Abortion Politics in American States

Mary C. Segers, Timothy A. Byrnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781563244490
• eBook ISBN: 9781315286716
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The essays presented here draw from the Soviet Interview Project's evidence of the internal condition of the CPSU party during the "era of stagnation" and its role, influence, and impact on the operation of legal and economic institutions and state bureaucracies.

ROSEMARY NOSSIFF

1 Pennsylvania: The Impact of Party Organization and Religious Lobbying

The contemporary abortion reform movement began in the United States in the mid-1960s in the aftermath of the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut.¹ In the eight-year period between Griswold and Roe v. Wade, fourteen states reformed their abortion laws to permit therapeutic abortions, and four states repealed them.² A striking exception to this trend was Pennsylvania, which passed a bill in 1972 to outlaw all abortions except in cases where the mother's life was endangered. Although that bill, HB800, was vetoed by Governor Milton Shapp, Pennsylvania has continued to lead the nation in restrictive abortion legislation since Roe with the passage of four abortion-control acts and various other bills in the past twenty years.

The campaign to restrict Pennsylvania's abortion legislation began in the late 1960s. Anti-abortion groups led by the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference (PCC) triumphed over pro-abortion forces for a variety of reasons that this chapter explores.³ Chief among them was the failure of the municipal reform movement in Pennsylvania to wrest control of the parties from the political machines. As a result, challengers such as the abortion reformers were unable to obtain the party support they needed to challenge the PCC. This, in turn, enabled the PCC to use its organizational and financial resources to create the abortion policy discourse in the state beginning in the late 1960s.

By discourse I mean talk,⁴ the definition of an issue and the policy response to it. In the war over abortion policy, discourse can be seen as a political resource used by interest groups to win public support for their definition of abortion and for the polices they support to regulate or deregulate its practice. Public discourse shapes the way we think about an issue. Nowhere is this truer than in abortion policy, where the subject was until very recently taboo, despite the fact that thousands of women were getting abortions, even going abroad to avoid local constraints.

In the wider context of political development, the clash over abortion policy discourse reflects the stormy federalist relationship between the national government and the states, which is characteristic of social regulatory policy. The legal discourse established by Roe collided with the moral one advanced by pro-life forces at the state level. This clash can be analyzed by examining the development of abortion policy discourse in Pennsylvania, the state that has had the most successful history in establishing a pro-life legislative agenda.

Pennsylvania's abortion policy can be broken down into four distinct stages. In stage 1 (1965—72) the PCC deflected attempts to create support for abortion reform by creating a discourse that defined abortions as infanticide and cast moral aspersions on women who sought them. The abortion discourse created by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, however, which held that unrestricted access to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy was a constitutional right, rendered this moral discourse immaterial.

During stage 2 (1973-80), pro-life forces in Pennsylvania passed the first Abortion Control Act as well as a myriad of bills designed to limit the impact of Roe. Much of this legislation was successfully challenged in the courts by prochoice forces, and, as a result, pro-life forces altered their strategy. In stage 3 (1981-88) pro-life forces passed two additional abortion-control acts, designed both to work within the framework established by Roe and to push back its boundaries. In stage 4 (1989-92) the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services was played out in Pennsylvania when the legislature passed the 1989 Abortion Control Act. Three years later, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Court upheld three of the main provisions of the 1989 act.

To understand why political conditions in Pennsylvania were more conducive to the success of pro-life forces than those of their pro-choice opponents it is necessary to examine the political developments that preceded them. In the period under discussion Pennsylvania was a strong party state with traditional party structures that regularly nominated candidates for public office.⁵ For this reason, the failure of the municipal reform movement to change the way the party system worked so that new political forces could be included played a crucial role in shaping the political resources and opportunities available to such outside groups as abortion reformers.⁶

To become part of the policy process, challengers need institutional support: legislators who are willing to sponsor bills; partisan resources, which can range from inclusion in various policy coalitions and party caucuses to access to lists of donors and active party members; and the political opportunities provided by a regime open to new policy demands.⁷ Unlike their counterparts in New York, who succeeded in repealing New York's abortion law in 1970 with the help of the reform wing of the Democratic Party, abortion reformers in Pennsylvania did not have similar resources or opportunities available to them. A brief examination of the municipal reform movement in Pennsylvania in the 1950s may explain why.

Municipal Reform

The modern history of municipal reform in Pennsylvania began in the late 1940s with the failed mayoral campaign of Democratic reformer Richardson Dilworth. Charges of municipal graft and corruption were the bases of Dilworth's campaign against the Republicans in the 1947 Philadelphia race. Throughout his campaign Dilworth leveled specific attacks against Republican incumbents, accusing them of being associated with organized crime.⁸ Although the Republicans denounced Dilworth in the press, he had established a large personal following, which became his future campaign base.⁹

Realizing the political support that municipal reform attracted in the campaign, the Democrats in 1949 drafted Dilworth to run for city treasurer; his former campaign manager, Joe Clark, ran for city controller in the off-year election. Both men won easily.¹⁰ Two years later, the Democrats nominated Clark to run for mayor and Dilworth for district attorney; once again both were elected.

Despite the support of the Democrats, Clark and Dilworth primarily considered themselves to be municipal reformers. Once in office, they were more concerned with controlling city government than in reforming the Democratic Party. Clark and Dilworth underestimated the party's power at the precinct level, and as a result they did not attempt to take control of the party apparatus from the regulars or replace it with mechanisms that would ensure that party reform would endure.

