A matter of life and death

in the firing line. Ros Davidson reports

WHEN the UN population conference opens today in Cairo amidst threats

of terrorism, abortion will be among the most heated issues. And no

other Western country is more torn about it than America. At a recent

press conference hurriedly scheduled after an anti-abortion outcry,

Vice-President Al Gore promised that the Clinton administration will not

impose its mildly pro-choice views on other countries.

Ironically, America has a higher abortion rate than any other

industrialised nation, three times as high as Scotland's and twice as

high as England and Wales. Yet anger about abortion as a social,

medical, and moral issue is more violent in America than anywhere else

in the industrialised world.

Since abortion was declared a US constitutional right in 1973, there

have been three murders and two attempted murders by anti-abortion

activists. In October, Paul Hill will be tried for two killings, of an

abortion doctor and a volunteer in late July in Florida. The former

Presbyterian minister, who says killing abortion doctors is morally

justified, is also accused of trying to murder a third person outside

the clinic.

Indeed, for 20 years America's abortion clinics have been swamped with

tens of thousands of bombings, death threats, arsons, stalkings,

kidnappings, chemical attacks, pickets, and blockades. Reported

incidents against anti-abortionists are rare, but include bomb and death

threats, an arson attack and one car sabotage.

America's fundamentalism, its strongly anti-abortion religious

institutions and puritanism fuel the controversy. Its political

structure and heterogeneous population also lead to stark national

differences. Abortion was legalised in New York in 1970, but just last

month the federal government had to force Louisiana to fund abortions

for poor victims of rape and incest.

The Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, declaring abortion a

constitutional right, was an aberration of judicial activism, at odds

with Middle America's anti-abortionism, says Michele Arocha Allen of the

National Right to Life Committee, the largest anti-abortion group. Yet

opinion polls actually show most Americans want legal abortion within

certain limits, says Malcolm Goggin, a political scientist at University

of Houston, author of Understanding the New Politics of Abortion, and

who taught recently at Strathclyde University.

But Roe v. Wade clearly incensed the religious right, already powerful

since the 1970s' fight over gender equality and the Equal Rights

Amendment, says Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist at Emory University. Both

Reagan and Bush were powerfully anti-abortion and, with conservative

Supreme Court appointments, brought an erosion of its availability. In

1979, the states became more empowered to draft abortion laws, and in

1992 Roe v. Wade was challenged and upheld, although weakened

significantly.

Despite Clinton's tentatively pro-choice views, millions are finding

access increasingly limited. Congress passed a Bill in May banning

blockades, violence, and threats against abortion clinics. But the

procedure is at its lowest rate in America since 1976, according to a

study released this summer by The Alan Guttmacher Institute.

Access to the abortion is striking. As many as 94% of rural counties

have no abortion providers, while eight in 10 of all counties have none.

Fewer hospitals and clinics offer the procedure, and fewer doctors are

training to do it, even if they specialise in obstetrics and

gynaecology. Increasingly, abortions are ghettoised -- offered only at

specialised clinics by doctors who do little else.

With America's privatised health system, legal abortion is also often

out of reach. (Many seeking abortions at clinics are poor, teenage, and

minority.) Federal money is limited to abortion after rape, incest, or

if the woman's life is endangered. Indeed, several states including

Colorado and Michigan have tried to outlaw funding for virtually all

cases, but are being ordered to follow federal rules.

Although the Democratic health Bills currently being debated in

Washington would make insurers cover abortion, it appears less likely

such a provision would survive a tempestuous debate, or that there will

be insurance coverage for all of America's 37 million uninsured. The

Catholic Church has threatened to mobilise its 65 million members over

abortion funding, while at least 35 members of Congress are against such

coverage.

''Many issues in America are reduced to morality very quickly,'' says

Alex Sanger, head of Planned Parenthood of New York. Indeed Planned

Parenthood, America's largest network for family planning, abortion, and

sex education, traces itself to his grandmother, Margaret Sanger,

arrested for obscenity after opening America's first birth control

clinic in 1916. She was opposed by the Church, doctors, newspapers, and

courts as an ''uppity nurse,'' he says. ''But my grandmother was never

shot at or threatened with death,'' notes Sanger.

''We have the most virulently anti-sex ethos,'' says Beverly Harrison,

a Christian ethicist at Union Theological Seminary who wrote The Right

to Choose; Towards a New Ethic of Abortion.

Harrison adds, ''The same Churches that condemned contraception are

condemning abortion.'' She says nowhere else in the West is

fundamentalism so enmeshed with the political right, and nowhere else --

not Italy nor Ireland -- has the Catholic Church taken such a stand

against abortion.

Harrison says misogyny and original sin in traditional teachings on

abortion lead to a view of ''innocent unborn children'' versus a mother

tainted by birth, womanhood, and sex.

But she also notes the pro-eugenics and racist element in America's

early birth control movement and says the liberal Churches were too

ready to embrace it despite this ''morally-dubious'' tradition.

''It's an issue of gender roles and family relations,'' says Ammerman,

the sociologist. She says America's fundamentalists see the male-headed,

two-parent family as God-given. ''Abortion is striking close to the

heart of the nature of family and who's in control,'' she says. Family

values and America's moral decay were indeed a major issue in the 1992

presidential race, says Goggin, the political scientist. ''The

perception of breakdown is so acute,'' agrees Harrison, the Christian

ethicist. ''This is the society where capitalism is eating its own

children.''

Also crucial to understanding anti-abortionism is the fundamentalist

tradition of ''an eye for an eye'' and Americans' tendency to take up

arms, says Ammerman. Since even the most moderate anti-abortion

activists say 31 million unborn children have been killed since 1973,

she concludes that extremists may too easily view murdering an abortion

doctor as ''justifiable.''