Billing Abortion as Murder Could Annihilate GOP Base

It was billed as a discussion of the differences between the conservative and moderate wings of the Republican Party and whether the twain shall meet. With Democrats as the enemy, shouldn’t all good Republicans be able to set aside their internal bickering?

As panelists discussed school choice and even gun control, a measure of gentility existed.

Then, the panelists turned to abortion.

Indeed, anti-abortion speaker Matthew Spalding wasn’t 10 seconds into his presentation when his opposite number, abortion rights advocate Carol Rowan, vehemently interrupted and said she wouldn’t tolerate him linking abortion to the Holocaust.

Spalding persevered, retreating not an inch from insisting that abortions in America amount to mass murder and that the Republican Party will stand for nothing if it doesn’t oppose them. Rowan, a Jewish mother of four and unsuccessful state Senate candidate from Los Angeles, glared at Spalding and upbraided him for comparing abortion to state-sponsored genocide.

So much for a meeting of the twain on this night.

As I watched these dueling Republicans last week on the Cal State Fullerton campus, I wondered how many similar sessions will occur around the country before the next Republican Party platform debate in 1996.

For many Republicans, addressing the abortion question is critical to the party identity. Is it a party taking the high moral ground and defending the rights of the unborn, or is it a party imposing a debatable values judgment on women and intruding on a right to make private decisions?

Spalding, a member of the Conservative Round Table of Orange County, is an analyst at the Claremont Institute, a public policy think-tank in Montclair. I spoke to him at week’s end, a few days after his Cal State appearance, and he conceded that abortion doesn’t lend itself to compromise.

“The argument is that this is what we stand for. These are our principles, and logically, it seems to me, if--the big if--abortion is wrong, then it’s wrong. There’s not much middle ground.”

As a defining issue, Spalding likens abortion to slavery. Just as the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln deemed that slavery was morally wrong and wouldn’t compromise on that essential belief, neither should it on abortion. “There are a few (political questions) in American history that are so important, you can’t ignore them as an issue,” Spalding said. “My point is that to ignore them is to, in a sense, say, ‘I don’t really care.’ ”

Casting abortion in that light only makes sense, of course, if one considers it murder.

Many Americans, it seems to me, may express personal distaste for abortion but aren’t willing to describe it in those terms. I think that’s because it takes them down a path of logic that is equally unsettling. If abortion is murder, are the doctor and the mother murderers? Are they the equivalent of Nazi prison camp guards? What about the grandmother who drives her granddaughter to the clinic for an abortion? Is she an accessory to murder?

Anita Mangels is co-chair of the Orange County chapter of the California Abortion Rights Action League. She’s also a Republican who bridles at Spalding’s position.

I asked her if she’s uncomfortable talking about abortion in the context of murder. She said she sees abortion as “the most painful and difficult decision a woman can make in her lifetime and I think it has to be made by the woman as an individual.”

Murder in the legal sense, Mangels said, has come to mean the killing of “a living, breathing, autonomous human being. When you’re talking about the concept of murder of a fetus, it’s a lot more complex question to answer.” Society has come to consider a “living person” as existing outside the womb. “That’s the context in which I’m viewing it,” she said.

She disputes the slavery analogy, arguing that Lincoln’s Republican Party supported individual rights. “I think the party of Lincoln would be appalled at the concept that a group of religious ideologues--which is what they are, that’s all it comes down to--would presume to tell other people what to do with their bodies.”

Spalding argued that Republicans support individual rights but not when they infringe on someone else’s--such as an unborn child’s. Mangels said the argument “should be hashed out in the hearts and minds of everyone concerned” but that it does not belong in a political party’s platform.

I’ll make one prediction: Republicans can forget unity if they frame the abortion issue as murder. Conservatives won’t countenance murderers in their midst; moderates won’t countenance being called murderers.

True, the Republican Party of the 1850s sprang from anti-slavery sentiment. It also came to accept slavery where it already existed.

I don’t know the political jargon of the 1850s, but those neophyte Republicans quickly learned what their descendants of the 1990s have forgotten--you don’t win elections by shrinking your base.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.