THE 25-YEAR WAIT

BEHIND ALL THE SLOGANS ARE REAL CONVICTIONS AND HUMAN STORIES IN THE STRUGGLE OVER ABORTION RIGHTS

Author: By Wendy Kaminer

Date: SUNDAY, January 25, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

Despite a few laudable efforts to find common ground in the abortion conflict, there is little possibility of compromise between advocates and opponents of abortion rights. If you consider the fetus a person, you cannot condone abortion any more than you can condone the killing of a 5-year-old. If you consider the fetus only a potential human being, and care about female autonomy, you cannot condemn abortions any more than hysterectomies. This is not a dispute about whether life begins at conception; of course it does. The question is, does personhood begin at conception?

The political process is unequipped to mediate metaphysical debates about personhood, much less resolve them. So it's not surprising that in the 25 years since the US Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, much of our discourse about abortion rights has consisted of people yelling at each other across barricades. Two new books get behind the lines and into the hearts and psyches of the combatants.

Cynthia Gorney, a former reporter for The Washington Post, has written a gripping, comprehensive history of the abortion war that ought to become a classic. ``Articles of Faith'' centers on the battle in Missouri, where a strong right-to-fetal-life movement encountered a tenacious group of health care professionals intent on providing safe, legal abortions. Gorney chooses as her lead characters pacifist Sam Lee, who aspired to the priesthood and found his calling instead in the crusade to preserve fetal life, and registered nurse Judith Widdicombe, a veteran of the abortion-rights movement and founder of Reproductive Health Services, an abortion clinic based in St. Louis.

In Widdicombe and Lee, Gorney has found two highly idealistic activists, engaged in opposing moral crusades. As a young nurse in the 1960s, Widdicombe partipated in an underground network that provided safe, illegal abortions at a time when desperate women were being maimed and killed by incompetent abortionists. As a young, religiously motivated pacifist in the late 1970s, Lee led sit-ins at Widdicombe's clinic, established shortly after abortions were legalized (in 1973, when he was a sophomore in high school). Later, as a legislative lobbyist in the '80s, Lee helped draft a restrictive abortion law that Widdicombe challenged but which was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court. Both began with civil disobedience and eventually worked within the legal system.

It is no small irony that by 1990 these two idealists found themselves sharply criticized by their own colleagues for choosing political pragmatism over ideological purity. Lee focused on limiting the number of abortions, instead of working to eliminate them. Widdicombe worked to secure some core right to abortion, instead of challenging every limitation of it. For each of them, integrity -- an unselfish commitment to protecting women, or their fetuses -- seemed eventually to require compromise.

The search for consensus on abortion has engaged the country for over two decades, and Gorney deftly interweaves the legal, political, and social history of the struggle over abortion with the stories of Widdicombe and Lee and other activists. (They are not the only compelling characters in the book.) She clarifies the most important Supreme Court cases on abortion, illuminates the history of prohibition and reform (abortion was not generally illegal until the late 1800s), and follows the changes in antiabortion activity, as peaceful sit-ins gave way to bombs. This is not a simple book -- the narrative is as complex as the history it traces -- but it is brilliantly clear.

Today the campaign to end abortion is dominated by the Protestant right, but at the outset, in the early and mid-1970s, it was a crusade led partly by Roman Catholics on the left. ``Wrath of Angels,'' by journalists James Risen and Judy L. Thomas, is a valuable, in-depth history of the antiabortion movement and its takeover by newly mobilized conservative evangelicals. The sane and decent people on both sides of the abortion divide who now seek ``common ground'' were drawn together by the tragedy that Risen and Thomas describe: the descent into homicidal violence of what was supposed to be a pro-life movement.

In the beginning, there was John O'Keefe, a left-leaning charismatic Catholic and Harvard student who articulated a philosophy of protest for opponents of abortion rights drawn from the teachings of Gandhi and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (O'Keefe strongly influenced Sam Lee.) In the late 1970s, O'Keefe organized peaceful sit-ins at a Virginia clinic and enjoyed a momentary victory in state court when a sympathetic judge accepted his group's ``necessity'' defense to trespassing charges (based on the claim that their actions were necessary to save lives). The American Civil Liberties Union then filed a lawsuit in federal court; a US District Court judge rejected the necessity defense and issued an injunction against future sit-ins.

Civil disobedience was not a terribly successful strategy for O'Keefe's nascent movement, as Risen and Thomas report, and frustrated activists who believed that God endorsed their crusade to protect fetuses turned gradually to violence. It began with attacks on medical equipment and clinic property. The nation's first clinic bombings were in Portland, Ore., in 1976. The violence escalated with the kidnapping of a doctor in the early 1980s, and culminated in the '90s with the murders of two doctors and a bodyguard in a Florida clinic and of two clinic workers in Brookline. Conspiracy prosecutions ensued, and a federal statute regulating antiabortion demonstrations was enacted in 1994. In a controversial effort to protect access to abortion and prevent violence, advocates of abortion rights have sought to limit protesters' First Amendment rights.

What shaped the murderous passion to save fetal lives, which cost adult lives and civil liberties? By the 1980s, sit-ins, designed mainly for their symbolic effect, had become ``rescues,'' aimed at dramatically preventing abortions, one by one. Action was valued over a process of persuasion. At the same time, the alleged evils of abortion were linked to the ``evils'' of feminism, homosexuality, pornography, and secular humanism, as the Protestant right began to shape the movement. Anxiety about social change intensified, and it became hard to distinguish between efforts to preserve fetal life and a crusade to restore a vanishing style of life, marked by traditional sexual mores and gender roles.

Opponents of abortion often compare themselves to civil rights activists of the 1960s (or 19th-century abolitionists). But to supporters of abortion rights, the people who block access to clinics and harass women trying to enter them are more like the protesters who once surrounded historically segregated public schools and tried to prevent black students from entering. They were trying to preserve a way of life, too.