ustxtxb_obs_1998_05_08_50_00025-00000_000.pdf

307 West 5th Street Austin, Texas the most famous anti-abortion pictures, known as “the bucket shot,” was produced by a doctor who admitted to having staged the picture, intending to use it as anti-choice propaganda. Stoked by such incendiary material, anti-choice radicals carried out acts of violence against clinics. While some more moderate portions of the anti-choice movement recognized that such acts would alienate anti-choice moderates, zealots were still willing to carry them out, in their fanatical desperation to “stop the killing.” The irony of promoting violence in order to save lives passed over many, but not over Sam Lee. A rational, quiet man, Lee serves in Articles of Faith as a compassionate embodiment of the anti-choice movement. Gorney stresses how likable Lee is \(even to those on the pro-choice masculine bias of the anti-choice movement, exemplified by C. Everett Koop – who decided, while on a luxurious retreat in Switzerland, that it was his duty to end abortions in the United States. The anti-choice movement has been fanatical since its inception. Even before the charismatic leadership of Ralph Reed and Randall Terry, the anti-choicers were staging threatening demonstrations, kidnapping abortion doctors, and shooting at them. They claimed religion was on their side, even though denominations were in disagreement about abortion. \(As one evangelical pastor put it, “Scripture makes Gorney seems to have gained the confidence of a number of anti-choice activists, and her insider detail makes the movement seem more bumbling or absurd than appears in daily newspaper accounts. During one working session of the Missouri Citizens for Life, the group’s members schemed to break into a clinic during operating hours and urinate on the vacuum aspirators, at the very least to disable them temporarily. As they saw it, prolonging the life of the fetus, even by minutes, was a noble endeavor. The book documents the uglier sides of both movements. Anti-choice activists fudged fetus pictures, because they know that fetus pictures elicit the greatest response. Pro-choice doctors connived to foist off lengthy abortions on other doctors, so that they could perform the largest number of procedures. \(Doctors were then paid on a per-abortion basis; the system has But the pro-choice figures in the book do not attempt to deny their own questions about abortion. Gorney describes her prochoice protagonist, Judy Widdicombe, undergoing and then considering her own \(ilslump into something like grief, a mourning not for a person, but for an idea, a shadow, a not-yet person.” Even though Judy Widdicombe never wavered about her decision, it was nonetheless emotionally charged, and Gorney does not try to cover that up. But it is not only “pro-choice” women who have abortions. In the clinics, writes Gorney, “Sometimes the counselors would sink into conference-room chairs at the end of the day and trade war stories about patients who had proceeded through the entire abortion process while insisting from start to finish that they were pro-life…. The protesters … had come in from the antiabortion ranks long enough to take care of their urgent little personal problem and then go right back out to the picket lines.” s candidates sparred over abortion during the eighties, the size of the . pro-choice majority in the Supreme Court slipped from seven to five. For prochoicers, the 1989 Webster ruling in 1989 was devastating. Planned Parenthood vs. Casey in 1992 was even worse. In the aftershock, abortion rights are disappearing across the country. Yet when it comes to abortion politics, there’s a public double standard. The pro-choice voting bloc has been shamed in the press as “single-issue,” although the anti-choice side has been very vocally single-issue anti-choice activists bluntly call it a “prerequisite” for politicians to be anti-choice, if they wish to receive support. True to her intentions, Gorney is able to write a moderate work about abortion. Yet the language one chooses to use when discussing the issue is so politically loaded that it is impossible to write in an entirely neutral fashion. Her pro-choice sympathies are evident, particularly when she explains the impact of anti-choice laws. The book’s most notable flaw is that it so seldom addresses the issue of access for poor and young women. Before Roe, poor or even workingclass women weren’t able to fly to Chicago or New York to get an abortion. Post-Roe, the situation has not improved. Since 1977, Congress has denied Medicaid coverage of abortions, essentially denying low-income women the right to an abortion. And as more parental notification laws are passed, the young are also being denied access to safe, legal services. Abortion clinics are being scared out of rural areas: there were community demonstrations and protests against the recently built clinic in College Station. Gorney ends her book optimistically, discussing the work of Common Ground, an organization that attempts to bridge the conflict over abortion by focusing on issues of commonality, such as insurance coverage for contraception. But this is false optimism. When Kofi Annan asked the United States to pay its billion-dollar debt to the United Nations last month, Congressman Chris Smith rallied the Republicans to agree to pay the.debt if, and only if, Annan would promise that not a dime Would go toward abortion. Ann. Moore is a graduate student at the U.T.Austin Institute of Latin American Studies, specializing in Demography. She works at the Texas Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. MAY 8, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 25