Why Voting Democratic Hasn't Preserved Choice
Thursday, 14 April 2016 00:00 By Elizabeth Schulte, Socialist Worker | Op-Ed
Donald Trump gave abortion rights supporters a frightening glimpse of what
an administration he commands might do when he told MSNBC's Chris Matthews
earlier this month that "[t]here has to be some form of punishment" for
women who have illegal abortions.
Trump had to backtrack on his comments pretty quickly -- evidently no one
told him that even anti-choice Republicans don't call for punishing women,
but instead pretend to oppose abortion in the interests of protecting women.
Ted Cruz claimed to be shocked at Trump's comments -- which you have to take
with a grain of salt considering that Cruz opposes abortions even in in
cases where the woman was raped. That's a position no US president has held
since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion.
With Trump or Cruz looking to be the most likely Republican presidential
nominee at this point, it's understandable why people who support
reproductive rights would be motivated to vote for any Democrat for
president, no matter how imperfect.
This is a regular feature of elections, especially for the presidency: The
Democrats win votes from people who want to make sure abortion remains safe
and legal, because no matter what, the Democrats are better than the
Republicans on this issue, right?
The problem with this reasoning isn't the answer, but the question. With
only two choices available, the Democrats can get away with doing nothing at
all to protect the right to choose abortion -- or worse, giving up more
ground to the right -- and still be certain of getting the support of
pro-choice voters, because they'll always be a little less bad than the
Republicans.
This is the pitfall of "lesser evilism" in general: Voting for the "lesser
evil" in order to stop the "greater evil" typically produces a combination
of both evils.
In the case of abortion rights, the whittling away of access and
reproductive choice -- restriction by restriction, at the state and federal
level -- is a product of both the Republican-led assault and Democratic
concessions, if not outright support for elements of the anti-choice
offensive.
***
It's worth pointing out that the Republicans didn't always have the position
it does now on women's right to abortion. Until 1980, the party was split
between a faction that agreed women should be able to obtain an abortion, as
laid out in the Roe decision, and those who opposed legal abortion.
In fact, for decades before that, the Republicans avoided using the word
"conservative" to describe their party. The 1960 Republican platform plank
on women's issues talked about "progressive Republican policies," and
throughout the 1960s and '70s, the GOP supported an Equal Rights Amendment
(ERA). In 1968, the Republican platform included planks opposing
discrimination, supporting punishment for polluters and proposing to lower
the eligibility for Social Security from 72 to 65 years old.
How could this be? The overall political climate in the US had shifted to
the left after the McCarthy era, most of all as an effect of the civil
rights movement and the other social movements to come in the late 1960s and
early 1970s.
The entire mainstream political spectrum, including the Republican Party
representing the right end of it, became more liberal under pressure from
social discontent. The same effect was felt, only in reverse, in the era
that followed -- both Republicans and Democrats moved rightward from the
late 1970s on.
Specifically, the Republicans struggled in the '70s to find a new base of
support after an era of Democratic political dominance. Party leaders saw an
opportunity to bring in a more socially conservative, religious voter base
-- especially in the South, where there was an audience opposed to many of
the demands of the social movements of the time.
In this way, the Republicans could be a party that continued to serve the
interests of big business, first and foremost, but still attract a loyal
following among conservative voters.
This is how the GOP went from being split on the issue of abortion to
staunch opposition. Take Ronald Reagan, who signed several bill in support
of abortion rights as California's governor in the 1960s, well before Roe v.
Wade. By 1980, he was anti-abortion and campaigned for the presidency on
that basis.
At the 1976 GOP convention, delegates approved a platform plank stating that
abortion "is undoubtedly a moral and personal issue" on which Republicans
disagree.
By 1980, that had all changed. Now the party said it sought a constitutional
amendment protecting "the right to life for unborn children." It also
dropped its support for the ERA.
Four years later, the fanatical anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly was helping
to craft the Republican Party position on abortion, and pro-choice
Republicans were iced out. Along with this came the mobilization of
anti-abortion forces at the grassroots -- with "right to life" protesters
trying to shut down clinics across the country.
