Anti-Abortion Effort Seems Anti-Logic
On the most contentious of all American policy issues, Bill Clinton comes closest to stating a national consensus. His objective on abortion is to make it “legal, safe and rare.”
Colin Powell couldn’t say it any better. What does the anti-choice right say? Well, it stammers, and steams, and stews in its juices. And it schemes up ways to undermine holistic programs that, by all logic, it should support.
It would be safe to say that the vast majority of American couples, regardless of where they stand on abortion’s morality, at least would preach what they practice: birth control.
Why isn’t the anti-abortion movement the most vocal and ardent agent of birth control - of pills and IUDs, and yes, condoms?
The increased use of condoms, by the way, was cited as a key factor last week when National Center for Health Statistics discussed a 4 percent drop in the nation’s teen birth rate from 1991 to 1993. The other key factor was abstinence in the age of AIDS.
Positions taken in Washington make you wonder if this isn’t an anti-abortion movement but, more to the point, an anti-sex movement. So it would seem, except that the numbers in the anti-sex crowd indicate The Act had to figure in there somewhere.
These are people who, by and large, want poor single women to stop having babies. Yet they are dedicated to undermining the program that does the most in helping poor women control that condition: It is Title X of the Public Health Services Act.
Signed by Richard Nixon in 1970, Title X was based on this premise: “The availability of family planning service to low-income persons can be instrumental in preventing or alleviating poverty and dependence.” It provided the funds to public and private agencies to do just that. Do away with it?
In July the House Appropriations Committee sent a scary message when it voted 28-25 to dismantle Title X. As with other moves, the vote was portrayed as a way to do things better by awarding money to states in block grants. But the aim was clear.
“This proves the agenda (of the anti-abortion movement) is anti-family planning,” said a House opponent. The words of a rad-lib feminist? No, they came from Illinois Republican John Edward Porter. Rep. Porter led an uprising of moderate Republicans that salvaged Title X in a floor vote.
Comments by chairman Bob Livingston, R-La., indicated that the anti-Title X amendment he authored was a “payback” to the religious right for keeping its lip buttoned on sticky social issues while Newt Gingrich steered clear of them his first few months as House speaker.
Payback? What is the payback of undermining federal family planning services at a time when family caps are proposed for welfare mothers?
The measure clearly was meant to undercut agencies like Planned Parenthood, those on the front lines delivering needed family-planning services to the poor using Title X grants.
The fact that some Planned Parenthood chapters perform abortion is used against them in these funding battles. It is as if somehow abortion had been banned and the rest of the country, including Planned Parenthood, had not been informed.
Legal, safe and rare. Those in the ambivalent middle should be chanting this truly pro-life stand.
Legal. A ban on abortions would simply send a lot of scared women into back alleys’ darkness.
Safe. We want reputable people, those who deal with the whole spectrum of reproductive health, making this alternative possible.
Rare. Most of all, we want Title X to continue funding family planning services so that women can control their reproductive fates without abortion.
Or else we can treat those women, simply, as baby machines.
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