GOP Group Backs Abortion Rights

Republican women who advocate abortion rights, borrowing a successful Democratic technique, are organizing a nationwide fund-raising network for GOP women candidates of like minds.

The group, which plans to meet in Washington tonight with Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) and six Republican congresswomen, has raised more than $100,000 in six weeks, said founder Glenda Greenwald, publisher of a woman’s magazine based in Michigan.

Noting that the 435-member House of Representatives has only 24 women members and the 100-member Senate only two, Greenwald said: “The numbers are appalling. American women are underrepresented in a very big way.”

Named Wish List--for Women in the Senate and House--the group also will consider channeling money to women abortion rights advocates who are candidates for governors and mayors in “strategic” races, Greenwald said. She identified one such race as this year’s San Diego mayoral election.

Greenwald said, “Our main thrust is women in office; our second thrust is Republican women in office, and our third is the criteria for pro-choice.

“We would not support someone who is pro-life.”

Pro-choice and pro-life are terms used, respectively, by advocates and opponents of abortion rights.

The fund-raising organization is patterned after a Democratic abortion rights donor network founded in 1985 and called Emily’s List, an acronym for Early Money Is Like Yeast--”it makes the dough rise.”

In 1990 alone, Emily’s List raised $1.5 million for 14 women candidates, and Greenwald credits it with helping to increase the number of Democratic House members in four years from 12 to 20, while Republicans dropped from 12 to nine. Victoria Toensing, a Wish List member, contended that a GOP fund-raising effort for women candidates who advocate abortion rights should not be seen as a rebellion against President Bush, who opposes abortion, or against the Republican Party, which has a platform plank against abortion.

The GOP “is a big tent, and this is a very positive movement,” said Toensing, a former deputy assistant attorney general and chief counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee who is now in private practice in Washington for a Los Angeles law firm.

Both parties have members who oppose and members who favor abortion rights, “and the electorate ought to realize that,” Toensing said.

Forecasting that the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision on abortion rights “is not going to be good constitutional law much longer,” Toensing said the issue of choice is headed for Congress. “The Legislature is where the action is, and we’re here to get Republican women who are pro-choice elected to Congress,” she said.

Wish List members agree to give $100 as an annual membership contribution and to contribute $100 in each election cycle to at least two candidates they select from those recommended by the organization.