All of this went along with more conservative language that played to
bigotry, but also distanced the GOP from its moneyed image. The party of
Corporate America and Wall Street began referring to "Washington's governing
elite." To pander to racists, the Republicans emphasized that they were
"tough on crime" -- a coded message based on the prejudice among supporters
that Blacks were responsible for crime and violence.
***
A simultaneous shift was taking place within the Democratic Party, though it
took a different form. The Democrats maintained their support for keeping
abortion legal -- and used this commitment at every election to win votes --
while making more and more concessions to the escalating attack on abortion
rights, especially on laws restricting access.
In 1980, the convention vote in support of abortion in the party platform
was two-to-one in favor. But by 1988, Kate Michelman, then the executive
director of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) was calling
for support for the vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, even though
the Texas Democrat opposed federal funding for abortion for poor women.
The 1992 presidential election illustrated the particular shifts going on in
each party. Bill Clinton, who six years earlier told the president of the
Arkansas Right to Life Committee that he was "pro-life," now stated his
support for keeping legal abortion -- while incumbent President George HW
Bush, who once supported Planned Parenthood, had reversed his position.
But the hollowing out of Democratic support on the issue was also clear. At
the party's 1992 convention, six pro-choice Republicans spoke while
"Pro-Choice, Pro-Clinton" signs were passed out on the convention floor.
"Their presence emphasized the fact that the Democrats no longer see the
issue as a matter of principle or even as deference to one of its
constituency groups," writes Jo Freeman, author of We Will Be Heard.
"Democrats are now convinced that it's the way to win elections."
Then-National Women's Political Caucus Political Director Alice Travis told
Freeman, "The Democratic Party is a feminist organization. We don't have to
lobby and march outside any more. We march together. It's not Us versus
Them. The Party stands for the same things the movement stands for."
In other words, mainstream women's rights organizations were abandoning any
kind of independent position that would allow them to criticize or even
pressure the Democrats -- by simply identifying their interests with the
success of the Democratic Party within the mainstream political sytem.
Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women (NOW)
bucked the tide somewhat, explaining that the group would not attended
either party's convention in 1992, but would participate in the founding
convention of the "21st Century Party," which committed to supporting
candidates that took up the rights of women.
"Politicians come and sweet-talk us every election and then they don't
respect us in the morning," NOW President Patricia Ireland told supporters
in 1992. But this stance was largely symbolic. NOW said it would endorse
21st Century candidates only in places where no major-party candidate
already supported their aims -- in most cases, Democrats could be portrayed
as backers.
***
The 1992 election was supposed to usher the "Year of the Woman" after a
number of Democratic women were elected to Congress, including 48 members of
the House of Representatives.
But the "Year of the Woman" starting the following January got off to a
pretty dismal start when a Democratic-controlled House voted to reauthorize
the Hyde Amendment, the 1976 bill that banned federal funding to poor women
who wanted to obtain an abortion, in a 255-to-178 vote.
While Bill Clinton won the White House with the endorsement of supporters of
women's rights, he didn't return the favor. During the campaign, he vowed to
help enact the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would have codified Roe
v. Wade in federal law. In the first year of his administration -- and with
Democrats controlling both the Senate and House -- the measure died without
reaching the floor of either chamber.
The rightward shift continued. Without federal legislation like FOCA
standing in the way, states continued to pass restrictions on abortion, such
as waiting periods and parental consent. Even the way that Democrats talked
about legal abortion accommodated more and more to the right, including an
emphasis on finding common ground with the anti-choice side.
The rhetoric of both Bill and Hillary Clinton about keeping abortion "safe,
legal and rare" became the mantra among Democrats -- and rather than
challenge this compromised position, women's organizations in turn adapted
their own message. Instead of putting pressure on the Democrats, the
Democrats were putting pressure on them.
A decade and a half later, the Freedom of Choice Act got the same treatment
under newly elected President Barack Obama -- enthusiastic support during
the campaign, but no action afterward. Obama stated at a Planned Parenthood
gathering that in order to confront state-level anti-choice laws, "The first
thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act."
