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"It shocked me that they were saying abortion is okay," Anita said later. "One woman there had a child and I said to her, 'Did you have an ultrasound? Didn't you see the heartbeat? Didn't you see that was a child?' "As it happens, abortion barely came up in the Catteralls' conversations with the residents of Clinton. But Rebecca Catterall would have had a ready answer. "Eliminating access to abortion won't eliminate unwanted pregnancies. Whose daughter, friend, or sister will be the first to die or become maimed from a back-alley abortion?"
Both sides were eloquent surrogates for the abortion activists who have enormous influence within the two political parties. For some of those people in the pro-choice camp, any restrictions on a woman's control over her own body is an assault on her personal freedom -- and Democrats running for national office had better get on-board with them. For pro-lifers at the opposite end of the spectrum, abortion under any circumstances is murder and must be made illegal -- and good luck to the Republican candidate who begs to differ.
It's a debate with no room for compromise, we're told. And today's political climate may make it so. But a lot of Americans seem to wish it were otherwise.
There's a reason that Bill Clinton came up with the ultra-nuanced line that he wanted to make abortions "safe, legal and rare." Personal convictions aside, he was a master at reading the public mood. And on abortion, the majority of Americans are not wholly comfortable with the activist positions.
Consider that when delegates to the 2004 Republican and Democratic national conventions -- a fine definition of activists -- were asked in a New York Times/CBS News survey if abortion should be "generally available," their replies showed a gaping divide of 62 percentage points; when the same question was put to everyday people who merely identify themselves as Republican and Democratic voters, the gap shrank by half (with Democrats, in particular, separating themselves from their party's delegates). Polls show that a majority of Americans feel that abortion should remain legal, but only under certain circumstances. Clear majorities are pro-choice if the pregnancy results from rape, if the woman's life is endangered, or if it's determined within the first three months of pregnancy that the child would be born with a life-threatening illness. Yet majorities are against abortion once the woman is in her third trimester of pregnancy (unless her life is at risk or the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest), when abortion is a tool for gender selection, or when it's based on personal inconvenience, such as a married couple not wanting more children.
Despite this consensus, numerous politicians on Capitol Hill are following the dictates of their party's activists and interest groups, fearing they'll otherwise be targeted for extinction. In other words, the national debate over abortion is being framed by absolutists, while most Americans have congregated in the middle.
Civil on Unions
Gay rights ignited nearly as much divisive rhetoric as abortion during the 2004 campaign. On that topic, however, there was more conciliation than controversy in Topanga and Clinton.
On gay issues, Anita Cambre says her Topanga neighbors seemed "really surprised" to discover that she thinks gays should have the right to marry. "My mother has quite a few friends who are gay," Anita says, "and I was raised with an open mind about it." She acknowledges that she and Steve have "different views" on gay marriage. In fact, Steve says, "I'm against it. It would cheapen the institution of marriage and open a Pandora's box." He's in step with the majority, as more than half of Americans oppose gay marriage.
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