Abortion: The Bottom Line

A quarter of a century ago, back when Christian virtue supposedly still prevailed, in the good old days before the Supreme Court made abortion legal, I drove a bleeding woman across the California border from Mexico. She was near death from a botched Tijuana abortion and I was about to become an accomplice to murder. Not because the fetus of seven weeks had been removed but because the mother could have died--just another statistic of her time, proving that the danger of death from an illegal abortion is 30 times greater than that from a legal one.

At a gas-station phone near a cheering crowd at the Del Mar race track, I put in a call to Dr. Pérez, who had performed the procedure in a dirty clinic without benefit of anesthesia or painkillers. Dr. Pérez' advice was not to call again. Whatever kind of doctor Pérez was or wasn't, he had already received his $400. That was all the unemployed black father of the baby had been able to scrape up; he had been unwilling or unable to accompany the mother on this trip. So I had volunteered for the drive to the border, made the mysterious phone calls to a Tijuana taxi stand, followed the back-alley guide to the clinic.

Abortion was and still is illegal in Mexico. It's estimated that last year 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 illegal abortions were performed in Mexico, producing 50,000 deaths and the hospitalization of another 240,000 women for serious complications. Under legal conditions, first-trimester abortions are 13 times safer than child-birth. That was the case back then, too, if you could fly to Sweden and have the procedure done safely and cleanly in a government-run hospital. But abortion was illegal in both California and Mexico, and the desperate woman I was escorting could not afford an airline ticket to Stockholm. She could not even pay the illegal street rates of California; she could afford only the lower Mexican fees of a foul-smelling dungeon they dared call a clinic.

They understood little English at the clinic; they took no medical histories. The woman sat in line with a row of equally worried Mexican women. Her turn arrived, she went in, and when she came out, pale and trembling, it was back to the land of the free. And then the heavy bleeding started.

Fortunately, in this case, after five physicians turned us away, a courageous sixth doctor in L.A. came through. The bleeding was stopped without much more money having to change hands. And let's not kid ourselves: The abortion issue has always been a matter of money.

Rich women easily obtained a safe abortion after an expensive plane ride to some modern country or from a competent U.S. doctor willing to take the risk for a high enough price. Poor women went to Tijuana if they were close enough to the border or did it to themselves with coat hangers.

Ah, yes, the good old days before Roe vs. Wade. That decision had the effect of legalizing abortion, but what that Supreme Court actually said was that a woman, as a right of privacy, had a constitutional right to control over her body. At first, that was interpreted as a right established for all women equally. But, in fact, since that moment, the courts have--case by case--interpreted the right mainly as a convenience for women with money.

In 1977, a pre-Reagan Supreme Court held that the constitutional right made effective by Roe vs. Wade did not mean that the states had to provide Federal Medicaid money for the treatment of the poor who had "elective" abortions. So much for equal protection under the law.

Then in July 1989, the Reagan Supreme Court decided in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services that the states should be the ones to decide on abortion. But the most immediate effect of the ruling was to put additional barriers in the path of poorer women, preventing those dependent upon county hospitals, rural facilities and other publicly funded abortion services from getting a medical procedure that is available with few restrictions to those with private funds.

If abortion is murder, as the pro-lifers claim, how the hell can they justify allowing only people of means to commit murder? They can't, which is why the Webster decision was a temporary political trick rather than a reasoned constitutional argument. If the Reagan Court had declared abortion murder, it would have at least seriously inconvenienced the wealthy and powerful with the necessity of going abroad. Instead, the Justices struck at the politically weakest segment of the population by denying poor women equal access to medical knowledge and technology.

Admittedly, the language of the majority decision indicates that the Court may soon go further and strike at the basic principle of Roe vs. Wade--that there exists a constitutional right to privacy guaranteeing women control over their bodies. For the sake of justice, that might be preferable to the current situation: At least the law would be applied equally to different economic classes. Again, as in the old days, those with the price of a ticket abroad would barely notice. This time, however, if the Court continues on its path toward moralizing about what a human being should do with her own body, these respectable citizens will be committing murder by the (new) laws of their own society.