But this wasn't the first thing he did, nor the second or third. In fact,
the Freedom of Choice Act didn't seem to be on the list at all -- as he said
explicitly as early as 2009:
[T]he Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority. I
believe that women should have the right to choose, but I think that the
most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding
this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that's where
I'm going to focus.
The next year, as Obama's health care legislation was being negotiated,
Obama used reproductive rights as a bargaining chip -- he sacrificed
abortion coverage in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in order to win the votes
of anti-choice Democrats.
The version of the health care bill that passed the House in November 2009
was included the Stupak Amendment, which stipulated that insurers
participating in the health insurance exchanges established by the ACA
couldn't cover abortions in the policies offered to people who were getting
any subsidies from the government.
Obama hailed the amendment named after anti-choice Michigan Democrat Bart
Stupak as "courageous" -- which is probably not the word I'd use for a
provision that makes it even more difficult for poor women to obtain a safe,
legal abortion. Cruel and opportunistic is more like it.
This is the Democrats' actual history on abortion rights. Yet year after
year, the party uses the threat of losing abortion rights to extort voters
into supporting their candidates. The same will happen this year with likely
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, even though her insistence on finding
common ground with the right and making abortion "rare" is decidedly out of
touch with many abortion rights supporters.
The history makes it clear -- support for the Democrats as the "lesser evil"
makes it easier for the party to compromise with the "greater evil." When
the Democrats know they can assume pro-choice support, they can move further
to the right to find "common ground" that falls well short of defending the
right to and accessibility of abortion.
Not only is a woman's right to choose abortion left at the mercy of whatever
deal Democratic politicians work out, but expectations about what women
should demand and expect from the US political system are systematically
lowered. We won't concede -- we support the right to affordable and
accessible, without apology.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
ELIZABETH SCHULTE
Elizabeth Schulte is a contributor to Socialist Worker.
RELATED STORIES
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By Carol Downer, SpeakOut | Op-Ed
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By Cristiano Lima, AlterNet | Report
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Why Voting Democratic Hasn't Preserved Choice
Thursday, 14 April 2016 00:00 By Elizabeth Schulte, Socialist Worker | Op-Ed
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reference not valid.
. Donald Trump gave abortion rights supporters a frightening glimpse
of what an administration he commands might do when he told MSNBC's Chris
Matthews earlier this month that "[t]here has to be some form of punishment"
for women who have illegal abortions.
. Trump had to backtrack on his comments pretty quickly -- evidently
no one told him that even anti-choice Republicans don't call for punishing
women, but instead pretend to oppose abortion in the interests of protecting
women.
Ted Cruz claimed to be shocked at Trump's comments -- which you have to take
with a grain of salt considering that Cruz opposes abortions even in in
cases where the woman was raped. That's a position no US president has held
since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion.
With Trump or Cruz looking to be the most likely Republican presidential
nominee at this point, it's understandable why people who support
reproductive rights would be motivated to vote for any Democrat for
president, no matter how imperfect.
This is a regular feature of elections, especially for the presidency: The
Democrats win votes from people who want to make sure abortion remains safe
and legal, because no matter what, the Democrats are better than the
Republicans on this issue, right?
The problem with this reasoning isn't the answer, but the question. With
only two choices available, the Democrats can get away with doing nothing at
all to protect the right to choose abortion -- or worse, giving up more
ground to the right -- and still be certain of getting the support of
pro-choice voters, because they'll always be a little less bad than the
Republicans.
This is the pitfall of "lesser evilism" in general: Voting for the "lesser
evil" in order to stop the "greater evil" typically produces a combination
of both evils.
In the case of abortion rights, the whittling away of access and
reproductive choice -- restriction by restriction, at the state and federal
level -- is a product of both the Republican-led assault and Democratic
concessions, if not outright support for elements of the anti-choice
offensive.
***
It's worth pointing out that the Republicans didn't always have the position
it does now on women's right to abortion. Until 1980, the party was split
between a faction that agreed women should be able to obtain an abortion, as
laid out in the Roe decision, and those who opposed legal abortion.
