A President Rowing in Reverse on Abortion Issues

Over the weekend, over the Internet, the joke caromed like a microchip billiard ball: “George W. Bush thinks Roe vs. Wade was the decision Washington had to make before crossing the Delaware.”

To the forces of the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom gathering in Sacramento last Monday, it was funny, but not remotely true.

This new president knows all about Roe vs. Wade.

The same day the coalition was working the whited hallways of the state Capitol, Bush undid a policy of eight years’ standing. Even though tax money hasn’t paid for an overseas abortion since 1973, Bush cut off every current dollar of aid to any overseas family-planning service that so much as offers abortion or abortion counseling, even with its own money.

The same day, Bush sent a message to antiabortion marchers at the Washington Monument that the Declaration of Independence’s pledges of life and liberty extend to all, “including unborn children.”

And--busy day, Monday--the administration announced a “safety” review of the abortion drug RU-486. (For the record, RU-486 spent 12 years being reviewed before it was approved; Viagra was so fast-tracked and green-lighted that it hit the pharmacies in six months.)

In short, Monday was a 180-degree whiplash, a grinding shift into reverse for the California coalition. There are 29 groups in the California coalition, doctors and midwives and nurses, Asians and Latinas, Catholics and Republicans. In latter years their cause seemed so settled that many of them stopped showing up for the annual “Lobby Day.”

“Now we have to spend four years working against things,” says Jo Ann Madigan, the coalition’s consultant. “There’s fabulous, positive work to be done, but we’re going to be stretched to the limit.”

“It will be night-and-day different,” says Nancy Sasaki, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles. “And Planned Parenthood never sleeps!”

Compare Bush’s first Oval Office deeds to Bill Clinton’s and you could line up the parallels with a ruler. Clinton led off with the gays in the military matter, a thank-you to his ardent but strategically low-profile gay supporters. Before Bush had figured out where they keep the presidential paper clips, he made antiabortion orders his gift to the antiabortion forces for lying low during the campaign.

Clinton spent his presidency hobbling around with the gay-military pebble in his shoe. California’s reproductive rights groups want be the first to roll the antiabortion boulder into Bush’s wingtip.

Belle Taylor-McGhee heads CARAL, the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. California “will serve as the bellwether on protecting basic freedom and women’s reproductive liberties.”

State Sen. Betty Karnette, a Long Beach Democrat, wants the Legislature to approve her measure urging the Bush administration to protect Roe vs. Wade. “I’m hoping [Californians] take the leadership position on this.”

With Bush in office, Madigan expects California’s Republicans “will be feeling their oats.” Sure enough, Assemblywoman Gloria Negrete McLeod, a newly elected Ontario Democrat, was approached quietly by a GOP colleague about signing on to a parental consent law.

McLeod is the mother of 10 and the grandmother of 27--the newest born this week. “Most people assume because I have a lot of kids I’m anti-choice, but I’m a pro-choice woman.” Parental consent is a hard-to-soundbite matter, but the multiple mom says “it almost has to be the choice of the person intimately involved.”

She told the Republican no.

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Last week, Laura Bush made it a grand slam--four Republican first ladies, Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and now her daughter-in-law, giving a pass to their party’s position and holding, as Laura Bush said on the “Today” show, that “I don’t think that [Roe] should be overturned.”

(Asked about this domestic division that reflects a political one, Bush said, “My wife is entitled to her opinion, just like a lot of other Americans are entitled to their opinions.” Which Americans are not so entitled, he failed to enumerate.)

The president’s birthday is in July, but that’s too far away. Presidents’ Day is just around the corner, though, and I’m thinking of doing something for him, something his wife and mother understandably wouldn’t do, something that’s caught on in certain circles.

Instead of a gift, people give money to a cause in the honoree’s name.

So check that mailbag, Mr. President, for a card reading, “President George W. Bush, a donation has been made in your name to Planned Parenthood.”

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com