide--actually had an abortion as a young woman. She has never responded to the gossip.

But last week, in a series of interviews with The Times, McMillan acknowledged that she had an abortion in 1970 while an unmarried drama student at USC.

It was an experience, she said, that she tried handling by “complete denial” for 13 years. “I faced it seven years ago when I was talking in my office with another woman who had an abortion. She was crying and talking about it and it just kind of flew out of my mouth . . . and I said, I mean I can’t remember what I said . . . but I suddenly was saying something I hadn’t said in 13 years.”

Despite that 1983 confession, McMillan said her abortion remained a 20-year secret kept from her family, friends and league workers. Because, she explained, it was a private moment decades ago, which she presumed was buried too deep for detection.

In addition: “It was my own private life and I don’t consider myself a public figure. You can go through 13 years of absolute denial to the point where you don’t even remember the fact, hardly, that you ever had an abortion. Oh, you know you’ve had it. But you don’t know anything else.

But the minute some journalist looks at you and says: ‘Have you had an abortion?’ . . . you have to say: ‘Yes.’

“And then somebody asks you what do you feel like and what does that do to you . . . and you have to relive it . . . and you, emotionally, abort all over again.”

McMillan also said that in 1983, three years into her work as an anti-abortion activist, she underwent a “therapeutic abortion” for a failing pregnancy at Glendale Memorial Hospital. This was after her marriage to San Marino lawyer William N. McMillan III and the birth of their eldest daughter, now 11, but before the birth of their youngest child, 5.

“I didn’t even know that that (a therapeutic abortion) was happening to me,” she recalled. “I was bleeding with sacs of blood and everything else . . . the doctor said I was losing the baby, the baby was deteriorating, and they had to go in and have a D and C (dilatation and curettage).”

Six months later, McMillan said, she had problems with another pregnancy. This time, she saw any termination as a possible conflict with her beliefs.

“I remember talking to some of my friends in the movement afterwards (after the earlier therapeutic abortion), thinking that (it) wasn’t really the right thing for me to do,” she continued. “So the next time--I was about four, four-and-a-half months pregnant--when they said they were going to take me in for a D and C. I said: ‘No you’re not. I’ll lay here in labor. It is my body.’

“And I lay there over 20 hours. She (the baby) was dead . . . very, very deformed.”

McMillan, 42, has carried the message of the Right to Life League and her California chapter of Feminists for Life from full debates on national talk shows to 75-word sound bites on Los Angeles radio stations.

She does 250 media interviews a year. Her name is filed under “A” for Abortion and “W” for Women and “D” for Death Penalty in most reporters’ Rolodexes.

For intelligent reaction to the threatened potato boycott before Friday’s veto of Idaho’s tough new abortion legislation: Call Susan Carpenter McMillan.

For a knowledgeable comment on the stayed San Quentin execution of murderer Robert Harris: Interview Carpenter McMillan.

For an articulate talk show guest with an interesting stand on the U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of a right-to-die petition: See if McMillan is available.

But will she resign from this public work knowing that her abortion history may be seen as a contradiction of her anti-abortion statements?

“Never,” McMillan said. “This (abortion) happened 20 years ago. I will never resign. Never. This movement is my life and I think what you are looking at is a prime example of what abortion does to women.”

And what is that?

“I think that women that deal with it and confront it . . . realize that they will never be the same. They are never completely whole again. You can’t hire a hit man to go into your body and crush the skull of your child and . . . have it ripped from your body and mangled . . . and expect to be just normal again.”

Presumably that was not what she told herself 20 years ago?

“I suppose you tell yourself that it (an aborted fetus) is tissue and that you were right. But the reality is that every woman knows that is a lie. That it is your baby you are asking to have killed. Every woman who ever enters an abortion clinic knows she is taking the life of a human being.”

McMillan declined to discuss the relationship that led to her 1970 pregnancy except to say it was a long-term romance. Nor would she discuss her reason for choosing abortion over adoption or marriage to the father of the unborn child.

But in an earlier interview, McMillan said that in her youth she carried no religious or emotional opposition to abortion “because I believed strongly in the woman’s movement.”

Will McMillan’s disclosure of once choosing abortion, now make a lie of her 10 years spent commenting against it?

“No. No. No.”

Will her past negate anti-abortion advice she now delivers to today’s young people?

“No,” McMillan snapped and she was crying. She said this had been the worst day of her life. A member of Pasadena’s Lake Avenue Congregational Church, she had spent most of it discussing her abortion admission with her minister and a counselor.

Then what might be her advice to young people?

“That I have been there . . . I have walked down that (abortion) path. You can look at me and I am a walking example of pro-choice. This is what it does to you.”