In fact, for decades before that, the Republicans avoided using the word
"conservative" to describe their party. The 1960 Republican platform plank
on women's issues talked about "progressive Republican policies," and
throughout the 1960s and '70s, the GOP supported an Equal Rights Amendment
(ERA). In 1968, the Republican platform included planks opposing
discrimination, supporting punishment for polluters and proposing to lower
the eligibility for Social Security from 72 to 65 years old.
How could this be? The overall political climate in the US had shifted to
the left after the McCarthy era, most of all as an effect of the civil
rights movement and the other social movements to come in the late 1960s and
early 1970s.
The entire mainstream political spectrum, including the Republican Party
representing the right end of it, became more liberal under pressure from
social discontent. The same effect was felt, only in reverse, in the era
that followed -- both Republicans and Democrats moved rightward from the
late 1970s on.
Specifically, the Republicans struggled in the '70s to find a new base of
support after an era of Democratic political dominance. Party leaders saw an
opportunity to bring in a more socially conservative, religious voter base
-- especially in the South, where there was an audience opposed to many of
the demands of the social movements of the time.
In this way, the Republicans could be a party that continued to serve the
interests of big business, first and foremost, but still attract a loyal
following among conservative voters.
This is how the GOP went from being split on the issue of abortion to
staunch opposition. Take Ronald Reagan, who signed several bill in support
of abortion rights as California's governor in the 1960s, well before Roe v.
Wade. By 1980, he was anti-abortion and campaigned for the presidency on
that basis.
At the 1976 GOP convention, delegates approved a platform plank stating that
abortion "is undoubtedly a moral and personal issue" on which Republicans
disagree.
By 1980, that had all changed. Now the party said it sought a constitutional
amendment protecting "the right to life for unborn children." It also
dropped its support for the ERA.
Four years later, the fanatical anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly was helping
to craft the Republican Party position on abortion, and pro-choice
Republicans were iced out. Along with this came the mobilization of
anti-abortion forces at the grassroots -- with "right to life" protesters
trying to shut down clinics across the country.
All of this went along with more conservative language that played to
bigotry, but also distanced the GOP from its moneyed image. The party of
Corporate America and Wall Street began referring to "Washington's governing
elite." To pander to racists, the Republicans emphasized that they were
"tough on crime" -- a coded message based on the prejudice among supporters
that Blacks were responsible for crime and violence.
***
A simultaneous shift was taking place within the Democratic Party, though it
took a different form. The Democrats maintained their support for keeping
abortion legal -- and used this commitment at every election to win votes --
while making more and more concessions to the escalating attack on abortion
rights, especially on laws restricting access.
In 1980, the convention vote in support of abortion in the party platform
was two-to-one in favor. But by 1988, Kate Michelman, then the executive
director of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) was calling
for support for the vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, even though
the Texas Democrat opposed federal funding for abortion for poor women.
The 1992 presidential election illustrated the particular shifts going on in
each party. Bill Clinton, who six years earlier told the president of the
Arkansas Right to Life Committee that he was "pro-life," now stated his
support for keeping legal abortion -- while incumbent President George HW
Bush, who once supported Planned Parenthood, had reversed his position.
But the hollowing out of Democratic support on the issue was also clear. At
the party's 1992 convention, six pro-choice Republicans spoke while
"Pro-Choice, Pro-Clinton" signs were passed out on the convention floor.
"Their presence emphasized the fact that the Democrats no longer see the
issue as a matter of principle or even as deference to one of its
constituency groups," writes Jo Freeman, author of We Will Be Heard.
"Democrats are now convinced that it's the way to win elections."
Then-National Women's Political Caucus Political Director Alice Travis told
Freeman, "The Democratic Party is a feminist organization. We don't have to
lobby and march outside any more. We march together. It's not Us versus
Them. The Party stands for the same things the movement stands for."
In other words, mainstream women's rights organizations were abandoning any
kind of independent position that would allow them to criticize or even
pressure the Democrats -- by simply identifying their interests with the
success of the Democratic Party within the mainstream political sytem.
Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women (NOW)
bucked the tide somewhat, explaining that the group would not attended
either party's convention in 1992, but would participate in the founding
convention of the "21st Century Party," which committed to supporting
candidates that took up the rights of women.