Make no mistake: In the Webster decision, the Court did not just nudge the law back over the line to some modest niche to the right of Roe vs. Wade. Instead, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's language in Webster embraces the most extreme of the pro-lifers' charges--that abortion is murder. Rehnquist wrote: "We do not see why the state's interest in protecting potential human life should come into existence only at the point of viability..."

Why not go further and include the sperm and the egg under such protection? Why not forbid all effective forms of birth control? The pro-lifers will say they avoid discussing that because the major religions divide sharply on the issue of when life begins. Thorny stuff, that, so best not to deal with it. But why does it matter what any of the religions say, and why is the Court taking such notions seriously, when the U.S. Constitution explicitly mandates a separation of church and state?

The basic accomplishment of the pro-life movement has been to make it more difficult for those women who already have the least access to prenatal care and birth-control information--teenage girls and poor women--to get an abortion. The pro-lifers seem unfazed by the fact that those same fetuses they "save" go on to be born and become the very children most of them most despise. It's an extraordinary kind of belief: These people hold the dead fetus, which is trafficked about in jars across the country, as a thing of beauty. But the actual child born to an unwed teenage mother they hold in contempt.

In a 1987 survey of 10,000 abortion patients, two thirds of the women lived in a family with an income of less than $11,000. How do you raise children on that kind of income? On the campaign trail, I would ask pro-lifers I encountered that question. Almost all, even those who were skilled at (concluded on page 150)Abortion(continued from page 55) abortion debate, would just roll their eyes heavenward. It seems that the cynical coalition put together by the right-wing sharpies has two morally inconsistent pillars: economic conservatism, which slashes social spending, and encouragement of the birth of more poor children.

Exceptions to the cynicism are the pro-life Catholic bishops, who are at least consistent in demanding far more funds for the poor. Indeed, they have endorsed a radical economic program that could include substantial income redistribution. If a pro-life stance were combined with an ironclad commitment by this society to guarantee equal claim to a decent life for all children and their mothers, such a position would be one worth respecting.

In the meantime, in the wake of the Webster decision, we are left to deal with a moral cop-out in which more poor children will be born to a society increasingly indifferent to their well-being. Get the kid born, keep him locked in the holding cell of some miserable ghetto, and when he commits a crime, kill him, even if he's a teenager.

There are more than 500,000 (some say more than 1,000,000) teenaged mothers in the United States, many of them surely daughters of other teenaged mothers. What protection, indeed, what equal rights will the Court guarantee their children--and the many millions more who will now be born because of this judicial dicking around with a constitutional compromise that had worked as well as most?

The practical result of Webster is that the states must ultimately decide the abortion issue. But a state legislature, which must also provide funding for the born or deal with the problems engendered by the uncared-for child, cannot so easily ignore the connection between population control and social problems. To begin with, a state legislature that bans abortion is likely to be under increased pressure to expand programs of prenatal care, sex education, homes for unwed mothers and birth clinics. Lawmakers will have to vote for an expansion of school facilities, orphanages, public housing, and so forth. That stuff costs big bucks. That's when that silent majority--the one that polls consistently say opposes a ban on abortions--may well rise up against a group of noisy pro-lifers with a frightening agenda. Up to now, that agenda has been just talk and has carried no price tag. Now it's a reality and the reality is expensive.

A quarter of a century ago, the state of California, which would not permit my young friend to have an abortion, led the nation, along with New York, in providing social services to the poor and, particularly, to poor children. Then its governor Ronald Reagan proceeded quite effectively to dismantle those programs. The state was saved from disaster by actions from Washington, one of which was the Roe vs. Wade decision of the Supreme Court. Now, if the clock is to be turned back on abortion rights, we ought to call for spending at the levels of the War on Poverty, or the New Deal, to protect the rights of the babies that the Reagan Court insists be born. If it comes down to economics, as things in life often do, I wonder if the crusade against abortion can survive its ultimate cost.