Gloria Feldt

It is an issue as divisive and polarizing as the Vietnam War, reaching deep down into families and setting one against another. Most of the wounds of Vietnam have healed over the course of a quarter-century. Yet, in the same space of time, since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the battle over reproductive rights has raged on, too often accompanied by violence. Neither side of this debate can claim any lasting victory, and supporters of abortion rights and their opponents seem farther apart than ever. Each remains bent on continuing what has become a long battle of attrition.

Over the last two decades, the forces calling themselves “pro-life” have picketed clinics offering abortions, demonstrated outside the homes of doctors who perform such procedures and organized voters to turn out against elected officials who declare themselves to be “pro-choice.” Extremists have even tried to defend the murder of abortion providers as justifiable homicide. Meanwhile, abortion-rights supporters have worked stridently to defend existing laws against challenge, ensure access to abortion and mobilize their own constituency.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America is at the forefront of defending what it sees as an assault on the reproductive freedom of the nation’s citizens. Founded in 1942 by Margaret Sanger, who opened the first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, Planned Parenthood runs 850 clinics nationwide, providing families with counseling, contraception and, at 148 facilities, surgical abortions. It actively litigates and lobbies legislatures to make such services available not only to its clients, but to families throughout American society, focusing most intently on the young, poor and geographically isolated.

The leader of Planned Parenthood is a woman who knows much about unplanned pregnancies. A native of West Texas, Gloria Feldt married and bore her first child at 16 and had two more before she was 20. While she has no regrets, she says her experience allows her to more fully understand the needs of young women who come to Planned Parenthood clinics, often with little understanding of either reproduction or contraception.

Feldt came up from the ranks, having run the Odessa, Texas, affiliate, and later the Planned Parenthood operation in Phoenix. Since 1996 she has been president of the national organization, and her driving goal has been to turn Planned Parenthood away from a defensive posture and toward an active agenda. Among her many goals: to convince the popular media to deal more frankly with issues of contraception. To that end, she visited Los Angeles last week to meet with TV and film writers and producers.

Feldt, 56, is now remarried and the grandmother of nine children. She divides her time between her office in New York and her husband in Phoenix, while also traveling to affiliates and promoting the Planned Parenthood cause on Capitol Hill.

Question: I read that you first became aware of Planned Parenthood from a Catholic priest. Is that true?

Answer: Yes. I was working in a Head Start program housed in a parish hall. A co-worker there introduced me to a priest, and they were both on the board of Planned Parenthood. At the time, I wasn’t really aware of the Catholic Church’s official position on birth control. But the perspective of that parish priest, who worked with the problems of people who were desperately struggling to get themselves out of poverty, was, “I can’t tell these people they have to have a baby every year.” Nowadays the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has gotten considerably less forgiving, and I don’t know if that priest would be able to be in the priesthood today. Still, I think that pastoral priests all over the world who really have compassion are, if not openly supportive, certainly forgiving.

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Q: Most people understand Planned Parenthood as an organization that operates clinics. But it’s also a very active and sophisticated political organization. So much so that you spend a good deal of your time in Washington, don’t you?

A: Actually, from the very beginning, Planned Parenthood has had two essential parts to its mission. One is to provide services such as health care and education. The other is to be an advocate for people’s right to have access to those services. I think these two mandates make us unique, and I know they make us especially credible. That’s because we not only agitate in the public-policy realm, we touch people’s lives in tangible ways.

In 1916, when Margaret Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic, she did it to provide those services to poor women. But opening the clinic itself was a political statement, because she was violating the law. She knew she would be arrested, and, in fact, she was. Eventually, she changed public opinion on the issue, and laws banning birth control were overturned.

Today, we find ourselves in a place where many of the victories we’ve had are being turned back by courts and legislatures. And that, I think, creates a need to go back to the grass roots and make sure that pro-choice supporters engage in the political process.

We’re doing something now that I think is as profound as Margaret Sanger’s opening of the first birth-control clinic. We are setting an ambitious agenda, and perhaps the No. 1 item is getting health-care-insurance equity for women. Women spend 68% more than men on out-of-pocket health-care expenses. The biggest reason for that is that their basic family planning exams and their contraceptives are frequently not covered by insurance. And yet, that is the health care that most women need, most of their lives, more than anything else.

We had drafted legislation a year ago, and nobody paid any attention, and then Viagra hit the scene. Insurance companies, for the most part, decided they would cover that, while the birth-control pill was almost 40 years old, and most plans didn’t cover it. Well, this gave us a wonderful opportunity to point out this inequity, and although we’ve yet to get our legislation passed, we have gotten insurers of federal workers to cover contraception if they cover other prescription drugs.

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Q: Your organization is a lightning rod for controversy because some of your clinics perform abortions. But didn’t Margaret Sanger consider abortion to be the least attractive option when it comes to reproductive health care?