"Politicians come and sweet-talk us every election and then they don't
respect us in the morning," NOW President Patricia Ireland told supporters
in 1992. But this stance was largely symbolic. NOW said it would endorse
21st Century candidates only in places where no major-party candidate
already supported their aims -- in most cases, Democrats could be portrayed
as backers.
***
The 1992 election was supposed to usher the "Year of the Woman" after a
number of Democratic women were elected to Congress, including 48 members of
the House of Representatives.
But the "Year of the Woman" starting the following January got off to a
pretty dismal start when a Democratic-controlled House voted to reauthorize
the Hyde Amendment, the 1976 bill that banned federal funding to poor women
who wanted to obtain an abortion, in a 255-to-178 vote.
While Bill Clinton won the White House with the endorsement of supporters of
women's rights, he didn't return the favor. During the campaign, he vowed to
help enact the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would have codified Roe
v. Wade in federal law. In the first year of his administration -- and with
Democrats controlling both the Senate and House -- the measure died without
reaching the floor of either chamber.
The rightward shift continued. Without federal legislation like FOCA
standing in the way, states continued to pass restrictions on abortion, such
as waiting periods and parental consent. Even the way that Democrats talked
about legal abortion accommodated more and more to the right, including an
emphasis on finding common ground with the anti-choice side.
The rhetoric of both Bill and Hillary Clinton about keeping abortion "safe,
legal and rare" became the mantra among Democrats -- and rather than
challenge this compromised position, women's organizations in turn adapted
their own message. Instead of putting pressure on the Democrats, the
Democrats were putting pressure on them.
A decade and a half later, the Freedom of Choice Act got the same treatment
under newly elected President Barack Obama -- enthusiastic support during
the campaign, but no action afterward. Obama stated at a Planned Parenthood
gathering that in order to confront state-level anti-choice laws, "The first
thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act."
But this wasn't the first thing he did, nor the second or third. In fact,
the Freedom of Choice Act didn't seem to be on the list at all -- as he said
explicitly as early as 2009:
[T]he Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority. I
believe that women should have the right to choose, but I think that the
most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding
this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that's where
I'm going to focus.
The next year, as Obama's health care legislation was being negotiated,
Obama used reproductive rights as a bargaining chip -- he sacrificed
abortion coverage in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in order to win the votes
of anti-choice Democrats.
The version of the health care bill that passed the House in November 2009
was included the Stupak Amendment, which stipulated that insurers
participating in the health insurance exchanges established by the ACA
couldn't cover abortions in the policies offered to people who were getting
any subsidies from the government.
Obama hailed the amendment named after anti-choice Michigan Democrat Bart
Stupak as "courageous" -- which is probably not the word I'd use for a
provision that makes it even more difficult for poor women to obtain a safe,
legal abortion. Cruel and opportunistic is more like it.
This is the Democrats' actual history on abortion rights. Yet year after
year, the party uses the threat of losing abortion rights to extort voters
into supporting their candidates. The same will happen this year with likely
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, even though her insistence on finding
common ground with the right and making abortion "rare" is decidedly out of
touch with many abortion rights supporters.
The history makes it clear -- support for the Democrats as the "lesser evil"
makes it easier for the party to compromise with the "greater evil." When
the Democrats know they can assume pro-choice support, they can move further
to the right to find "common ground" that falls well short of defending the
right to and accessibility of abortion.
Not only is a woman's right to choose abortion left at the mercy of whatever
deal Democratic politicians work out, but expectations about what women
should demand and expect from the US political system are systematically
lowered. We won't concede -- we support the right to affordable and
accessible, without apology.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Elizabeth Schulte
Elizabeth Schulte is a contributor to Socialist Worker.
Related Stories
Reproductive Sovereignty or Bust!
By Carol Downer, SpeakOut | Op-EdReproductive Health Care in Women's Prisons
"Painful" and "Traumatic"
By Victoria Law, Truthout | ReportAbortion Providers Faced a Staggering
Increase in Violence and Threats in 2015
By Cristiano Lima, AlterNet | Report
Show Comments