McMillan--Susie to just about anyone who has known her for more than an hour--has no intention of letting her revelations interfere with her work.

The morning after revealing her past she was on a flight to Lincoln to make a presentation in the Nebraska state Capitol. Then she was issuing a press release urging anti-abortion supporters to boycott a boycott--by buying Idaho potatoes for delivery to the homeless.

But within herself she goes “into hibernation, a slump when these things come up.” In the past, McMillan said, it was whispered that she had bilked the league by using its funds to pay for first-class air travel to Oslo and a series of speaking engagements last year. Those expenses, she explained, were actually paid by her and the Norwegian sponsors of her visit.

Then, she said, “I’ve heard that I’ve given a child up for adoption . . . and I’ve heard people say: ‘Oh, she’s probably having an affair with the senator’ because I’d be up meeting with someone in Sacramento.”

After the cocktail party gossip concerning her alleged misuse of league money, “I cried for three days. I broke out in red blotches. At these times in my life I think: ‘Hells bells, why am I in this?’ There are times, sitting here with you, knowing that these things are going to come out, that you do want to get out of it.

“But I’ll go back (home) and look at my newspaper. . . .”

It is an old newspaper, a 1983 periodical published by the Pro-Life Medical Assn. It shows a fetus in pieces. The caption reads: “Baby Boy, unnamed, Coroner’s case 82 -1901-1, weight after abortion, 900 grams. Age 27-29 weeks. Cause of death: Dismemberment by Dr. . . . now doing business in Arizona.”

“I’ll look at that and pull myself up and go on,” McMillan said. “But inside this very tough woman is a very sensitive woman and it (accusation) hurts.”

Toughness. It’s a quality that even McMillan’s critics applaud.

Determination rooted in dedication to the issue. It’s a strength that attorney and abortion-rights advocate Gloria Allred finds in the woman she considers “an interesting adversary.

“I enjoy debating Susan,” Allred said. “She is one of the best, one of the more formidable advocates they (anti-abortion groups) have. She is very bright, clever and articulate and politically very astute.

“Of course, I completely disagree with her position and especially that you can be a feminist and anti-choice, a complete contradiction in terms.”

McMillan is a rich woman. She and her husband live in a multimillion-dollar, 6,600-square-foot home on one acre of San Marino. It is built on what used to be the Winchell (as in doughnuts) Estate. That’s across from the Pillsbury (as in Doughboy) Estate.

McMillan drives to inner-city anti-abortion meetings in her Mercedes 380SL. She wears a gold Rolex and a diamond ring that is “one carat for every year I helped put my husband through law school.”

But McMillan says she makes no apologies for her husband’s success, will not wear jeans to her public presentations and although “the last thing I’m there (in the inner city) to do is offend . . . I am not going to have a wardrobe for the poor.”

That, in the opinion of KTLA Channel 5 reporter Marta Waller, reveals McMillan as somewhat unsophisticated and a little naive. “Even I don’t wear red and blue in Compton,” said Waller, referring to gang colors.

“So there is an aberration,” continued the reporter who has frequently interviewed McMillan. “But the trappings of society . . . it’s tough to put them aside. I understand grinding poverty. I don’t know if she can relate to it.

“But Susie definitely is someone I would go and have lunch with. She’s honest, a straight shooter. She has taken a stand on an important topic and has not backed down and I have a lot of respect for her courage.”

Where that resolve cames from is not something that McMillan easily pins down.

Her belief in the guidance of God may have come from the Church of the Foursquare Gospel where she worshipped as a child--and from a mother who was ordained by the controversial founder of that church, revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson.

Her father, the late Charles Carpenter, a California land developer, could have sparked her concern for community issues. Carpenter often visited Skid Row with money and food for the homeless. He would take his daughter with him.

“I used to go down to the Union Rescue Mission with him and watch him hold the hands of people who would vomit on him,” she remembered. “He brought troubled people into our home. He’d pray with them and I had tremendous admiration for him.”

From marriage and discussions with her lawyer husband, says McMillan, came an opposition to capital punishment and, in fact, any taking of human life. Except in defense of one’s own life.

Maybe the abortion at 21 shaped her future. Subconsciously, she says. The conscious catalyst, she believes, arose in 1977 with a $16 examination at a Los Angeles clinic.

McMillan, five years married, was told she was pregnant.

“I didn’t want children, ever,” she remembered. “When we got married, I told Bill: ‘No children.’

“It was a crisis. We had no money. None. Except for my (department store) paycheck. My husband wasn’t working. I’d bought this home thinking he was going to pass the bar right away, but he didn’t pass the bar the first time.

