Limits on Abortion Rights Bill Sap Support Among Women

A growing number of women lawmakers are reconsidering their support for the most far-reaching abortion rights legislation before Congress this session, exposing a widening schism within the ranks of those who call themselves “pro-choice” and further clouding the prospects for the bill.

“It is very serious,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) said Tuesday, adding that the widening disagreement, which has taken on racial overtones, marks “the first time that I have witnessed this kind of division in the women’s movement around this issue.”

Supporters of the bill, which is known as the Freedom of Choice Act, say they seek to write into law the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision establishing abortion as a constitutional right. That, in essence, would take the issue out of the hands of the courts, where the interpretation of Roe vs. Wade has been narrowed in recent years.

After last fall’s election swept an abortion rights supporter into the White House and scores of them into Congress, many had believed that passage of the bill was virtually assured. Instead, the legislation is running into new difficulties because its supporters cannot agree over how sweeping it should be.

The outlook for the bill is particularly questionable in the House. Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), chairman of the Judiciary Committee subcommittee that wrote the bill, said supporters are counting their votes every two or three days, and have yet to come up with a majority.

The dispute among abortion rights advocates centers on provisions in the bill that give states the option of deciding whether to pay for poor women’s abortions and whether to require parental involvement before a minor can get an abortion.

Critics say that those provisions put abortion out of reach of many poor women and teen-agers.

For many women lawmakers, the decision about whether to support the bill involves some political risk: They can oppose it, gambling that they can persuade their colleagues to pass a new bill that includes some federal funding for abortion, or they can hold their political fire and vote for it without the funding, hoping President Clinton’s health reform package will include abortion as a basic benefit for all Americans.

The possibility of getting federal abortion funding in this bill appears unlikely.

To oppose the bill because it does not go far enough is “basically saying you don’t want a Freedom of Choice Act at all, because there’s no way the bill passes without those changes,” said one aide to the House Democratic leadership.

The feminist coalition in Congress showed its first serious sign of splintering last week, when Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.) issued a statement withdrawing her sponsorship of the bill, citing a concern “that the bill allows the states to discriminate against young and poor women seeking an abortion.”

“I cannot support a bill that trades off the rights of some women for the promise of rights for others,” added Moseley-Braun, who is the first black woman ever elected to the Senate.

Moseley-Braun’s action came a week after the House defeated the effort to overturn the 16-year-old ban on Medicaid funding for abortion. The debate over the issue was remarkably raw and emotional, with some black women in the House accusing their colleagues of racism.

However, the tensions within the abortion rights movement in Congress have been building for months. Behind the scenes, minority members have accused some abortion rights organizations of being willing to abandon the interests of poor women in the hope of securing access to abortion for the middle class and the wealthy.

A few days after the House vote, the National Organization for Women officially came out against the bill. “We are actively lobbying folks who are (supporting the bill) to come off,” said Ginny Montes, the group’s national secretary.