A Legal Divide : When a Professional Organization, Like the Bar Association, Takes Stand on an Issue Like Abortion, Colleagues Can End Up Confronting Hard Choices--and Each Other

Rosa M. C. Cumare faces a dilemma. She belongs to two groups that endorse the equivalent of murder. At least that’s how she sees things, now that the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. and the American Bar Assn. are on record with a resolution supporting a woman’s right to make her own decisions concerning abortion.

“In my mind, it’s as if you had an organization that supported apartheid or legalizing the killing of minorities,” said Cumare, a Catholic and a lawyer with the Los Angeles firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson. “If they had a resolution that was anti-Semitic, they wouldn’t suggest that Jewish members remain within the organization. This resolution almost strikes me as being anti-Catholic and anti-Mormon. There are a lot of Catholics and Mormons who can’t support it, and can’t be members of the bar if it does.”

The county bar is more than just a professional group to Cumare. Having begun to practice law only five years ago, after 10 years as an English teacher, she turned to the local bar for business contacts, professional advice, inspiration and camaraderie.

“This is the organization to which you really should belong if you are going to be a successful lawyer,” she said. “It’s important to me.”

But unless something changes soon, she said, she will feel compelled to resign.

Lawyers are, by reputation, a cerebral breed. Educated in the fine art of the disputatious flip-flop, they are able, supposedly, to argue either side of an issue with dispassionate aplomb and reach agreements based on pragmatism.

But in the legal world or the real world, the issue of abortion tends to render conventions moot.

The conflict began Jan. 24, when the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. Board of Trustees voted 14-4 to support a proposed American Bar Assn. resolution endorsing what some members interpret as a womans’ constitutional right to make their own choices on abortion.

In February, the ABA approved the resolution at its midyear meeting in Los Angeles, and the issue that has embroiled the country in emotional civil war began rocking the legal community as well.

As a result of those votes, 35 members of the 25,000-member local bar resigned, joining 1,100 lawyers who quit the 360,000-member ABA.

Now the countdown has begun for others, who say that unless a drive to push the bar back to a position of “neutrality” on the abortion issue succeeds at the ABA’s annual meeting in Chicago on Aug. 6, they, too, will walk away from the nation’s leading lawyers’ association. There is talk of forming an alternative group more compatible with their beliefs.

For many bar members who support the “reproductive rights” resolution, the anti-abortion position pushes the debate to an impasse. What do religious beliefs have to do with the law, they wonder?

“This is a legal issue and we’re taking a legal position,” said Carolyn J. Kozuch, chairwoman of the Women Lawyers Assn. of Los Angeles’ Pro Choice Committee.

If it were only a legal issue, though, there might be more room to compromise.

But Kozuch and others say that they also have a personal stake in the resolution. “I don’t want other people to make decisions about what happens inside of my body. To me, this is a privacy issue, and the way I see it the Constitution protects that privacy.”

The resolution states: “Be it resolved that the American Bar Assn. recognizes the fundamental rights of privacy and equality guaranteed by the United States Constitution, and opposes legislation or other governmental action that interferes with the confidential relationship between a pregnant woman and her physician, or with the decision to terminate the pregnancy at any time before the fetus is capable of independent life, as determined by her physician, or thereafter when termination of the pregnancy is necessary to protect the woman’s life or health.”

Of course, the rest of the country is capable of fighting endlessly on its own over abortion. So why should anyone other than bar members and story editors at “L.A. Law,” care about this internecine legal squabbling?

Nancy Iredale, a tax lawyer in Los Angeles, explained: “The ABA traditionally has enormous clout within the profession and therefore within state legislatures and with the Supreme Court.”

Iredale and other abortion opponents have no doubt that the bar will assert itself in the national debate unless prevented from doing so.

For Iredale, it is simply unthinkable to pay dues to a group that supports abortion. She turned in her resignation to the county bar this week, and says she will resign from the national bar if it does not reverse its course.

“This is an expensive voluntary organization, and I am not going to have my dues used to subsidize the abortion-rights side of this issue.”

Unlike belonging to the California State Bar, belonging to the local bar and the national bar is voluntary, with dues for the ABA costing a maximum of $250 a year. But some lawyers argue that the benefits of belonging, such as access to group insurance, make membership in the group almost crucial.

Other professional organizations have taken stands on controversial issues, including abortion. The California Medical Assn., for instance, has had a policy at least since 1983 stating that abortion is a private medical matter between a woman and her physician. In the last few years, “two or three” physicians have resigned over the issue, a spokesman said. “There is not a giant groundswell of disagreement.”

There is no simple checklist for how professionals should act when their consciences clash with the espoused values of their profession, explained Edwin M. Epstein, a nonpracticing lawyer who teaches courses on business ethics and corporate social policy at UC Berkeley.

“There is no sort of machine tool template you can put over a situation and have it answered easily,” Epstein said. Some ethicists might advise a Kantian evaluation of a dilemma, which would demand that people sever ties with an organization whose values conflict with theirs. Others would suggest a more pragmatic approach, which weighs the relative values and benefits of the decision.

But with abortion, neither side of the debate seems remotely able to understand the other’s perspective, so ethicists probably don’t offer much help anyway, he added.

