Liberal cowardice puts the right to choose at risk

Opponents of the ban on partial birth abortion that passed Congress in October knew they had lost. "I know the handwriting is on the wall," California Senator Barbara Boxer said, before calling for another day of debate. What she got was pure political theater. Republican senators in cowboy boots held up pictures of bloodied fetuses with barely formed hands. Across the aisle, liberals from both coasts with loud suits and louder voices, decried the erosion of liberty, privacy, women's rights. In the end the measure passed, as everyone knew it would. Seventeen Democrats and 47 Republicans voted to approve the ban, vetoed twice by President Clinton. Third time's a charm.

The posturing after the vote was predictable. President Bush and his Capitol Hill lapdog, Majority Leader Bill Frist, used words like "abhorrent," "barbaric" and "moral sensibilities." You could cut the righteousness with a knife. Democrats, true to recent form, said little. No one tried to explain why seventeen of their own jumped ship and signed on to a bill that would have been anathema to the party not long ago. Defeated, the Democratic leadership went home, leaving groups like the ACLU, the National Abortion Rights Action League, and Planned Parenthood to vent their frustration to the media, the courts, to anyone who would listen.

.....The ban prohibits partial birth abortion across the board, with no exceptions for rape, incest or the health of the mother. In a country in which Roe v. Wade is law, pro-life leaders have constructed a straw man to distract the public while they slowly whittle away at the right to choose. Partial birth abortion is disgusting. It is easy for the public to look at pictures of fetuses so close to being children, to hear the stories about blood and suction, and to take their nausea and discomfort and turn it into public opinion.

.....This is a law that bans a specific medical procedure. If I were a woman on an operating table, I would want my doctor, and not Congress, to decide what procedure was right for me. But the people who introduced this ban don't believe this is a medical decision. They believe it is a matter of life and death — not of the mother, but of the unborn child. They make no secret that this is only a first step in their war on reproductive rights. Conservatives fought successfully to remove a provision from the bill that expressed the Congress' support for Roe v. Wade. After all, a signing in the Rose Garden is a small victory compared to the conservative judicial nominees, trimester provisions, and consent laws that are sure to come. Can a Supreme Court decision in their favor be far away?

The true hypocrisy is with the Democrats and pro-choice Republicans who signed on to this bill because it was popular, because it would have been too hard to vote against the graphic descriptions and fuzzy ultrasound pictures. These are the people who ought to be protecting the right to choose from the inevitable onslaught this legislation is sure to bring. These are the people who believe that a fetus is not a life, that a woman's womb is private, that there are some decisions the government has no right making for its citizens. And yet more than a few Congressmen most would call liberal, more than a few men and women who have given fiery speeches about the right to choose, made their way to the front of the Senate and House chambers and voted for this ban. It would have taken courage to explain why choice should triumph, to defy the propaganda and moral righteousness of the right, to hold dear to the convictions of medical privacy and women's rights. Sadly, courage is in short supply in Washington.

The law that Congress passed last month is likely to be struck down the by the courts. A similar state law was deemed unconstitutional three years ago because it contained no exceptions for the health of the mother and defined partial birth too broadly. Those of us who value our freedom from government morality and medical intervention can take solace in the fact that the Court will likely save us once again. Just over fifty percent of Americans call themselves pro-choice. We ought to be terrified of what could happen if the Court's fragile majority fell, if this law were allowed to stand. We ought to use our voices and our votes to make clear that we will not tolerate our rights being traded away for political bargaining chips or margins of error in public opinion polls. Opponents of the ban on partial birth abortion knew they had lost this battle long before the votes were cast. Now, we must prepare for the fights to come.

Katherine Reilly is a Wilson School major from Short Hills, N.J.