Matt Yglesias

NARAL President Nancy Keenan on Abortion and Health Reform

Yesterday came the news that the Senate Finance Committee might include language preventing Exchange-participating insurers from offering coverage for abortions in pursuit of Republican support for overall health care reform. It strikes me as a strange tactical idea because the two Republicans most likely to support reform, Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine are both pro-choice, and that’s all the Republicans you need. But this trial balloon highlights the fact that health care reform is full of angles related to reproductive rights. Dana Goldstein has an enlightening interview with NARAL President Nancy Keenan on this subject in which she warns that “that many, many women could lose the coverage they presently have.”

Bishops, Baptists Organizing Against Contraception

It’s precisely because of stances like this that it’s very hard to take the “abortion is murder” crowd seriously when they say abortion is murder. Their revealed behavior indicates that they don’t actually find abortion especially problematic, but just place it on a spectrum containing a general aversion to women controlling their own sexuality:

But more conservative religious groups working with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships say they would be forced to oppose such a plan—even though they support the abortion reduction part—because they oppose federal dollars for contraception and comprehensive sex education. This camp, which includes such formidable organizations as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention, is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills. One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy, while the other would focus on supporting pregnant women.

Atrios sees this as a reason to mock those who advocate seeking “common ground” with abortion proponents. I think we’re arguably seeing here the real fruits of seeking common ground in good faith—their real views are smoked out.

Public Opinion on Abortion

There’s been a lot of talk lately about a couple of polls that seem to indicate rising popularity of the “pro-life” self-ascription. John Sides helps us put this in context with some time-series data from the National Election Survey:

There has been some discussion about abortion during recent years. Please tell me which one of these opinions best agrees with your view:

1. By law, abortion should never be permitted.

2. The law should permit abortion only in case of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger.

3. The law should permit abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or danger to the woman’s life, but only after the need for the abortion has been established.

4. By law, a woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice.

Looks like not much is happening in terms of trends. It continues to be the case that the orthodox conservative position on abortion is extremely unpopular, but that the orthodox liberal position doesn’t command majority support either. At the link you can see data from the General Social Survey that leads to a similar conclusion.

Going Pro-Life

Raymond Hernandez for The New York Times takes a look at pro-life Democratic candidates:

Kelli Conlin, the president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, called the recruitment strategy misguided, saying that surveys conducted by her organization showed that even some Republicans express support for abortion rights when her group described the consequences of outlawing the procedure.

“The movement to recruit anti-choice candidates ignores the larger reality that this is a pro-choice nation,” she said. “It misses the larger point.” (Polls show a divided nation on the issue: A 2008 CNN-Opinion Research poll found that 53 percent of Americans characterized themselves as “pro-choice,” versus 44 as “pro-life;” a 2007 poll by the same organization showed the numbers reversed, 45-50.)

The Times uses Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) as the poster child for this trend, but he actually seems like an outlier example. Pro-choice Democrats regularly win statewide in Pennsylvania — Clinton in 1992 & 1996, Gore in 2000, Rendell in 2002 & 2006, Kerry in 2004 — and, indeed, pro-choice Republicans like Arlen Specter and Tom Ridge have a good record in the state as well. In a place like that, pro-choice voters are naturally going to have a strong preference for a pro-choice candidate. But the fact that Casey’s opponent was Rick Santorum nevertheless left Casey as clearly the more socially and culturally liberal candidate.

The main subject of the article is the rather different case of recruiting pro-life candidates to run in districts or states that are so strongly anti-choice as to make it highly unlikely a pro-choice candidate could win. To me, that seems like a very different calculation. What’s more, it’s clearly a calculation that makes national polling on abortion rights irrelevant.

Could or Would John McCain Ban Abortion?

A new Barack Obama ad tries to get pro-choice voters alarmed about John McCain’s steadfastly anti-choice record. An announcer argues that “as president, John McCain will make abortion illegal” then shows a snippet of Meet The Press where McCain tells Tim Russert that he favors “a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions.” The ad concludes: “We can’t let John McCain take away our right to choose. We can’t let him take us back.”

Brendan Nyhan says this “distorts” McCain’s position and deems the overall product “misleading.” What’s wrong with it?

The president can’t make abortion illegal. If John McCain appointed new conservative Supreme Court justices (who must be confirmed by the Democratic Senate), it is possible that the Court could decide to overturn Roe v. Wade. In that case, the issue would be returned to the states, who would each create their own abortion policies through the legislative process. The odds of McCain successfully passing a constitutional amendment to create a national ban on abortion are zero — there is simply no way he “will make abortion illegal.”

For one thing, conservative members of congress regularly seek to pass federal legislation restricting reproductive freedoms (”partial birth” abortion bans, etc.) and I see no reason to think that would change if Roe were overturned. And more broadly, the idea that it’s unfairly deceptive to characterize McCain’s position on abortion accurately — he favors outlawing abortion throughout the country — on the grounds that it’s extremely unlikely that McCain would be able to deliver legislatively on his policy preferences seems like an odd standard. Democrats will almost certainly have a congressional majority in 2009 which makes it very unlikely that any aspect of his domestic agenda will pass precisely as proposed. Does that make it unfair to critique his domestic policy proposals?

Flip-Flopping on Abortion

In all likelihood the origin of the myth that John McCain is pro-choice is that it really is true that despite McCain’s solid pro-life record, back in 2000 he suggested modifying the Republican plank to call for the criminalization of abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or where failure to abort would kill the mother. That would be a far cry from the pro-choice position, but it would be somewhat more moderate than the current platform’s commitment to blanket criminalization. Then he lost the primary, his views swung to the left on a variety of views, and then starting with George W. Bush’s re-election campaign he swung his views on taxes, immigration, and a series of other issues back to the hard right. But as of April 2007 he was still mavericky on abortion:

Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., told ABC News Saturday that he still wants to change the GOP’s abortion platform to explicitly recognize exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.

But now his campaign says they won’t try to change the platform after all. Instead, the plan is to just try to avoid accepting any responsibility for his repeated cave-ins to conservative dogma.