Within the bar, many supporters of the abortion resolution have urged their anti-abortion colleagues to do the lawyerly thing, and fight for change from within the organizations.

Many opponents of the resolution have done just that.

In April, for instance, they forced a rare, full membership vote of the Los Angeles County Bar on the issue. They lost. Opponents also ran an alternative slate of candidates. They lost.

Supporters of the abortion resolution now urge their colleagues to be good sports.

But it’s not that easy, opponents say.

At least a few accuse their fellow bar members of insensitivity, at best, and persecution, at worst, for failing to see that abortion is, for some, a matter of uncompromising religious and moral conviction.

Richard M. Coleman, joined the county bar in the 1960s. He served a term as president. But the abortion issue prompted him to resign from that group and the ABA.

“Someone said to me ‘You’re taking your bat and ball and going home’ ” he said. But, “when it’s a matter of taking a human life, I have an obligation to take the bat away. Some of us believe that abortion is the killing of innocent human life. How can anyone expect us to lend our name and money to the taking of a life?”

Coleman is incensed that the abortion debate within the bar has not addressed what are central issues to those who oppose abortion, such as “Why is a 24-week-old fetus legally protected, except in the case of abortion?” and “Why should an entity with separate brain waves and blood circulation be considered a part of the mother?”

He and others are outraged by what they contend is an effort by abortion-rights groups to use bar associations to do their bidding.

Estelle Rogers, chairwoman of the Rights of Women Committee of the ABA’s section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, said she understands the deep convictions of those who oppose the “reproductive rights” resolution--which she helped draft. “I regret deeply that it causes them such pain.”

But she denied that the resolution was shaped by outside groups and joins others in arguing that there is no such thing as “neutrality” on this issue.

The bar’s current position allows members to make a decision on abortion “in their own conscience and within their own religious beliefs. Whereas the position they would like us to adopt, on the contrary, imposes a set of religious beliefs on all segments of society . . .

“What we would all like is for there to be government neutrality on this issue,” she said. “Since there isn’t, the nation’s lawyers are obligated to take the position that there are some private matters in American life which are sacrosanct and must be protected from the whims of the politicians.”

Scott Alumbaugh, a business litigation lawyer and author of an essay on the resolution in the current issue of Los Angeles Lawyer--a rebuttal, of sorts to an essay by Cumare--agreed that neutrality is impossible in the abortion debate. For the bar to refuse to take a stand would be a tacit endorsement of a legal system that has been and largely remains unfairly dominated by the perspective of white males, he asserted.

Men, Alumbaugh argued, have created a status quo that ignores womens’ perspectives of the world. The abortion debate is a case in point: “That the law posits the fetus and individual as separate entities with conflicting rights--that’s a nonwomen’s point of view, a fiction.”

The “reproductive freedom” resolution that he supports, is part of an necessary inching towards a legal system that embraces women and other under-represented groups, Alumbaugh said. There are lawyers, however, who believe that women should have the right to make their own decisions on abortion, yet think the bar should remain neutral in the debate.

“It’s both sad and amusing that people are wasting all this time over (a debate) that never should have occurred,” said William Kurlander, a partner in the firm of Barger and Wolen. Although Kurlander describes himself as “pro choice,” he ran for the county bar’s board of trustees on the losing alternative slate, which was designed to force the bar “out of politics.”

“I think it’s clear that I’m speaking for the majority of bar members when I say I’m ‘pro-choice,’ ” he said. “But I think the bar has enough to do without worrying about issues which are about as unrelated to the practice of law as you can get.”

Moreover, Kurlander and others dispute the basic premise of the contested resolution. In its Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services decision, the Supreme Court effectively rejected the notion that there is a constitutional right to abortion, Kurlander contended. “There is no present right under the federal Constitution to have an abortion. If I were rewriting the Constitution, I might put one in there, but as the law stands, it’s up to individual states.”

That analysis is not shared by everyone, Kurlander conceded. But, he added, “from a practical standpoint, I think it’s wise for the bar association to stay away from issues such as abortion. Also, there are such a large number of members who have deep moral convictions, I think its unfair for the majority to speak for everyone.”

Meanwhile, the ongoing battle is, he said, “a perfect example of needless dissipation of energies and resources. Hell, I dissipated my resources for two months . . . A year from now it won’t matter anyhow.”

Even now, though, forces on either side of the issue are mustering support, lobbying, writing letters and filing charges about where opponents get their money and motivation.

The neutrality forces argue that abortion rights groups are pushing the resolution; those who hope to defeat the resolution say anti-abortion groups are eager for the bar to endorse their viewpoint, but since that’s impossible, they’ve decided to push for neutrality.

And for its part, the bar plans to remain neutral in the upcoming debate over neutrality.

“There is absolutely no partiality of any sort being shown by officers, directors or staff in this organization,” said Richard Collins, director of policy and presidential communications of the ABA. “There will be a level playing field.”

Collins expects the debate to dominate the ABA’s national meeting. But like others in the bar--like many people looking at the abortion wars in the country as a whole--he remains unclear as to just how deep the schism really cuts.

“I am frankly confused. I cannot read this issue,” he said. “There are those on both sides who feel deeply--feel very, very deeply. But as to the numbers on each side who feel that way, I can’t begin to estimate. It’s very peculiar.”