A: We would always prefer prevention, and 98% of all visits to our clinics are for preventive, contraceptive care. In order for us to pursue our mission with integrity, we have to defend the reproductive rights of all women, not just the women who don’t happen to be faced with an unintended pregnancy today. Reproductive rights truly are indivisible. Everyone has them, or no one has them. And everyone must have the full range of reproductive rights, or you don’t really have them at all.

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Q: The FDA recently approved a medication that can prevent pregnancy if taken shortly after unprotected intercourse. You’re promoting this. Do you see it as a way to reduce the number of surgical abortions?

A: Yes. It has enormous potential to reduce unintended pregnancies and abortions. It could cut them in half, which would be truly revolutionary. We have been the country’s largest provider of emergency contraception, and now that there is an approved product we have embarked on an unprecedented program to make women aware of it and make it easier for them to get. We believe that every woman of reproductive age should have a package of emergency contraception in her purse or her medicine cabinet at all times. So we are prescribing it in advance, not as a substitute for birth control, but for emergencies, such as when contraceptive devices fail.

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Q: Opponents of abortion are well organized, particularly at the grass-roots level, and their strategy seems to be not only to attack you directly, but also to chip away at your flanks. How do you go about countering these well-coordinated efforts?

A: Since they have been unable to outlaw abortion outright, our opponents have tried to reduce access to abortion, bit by bit and person by person. They start with the most vulnerable: the young and the poor. These are also the people who have the least amount of political power. So we have to be there to speak for them.

Let me say that as a service-providing organization, we understand one simple fact: Women who have abortions are the same women who have babies. They are the same women who come to us for birth control, which is not always perfect. The woman who comes to us for birth control may be the same woman who comes to us a year later seeking prenatal care for a planned pregnancy. And she may be the same one who comes to us three years later with an unintended pregnancy. It’s the same woman.

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Q: There have been surveys showing that it’s more difficult than ever for women to obtain abortions, yet, recent news reports indicate that, in many cases, you are winning more legal and legislative battles at the state level. How would you characterize your position in the debate at this time?

A: Fundamentally, we have won the hearts and minds of the people, but we haven’t translated that into public policy. Congress has drifted far away from public opinion on family planning and on the belief that it’s not the government’s role to intrude on decisions between a woman and her doctor. It’s up to citizens and advocacy groups to get the message to Congress and the state legislatures that we want access to these services. It’s true that we have won some battles in state courts, but those are long, expensive battles which will never be a substitute for grass-roots support and participation in this debate.

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Q: But if you have the people’s hearts and minds, why the disconnect between that and the makeup of Congress, where a majority favors limits or repeal of abortion rights?

A: Sometimes people step into the voting booth without knowing their candidate’s position on reproductive rights. Which is why we have been concentrating on voter education and get-out-the-vote programs. Perhaps because we have a pro-choice president, many people may not place a high priority on this issue, even though if you asked them, they’d say they’d never vote for anyone who wanted to take away their rights to family planning. They simply don’t recognize the threat to their own reproductive choices. So, we have to do a much better job of mobilizing support for our position that those choices are indeed under threat. However, we were successful in the last election, in that we picked up nine pro-choice seats in the House.

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Q: Then there is the violence, which colors the entire issue of abortion. Can you foresee a day when there is an end to violence toward abortion providers, and how do you see us getting there?

A: First, we’re proud of having been a part of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s attempts to form a national task force on clinic violence. That sends a signal that the Justice Department puts great emphasis on this issue. It also provides an opportunity for all the various law-enforcement agencies to share information, so they can more quickly bring perpetrators to justice and establish procedures that will help prevent future violence. This sort of law-enforcement effort is important, but there must also be a community climate in which violence is not acceptable. That means community leaders must speak out against the violence, not just bemoan it afterward at a candlelight vigil. I’m tired of going to candlelight vigils. We need leaders who are vocal and say they won’t tolerate violence in their communities. Secondly, I call upon the so-called Right to Life community to stop spewing the kind of hate-filled rhetoric that furthers this kind of violence.

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Q: What about some sort of summit meeting between leaders of both sides in this controversy? Can you imagine some sort of dialogue that could resolve this?

A: Absolutely. I would be happy to participate in such a discussion. But it has to be genuine, with everyone agreeing that no matter what we think about abortion, we don’t want this violence--not in our community, not in our state, not in our country. I think violence takes away much of the moral authority with which our opponents believe they speak.

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Q: Would you say you’re optimistic that women will retain the reproductive rights you’ve fought for all these years?

A: We just had our annual conference, and I can never remember a time when our group was more energized and unified. We’ve launched an agenda that is national in scope, that is designed to increase services that help prevent unintended pregnancy, improve the quality of health care and assure access to abortion. I’m hopeful for the future because I think we have moved away from being defensive and have an affirmative program in place that gives voice to American mainstream values. I just think the spirit in the movement is more positive than I’ve seen it in many, many years.