Playboy Viewpoint: Illegalizing Abortion

Foes of abortion have fired the opening shots in what they hope will be a successful two-year campaign to make childbirth compulsory for all pregnant women. Here is a report from our Washington correspondent.

The New Moral Right has wasted no time capitalizing on its new-found power in Washington. Just two days after Ronald Reagan's Inauguration, 60,000 citizens carrying March for Life banners tied up traffic for hours in the nation's capital. Their leaders commanded a private audience with the new President, the very first special-interest group he received in the Oval Office. They were addressed by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Congressman Robert Dornan of California. Between the Gospel singers and the Bible wavers (Jerry Falwell was also there), Reagan's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Richard S. Schweiker, spoke to the assembled religio-biological shock troops, telling them they "have a friend in the Reagan Administration."

Schweiker performed the kind of policy somersault that characterizes an Administration bent on bringing back the Fifties. Having announced that he favored a constitutional amendment to make abortion a crime, he later added that he would try to end his department's support of sex education and family-planning information for minors and indigents. In other words, don't tell them how they get pregnant, and when they do, don't allow them to get unpregnant.

The forces of the past have momentum. Poll after poll confirms that a substantial majority of Americans favor freedom of choice on abortions, as mandated in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision. Yet the best-organized single-issue lobby in the country today has turned the unborn fetus into a political football. It is a master stroke of minority politics.

The hysterical right operates through an interlocking machinery of television evangelists, direct-mail wizards, milk-the-ignorant fund raisers and Congressional glibmeisters (both Helms and Dornan went to Washington from jobs as television commentators). Its secret is a combination of scare propaganda, negative campaigning and religious humbug. It has galvanized all manner of conservatives around the abortion issue and helped elect the most conservative President in modern times.

If you want to know why we should ban abortion (and return to the back-alley butchers of yesteryear), listen for a moment to Helms, who once wrote that "the Supreme Court's ruling in the abortion cases raises the specter of euthanasia. ... Eventually, we shall arrive at the final stage where 'undesirables,' such as the sick, the aged, the senile and the retarded, are eliminated." Just like Nazi Germany, implies Helms.

Or consider Dornan, a California Catholic who looks, dresses and talks like a Southern tent evangelist. "It's hedonism and secularism versus ecumenism," he shouted to a hysterical claque of pink-faced supporters in a Senate hearing room last January. "American citizens dying in their mothers' wombs have gone beyond the Herodian slaughter of the Hitler regime. And that's a conservative estimate. Only 30,000 were killed at Dachau. We kill 30,000 innocent citizens in their mothers' wombs every month!" Cheers, screams, applause.

Outside, supporters waved posters reading, Wanted for Murder: Five Million Mothers and Their Doctors. Dornan and Helms forthwith marched into their respective houses of Congress to introduce constitutional amendments to ban abortion. Surely, when the clause allowing for amendments was written, the framers of the Constitution did not have in mind the raising of medical theology to constitutional force. Why not a constitutional amendment on smoking in public elevators? On health standards in restaurants? On the tax-exempt status of churches?

Well, Helms, who is the smartest, slickest and most dangerous right-wing polemicist in American politics today, has thought of that, too. "We don't have the votes" to get a constitutional amendment, he says. It takes two thirds of the Senate and the House and then three fourths of the states to amend the Constitution. So Helms has come up with a better idea: Amend the Constitution through the back door of legislation. A Federal law requires passage by only a simple majority in both houses. Enter Senate Bill 158 and House Resolution 900, which will, in effect, amend the 14th Amendment, which prohibits depriving persons of life without due process of law. The bills jump into a tiny gap left in the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that pointedly skirted the constitutional definition of the word person. Under the new law, if passed, a newly fertilized egg would be endowed with "personhood" by the following simple definition: "Human life shall be deemed to exist from conception, without regard to race, sex, age, health, defect or condition of dependency." In short, your ovum has civil rights.