“I had no emotional attachment to the unborn. But suddenly, in my tissue . . . I couldn’t believe I was pregnant. And I just went to pieces. I walked downstairs to book my abortion but I was crying so hard by the time I got there I couldn’t book it.”

The vehemence of her reactions surprised McMillan. So she explored her responses. She looked through a first semester biology book. There were pictures of fetal development. “I saw a human life looking back at me . . . I saw my baby.”

A daughter was born. So was an activist.

She and the league objected in 1986 when Loma Linda University Medical Center--citing an unstable relationship between parents--refused to consider a desperately ill infant as a potential heart transplant recipient. McMillan prevailed and Baby Jesse, now almost 4, became a household name.

She and the league intervened in 1988 when a state agency denied funds for a liver transplant for a 5-year-old boy, a Mexican national. McMillan won again and the boy survives.

She states her opinions plainly:

* On capital punishment: “Lock the sucker up and don’t ever let him out but don’t kill him. They (convicted murderers) are animals. But kill them and you become the animal they are.”

* On abortion for victims of rape or incest: “We can’t make exceptions for any of those. It is still (taking) a human life and if you make one exception then you make all exceptions.”

* On abortion to save the life of the mother: “I’m saying that (a mother) has a right to defend her life. . . . Then the woman has the right to say: ‘I’m going to take the life of this little aggressor even though it is an innocent aggressor.’ ”

* On abortion of a deformed fetus: “(No.) Suddenly, I guess God took the day off and you decided who shall live and who shall die.”

* On the right of people on life-support systems to die: “You do all that you can to save life and to comfort life and to make it easy. And when the plug needs to be pulled, you pull the plug. But you do not starve people to death who are not dying.”

* On abortion in extreme cases of poverty or other family hardship: “What would you say to a mother who had tuberculosis and a father who had syphilis and the first child was blind? The second child had tuberculosis and the third child was mentally retarded? And now she’s pregnant again. What would you do? Everybody says: ‘I’d abort.’ Well, you just aborted Beethoven.”

* On the abortion pill: “It’s a human pesticide.”

Critical remarks rise regularly against such statements and the woman who makes them. Said Beverly Hills lawyer Edward Tabash, of the California Abortion Rights Action League: “I see her as a traitor to her gender because of what will happen to the women in this country if her work results in any change to this issue.”

Commented Allred: “She has an elitist, upper-middle-class, unrealistic view of the world. She has memorized the hot buttons and the buzzwords.” Other detractors suggest that McMillan is more enamored of the limelight than the issue. “They sound like quotes from anti-lifers who think I’m very effective,” McMillan countered. “And I am very effective because I believe in what I’m doing. With an unbelievable passion.

“But if I was doing this for the cameras, I durned well would have chosen an issue that is a lot more popular.”

It almost is certain that with disclosure of her 1970 abortion, Susan Carpenter McMillan faces tougher questions and heftier criticism.

She says she is ready.

She does not want to speculate on what her life might have been had she decided against the abortion. But she says she has thought about that decision “probably every day for the last seven years. . . . I probably would have been able to look at a beautiful 20-year-old child today. And thank God that I had not killed him.

“I know what I’ve gone through this week in my life . . . so I think having a baby would have been a lot easier than facing that I murdered a child. So, I guess . . . I’d give up everything I have today to reverse the decision that I made 20 years ago.”

McMillan recalls the moment clearly.

“I looked at that doctor and I said to him: ‘Is this (fetus) a baby?’ And he laughed in my face and said: ‘Oh, honey, it is just a cluster of cells.’

“Every woman knows better, but you want to believe that you’re not going to be lied to. And the bottom line is, you are lied to. And so I went ahead.”

On Thursday morning, McMillan broke news of her past to key members of her league. The response, she said, was support and understanding, flowers and hugs.

Later that day she flew to Nebraska with a new realization.

“Now there is no vulnerable spot in my life, no weakness in my armor. And, of course, I guess there never has been.

“But for many years I sat and listened to Gloria Allred and people talk about their abortion, and rant and rave and carry on, and I’ve sat there quietly thinking: ‘I could defuse everything you’re saying.’ But I just sat there and never said a word.”

And in Nebraska, McMillan said a few words.

A reporter asked her how could she relate to a young woman considering abortion?

“And I said: ‘Because when I was 21 I went through it.’ And all of a sudden he looked at me and said: ‘Oh, dear, I’m sorry for that question.’ And then he said: ‘But what a powerful tool you have. . . . ‘ “

JAYNE KAMIN-ONCEA / Los Angeles Times