Dole Steps Ever So Gingerly Into Contentious GOP Abortion Debate

Diving into her party’s most contentious issue--and one that bedeviled her husband’s 1996 campaign--potential GOP presidential contender Elizabeth Hanford Dole on Friday simultaneously renewed her anti-abortion credentials and urged those who share them to end their efforts to outlaw all abortions.

“It is a divisive, and it is an irrelevant debate in terms of an amendment,” said Dole, referring to the party’s official sanctioning of a constitutional amendment banning abortion. “An amendment is not going to pass. . . . . People want us to move forward and accomplish some things, not just kind of endlessly debate something that really is not going anywhere.

“It’s not going to happen. There’s not the support for it.”

Her remarks, which came after a Beverly Hills speech, placed Dole squarely beside Texas Gov. George W. Bush, seen as the front-runner in the race, on somewhat moderate abortion turf for a Republican. Bush earlier had reiterated his personal opposition to abortion, but he said he would not pursue a constitutional amendment because it lacks public support.

It also put her in the sights of the party’s more vociferously anti-abortion candidates--one of whom, conservative activist Gary Bauer, immediately criticized Dole through a staff member.

“A presidential candidate has to have a specific plan, a specific pro-life plan, to end abortion on demand,” said Bauer’s communications director, Tim Goeglein. “It’s very important to say; it goes to a central tenet of the Republican Party.”

His remarks reflected the views of several likely candidates who have pledged war if the party seeks to soften its opposition to any form of abortion.

Dole’s comments to reporters in Los Angeles were her first on the subject of abortion since she announced last month that she was exploring a presidential campaign. The remarks followed the release by her campaign of a letter to an Arizona supporter in which she recounted conversations with GOP women concerned that the abortion debate was ravaging the party.

Though Dole sought in the letter to blame the media for a preoccupation with the subject, it has riven every national Republican convention for nearly a generation, most recently when Dole’s husband, former Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, was the party’s nominee.

In 1996, Bob Dole was castigated when he tried to allay the concerns of party moderates by including in the party platform a prominent recognition that Republicans hold varied views on the subject.

Battered after that suggestion, he ultimately settled for secreting the comment in an attachment to the platform.

Somewhat surprisingly, Elizabeth Dole on Friday embraced the very notion that caused her husband such trouble.

“In terms of the platform, what I would suggest right now is that we add the fact that good and honorable people disagree on the subject of abortion,” she said in response to a question. “I’m not going to comment further than this right now. . . . At this point, I’m not even an announced candidate, much less the nominee of the party.”

By implication, Dole suggested that she would not seek to take the call for a constitutional amendment out of the platform.

Dole did not discuss abortion in her speech Friday to the USC support organization Town and Gown. But in the letter her campaign released at the event, Dole explained her views on the matter.

“I am pro-life, with exceptions in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother,” she wrote to a Phoenix woman who had hosted a Dole fund-raising event.

“We must recognize that good and honorable people disagree on the subject of abortion,” she wrote. “We should agree to respectfully disagree.”

While that approach has been loudly opposed by social conservatives within the Republican Party, it has been growing in strength among some of the groups most interested in fighting abortion rights. When Bush signaled his views on abortion recently, he was criticized by some conservatives for refusing to press for a constitutional amendment.

But he later received support from Pat Robertson, founder of the anti-abortion Christian Coalition, and David O’Steen, head of the National Right to Life Committee.

They and others have strongly suggested that anti-abortion groups have more to gain from supporting Republicans against Democrats than from embroiling the GOP candidates in an emotional dispute.

For Dole, achieving a balance on abortion rights is crucial. Central to her chances is appealing to women of all political stripes who might be entranced by the first serious presidential campaign by one of their gender.

A rigid anti-abortion stance, however, complicates the political calculus. In October 1996, just before the end of the last presidential campaign, a Los Angeles Times Poll found that 42% of registered Republican women voters opposed the Supreme Court decision, Roe vs. Wade, which established abortion rights.

Among Democratic women who were registered to vote, however, 52% supported the decision and 40% opposed it. Independent women were split on it.