These so-called Human Life Bills (as opposed to the Human Life Amendments) are clearly the most imaginative attempt yet mounted by the forces of righteousness to roll back the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized medically safe abortion. "We've got the votes and we'll get it through in timely fashion," says Carl Anderson, Helms's social-issues expert, perhaps the only man in America paid by taxpayers to spend most of his time thinking up ways to make motherhood mandatory. Anderson goes so far as to admit that introducing the Human Life Amendment two days after Reagan's Inauguration was--in my words--a mere "softening up of the political landscape with heavy artillery so you could come in behind it with the Human Life Bill."

"Sure, sure it was," he replied.

Likewise, passage of the bill would till the soil for the more difficult task of pushing through the Human Life Amendment itself. "The bill is not the final solution," says Anderson, only half laughing at his own malapropism. "We can probably get the rest in 1982. With Kennedy and Metzenbaum and all those other Democrats up for reelection next year, I don't think they will want to be too vocal in their opposition."

The value of sheer persistence and simple attrition is not lost on the New Right, which has shown unparalleled tenacity over the years--the kind only the truly zealous can summon. This has finally produced an effective level of irritation among even more reasonable members of Congress, who want to have done with the thing and shut the right-wingers up for a while.

"I sense among many Congressmen a strong desire to get the abortion issue off their backs," says one pro-choice advocate on Capitol Hill. "And to them, the Human Life Bill looks like the easy way out." Two licks for Helms.

In the Fifties and early Sixties, the overriding social issue in this country was a real one--race relations. That was eclipsed by a foreign issue, Vietnam, which translated into the social alienation of an entire generation. The Seventies was the decade of women, followed by a preoccupation with self--the absence of concern with social issues. Into that vacuum have leaped the single-issue groups, right-wing hatemongers and political polemicists to create a false social issue: abortion.

Abortion is not a problem in this country: It is not a legitimate social issue. Never has the matter been better settled than by the Supreme Court's decision, which says the question to abort or not to abort is a personal and medical one, not a legal one. Now come the religio-political zealots who want to interfere in the most private of our personal affairs. The pro-lifers say your pregnancy is their business, while the pro-choice folks say it is your own. The pro-lifers say what you must do is have a baby; pro-choice advocates say there is no must; they don't care what you do, as long as the decision is yours.

Yet the anti-abortionists--they of the fetus photographs and visions of another holocaust (today the fetus, tomorrow the grandma)--have become such a vocal minority that even the Republican leadership has begun to kowtow to them. Reagan had some of them into the White House a second time. The reason: their remarkable fund-raising ability. Emotion, after all, is a greater motivator than reason, as we learned from the Third Reich.

Paul Brown, director of the Life Amendment Political Action Committee (LAPAC), put it more bluntly: "We can threaten jobs." And threaten they do: LAPAC has 12 Senators on its new "Deadly Dozen" "hit list" for the 1982 elections, from liberal Edward Kennedy to neoconservative-intellectual Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Brown is the nice guy who maligned rape victim Karen Mulhauser, who happens to be executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, in an interview with New York magazine: "I hear that Karen claims she was once raped. Well, let me tell you, Karen is not the most beautiful creature in the world, so when I hear her say she was raped, my response is, 'You wish.'" Brown later claimed he was misquoted, but his interviewer stood by the story.

Pro-choice advocates fear that many Americans are not sufficiently aroused to the danger posed by the Human Life Bill--and 16 similar bills and amendments that have been thrown into the Congressional hopper. Abortion has been with us always; and legalized, safe abortion, for nearly a decade. Many people now take it for granted, just like the rights of blacks to eat in any restaurant. No one thinks about a serious return to de jure segregation, so they are incredulous at the notion that the clock could be so definitively turned back on a social issue that most of us thought was settled long ago. Yet that is just what could happen. Might well happen. Anti-abortionists, after all, have for several years won simple majority votes in Congress against Medicaid funding for abortions.