As we shall see, their disinclination for party reform had significant implications for the future of party politics in Pennsylvania in the 1960s. For example, had Clark and Dilworth institutionalized changes in the 1950s, the reform wing of the Democratic Party may have regularly sponsored abortion reform bills and helped abortion reformers to create a broad-based coalition to generate the support they needed to change the abortion laws in the decade that followed.

The absence of lasting reform was exacerbated by Clark and Dilworth's departure from Philadelphia politics. In 1956 Clark successfully ran for the U.S. Senate; in 1962 Dilworth unsuccessfully ran against Bill Scranton for governor. In a neat twist, Scranton and his running mate, Raymond Shafer, incorporated the theme of municipal reform (minus the program) into their successful campaign against Dilworth. Both developments enabled the Republican machine to temporarily reassert its control at the state level and the Democratic machine to dominate city politics once again.¹¹ Within fifteen years of their ascendancy, municipal reformers had effectively lost their power base.

Against this backdrop, abortion reform forces in Pennsylvania began their campaign to change the laws. When the contemporary abortion movement in Pennsylvania is viewed in this context, it becomes clearer why the party access and resources needed by abortion reform forces to challenge the PCC were not available to them, as well as why the PCC had a head start on its opponents even before the battle began.

Stage 1 (1965–72): Griswold to HB800

The right to privacy articulated in the 1965 Griswold decision was used by abortion reformers across the country to begin campaigns to change restrictive abortion laws. Since the Court had found that the right to privacy protected married couples' access to contraceptives, the reformers reasoned that constitutional protection might also extend to another contraceptive: abortion.¹²

In 1965 abortion reformers in New York linked up with the reform wing of the Democratic Party and began a campaign to change the state's restrictive abortion laws. In 1966, Reform Democrats introduced an abortion bill based on the American Law Institute's model for abortion legislation, which allowed for abortions in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, or to protect the physical and mental health of the mother. One year later, in neighboring Pennsylvania, a similar bill, Senate Bill 38 (SB38), was sponsored by a bipartisan group of legislators as part of a larger effort to update the state's penal code.

Partly as a result of the failure of the municipal reform movement, the mechanisms needed to place new policy demands on party platforms had not been established, and therefore there was no organized support for SB38, which died in committee. Had party support existed in 1967 for abortion reform, SB38 may have made it out of committee and onto the assembly floor for debate. Pro-abortion forces in Pennsylvania could then have used it in the same way their counterparts in New York had used the early abortion bills sponsored by the reform Democrats in Albany: to build support for abortion reform gradually by speaking about it at political clubs around the city.

The introduction of SB38 marked the beginning of abortion reform in Pennsylvania and the active opposition of the PCC. Although the bill had little chance of passing, the PCC nevertheless began a campaign to shape the public discourse concerning abortion policy. The PCC's strategy was to remain on the offensive as long as possible and to go on the defensive when necessary. To that end, it sought the assurance of Governor-elect Shafer that he would honor his campaign pledge to oppose abortion reform legislation. In addition, the PCC issued a public statement opposing SB38 on two grounds: that there were no objective medical standards to judge when the physical or mental health of the mother was in jeopardy, and that however tragic rape and fetal deformity were, they did not constitute justifiable grounds for abortion.¹³

The underlying message of the PCC's position, outlined in a draft of its public statement against SB38, was that physicians and women were not to be believed:

We are not unmindful of, or without compassion towards, the totally deformed, the true victims of rape, the possibility of the true impairment of physical or mental health of the mother, or in general, of the social and personal ills which the proponents of this legislation seek to remedy. We submit, however, that the act of deliberately taking innocent life can never be warranted as a remedy even for actual personal misfortune. . . .¹⁴

The absence of any previous discussion about abortion reform played into the hands of the PCC. From the start, it recognized the importance of establishing an anti-abortion discourse, which is why it responded so swiftly and vigorously to SB38. The PCC adopted Vatican II 's definition of abortion as infanticide to establish the future parameters of the debate. By doing so, it was able to define the issue in the moral and religious terms it supported. Because the PCC was the only public voice heard on abortion policy until 1969, it was able to define the issue without challenge.

By any comparison, the organizational and financial resources of the PCC dwarfed those of the abortion reformers. In addition to direct and regular access to millions of Catholic parishioners, the PCC could also draw on the church's active political lobby at the national level, the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC). In 1967 the PCC established an ad hoc committee on abortion, based on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Abortion Politics in American States
• 1. Pennsylvania: The Impact of Party Organization and Religious Lobbying
• 2. Minnesota: Shifting Sands on a "Challenger" Beachhead?
• 3. Maryland: A Law Codifying Roe v. Wade
• 4. Louisiana: Religious Politics and the Pro-Life Cause
• 5. Arizona: Pro-Choice Success in a Conservative, Republican State
• 6. North Carolina: One Liberal Law in the South
• 7. Ohio: Steering toward Middle Ground
• 8. Washington: Abortion Policymaking through Initiative
• 9. California: A Political Landscape for Choice and Conflict
• 10. Massachusetts: Abortion Policymaking in Transition
• 11. Beyond Compromise: Casey, Common Ground, and the Pro-Life Movement
• 12. The Pro-Choice Movement Post-Casey: Preserving Access
• Conclusion: The Future of Abortion Politics in American States
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index