The implications of either a Federal human-life law or a constitutional amendment are enormous. And what of contraception? If human life commences at the moment of fertilization and is thereafter protected by law, what of the intrauterine device, which often acts as an abortifacient? Most of the birth-control pills are thought to function the same way once in a while when an ovulation takes place.

Judie Brown, president of the anti-abortionist American Life Lobby, wrote an open letter to members of Congress arguing that since I.U.D.s and birth-control pills make the uterus "hostile to a fertilized egg," each one "kills a brand-new human being." She concluded: "Chemicals which kill are not contraceptives. They perform abortions!" The only thing these loonies accept is "barrier" contraceptives: We're back to rubbers.

The "human life" bills obviously have complex medical and legal ramifications; their passage would have such profound impact on society that one Republican connected to the White House predicted "lawlessness that would make Prohibition look like a picnic." Police at all levels would be charged with snooping on country doctors--those sympathetic souls who once clandestinely accommodated unlucky coeds from college towns--and breaking down motel doors to see if someone were flushing a pregnancy down a toilet. Texas boyfriends would once again be administering the anesthesia at unclean clinics in Mexico. Today's generation of unmarrieds has no idea how bad it was; the ones who remember would be flying off to Haiti and Sweden.

Yet conservative Republican leaders were cleverly conspiring last winter to ignore public opinion, exclude prochoice testimony and effectively railroad their bills onto the floor of the Senate, where a man's vote is his record. The abortion bills fell into the jurisdictional hands of three of the most regressive members of the Senate: South Carolina's venerable segregationist Strom Thurmond, the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee; Orrin Hatch, the mirthless Mormon from Utah, who heads the Subcommittee on the Constitution: and John East, the wheelchair-bound ideological clone that Jesse Helms's political machine produced out of North Carolina, who chairs the Subcommittee on Separation of Powers.

Although Helms's anti-abortion statute is the most significant social legislation of our time, the conservatives were intent on narrowing the scope and keeping pro-choice forces from being heard. The strategy mounted by East, who is largely controlled by Helms, was to hold a mere two days of hearings on the sole question "When does human life begin?" He decided to hear strictly medical testimony, exclusively from pro-lifers.

What this all really amounts to is an all-out attack on sex. Deep down, the New Right is nothing if not a movement in reaction to the sexual revolution of the 20th Century, especially the liberation of women. The abortion issue brings the conservative extremists together on the things that stir them most: fear of sex, religious fundamentalism, racist hostility to minorities with "loose morals," the independence of young people.

Helms for years practiced a smooth and venomous demagoguery on North Carolina television. He often smeared blacks seeking their simple civil rights with allusions to "crime rates" and "immorality." This is the your-mother-is-a-whore approach to race relations. He has successfully brought this style into national politics and the U. S. Senate. At last year's Republican Convention, he neatly summed up the new party platform by broadly attacking "the permissiveness, the pornography, the drugs, abortion, living together, divorce ... somewhere you've got to put the flag down and say, 'Enough is enough.'"

Helms has decided to wrap himself in the flag by standing right on top of the abortion issue, which he conveniently lumps in with living together and divorce, both common and, we thought, legally sanctioned activities between the sexes in this country. Perhaps Helms and his following think that if they can eliminate the one, the two others won't be far behind. We underestimate the zeal, power and "final solutions" of the right wing at our own considerable peril. We'll soon be back to strictly missionary positions on alternate Saturdays.

What you can do to be Heard

Because politics is people and votes, Senators and Congressmen really listen to their constituents. To make your voice heard on the abortion issue, write to your Senator, U. S. Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510, and to your Congressman, U. S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. 20515. And, believe it or not, they also listen to phone calls. You can reach any Senator or Congressman in Washington by simply dialing 202-224-3121 and asking for him.

The three pro-choice organizations most actively engaged in centralized lobbying efforts are the National Abortion Rights Action League, 825 15th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005; the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., 810 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 10019; and The Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, 100 Maryland Avenue, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002.