Nelson Mandela In America - 29 June 1990

"The morning after" – a familiar phrase that suggests the penalty of a hangover.

And in the past 30 years or so, it has meant, to newly-independent African nations, the letdown after the roaring festival of uhuru, the night of celebrating their freedom. Something of the same emotional letdown is beginning to be felt in New York City, certainly after the departure of Mr Mandela.

The wave of public euphoria followed him to Boston and then to the streets of Washington and Atlanta, but in between he went to the White House and sat down and talked to President Bush and for once in this kind of jubilant welcome, the only real issue was not obscured by the blizzards of goodwill and ticker tape.

I mentioned last time a speech Mr Mandela gave in South Africa in May in which he talked about "imaginary armies, which have not conducted a single armed struggle, who criticise us for trying to secure peace, our patience is not likely to last long".

That speech and similar speeches that at least foresaw if they didn't threaten an armed struggle were well remembered at the White House, so when the President and Mr Mandela sat together for three hours, Mr Bush was not slow to bring up the main anxiety.

Was Mr Mandela prepared now to speak for the African National Congress and renounce violence as a weapon in his struggle to have apartheid abolished? Mr Mandela did not have to be reminded that the United States had just broken off talks with the Palestine Liberation Organisation because Yasser Arafat had refused to condemn recent violence that the PLO has condoned, if not sponsored.

Mr Mandela has said many times here, to the administration's discomfort here, that he regards Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gadaffi and Cuba's Fidel Castro as his friends and loyal supporters, even going so far as to say that Mr Arafat's crusade was much like his own – to see that his own people achieved self-determination in the lands that were rightfully theirs. That, too, was not bypassed.

Mr Mandela knows of course that the United States has no diplomatic dealings or representation with Cuba and Libya. Would Mr Mandela now rule out the use of force? He would not and at the end of the meeting, there on the south lawn of the White House he plainly said why violence must be "a weapon in reserve", so long as the South African government continues negotiations with the African National Congress.

The congress, he said, has a total commitment to peace but if the government reneges on its promises and maintains what he called "repressive legislation", which keeps political dissidents behind bars and keeps in exile 20,000 South Africans and maintains the state of emergency in Natal, "then if we are forced to resort to violence it is because we have no other alternative whatsoever".

In appearing before Congress, Mr Mandela followed other recent revolutionary heroes, Mr Gorbachev, Mr Havel, in solemnly paying tribute to the American "giants", he called them, who gave him his revolutionary education – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln – always a sure-fire prescription for a standing ovation from congressmen who, it seems to me, never stop their cheering long enough to realise what he's really saying.

Which is to remind them that their nation was created by revolution – that when negotiations with the House of Commons collapsed and London went on closing American ports, billeting soldiers in the cities, entering and searching the houses of suspected rebels, along with other repressive legislation, then he was saying, in effect, you too had no other alternative than to resort to violence.

This reminder is usually passed off with jovial banter. This time it was received, amazingly, with thunderous applause, but it remains unanswerable.

Even before Mr Mandela had gone, several remarkable things happened in Washington that quickly swept him off the front pages. Two of the biggest popular issues that have flared and burned around the country for years were, if not doused, then brought under control for the time being – the right to life and the right to die.

On abortion, you know that the first time the Supreme Court took it up was in 1973 when, by a firm majority of 7 to 2, it delivered what can justly be called a landmark decision. Citing a woman's constitutional right of privacy, it legalised abortion throughout the nation but added three conditions. In the first three months of pregnancy the decision is up to a woman and her doctor, in the second three months, the states may set certain regulations to protect the woman's health; in the third three months they may take steps to protect the life of the foetus.

Since 1973, there have been 11 separate appeals to the Supreme Court on points not anticipated or ruled on in the first judgment. In 1979 came one of the most controversial rulings, the states may take a doctor's word when a foetus can live outside the womb – but doctors disagree.

This ruling really set a fire under the anti-abortionists the so-called Right to Lifers who first got involved in fierce arguments about when a foetus is a life, and went on later to declare that life begins in the moment of conception and that therefore all abortion is murder.

There have been eight more cases appealed since then – where abortions may be performed, who pays for them and then, no state need require abortions for women more than three months' pregnant to be performed in a hospital. That was an attempt on the part of the Right to Lifers to strike down abortion clinics, which they've been picketing ever since.

Last year, the Right to Lifers took heart from seeing the court show its conservative colours – it gave more authority to the states to restrict abortion allowing them, for instance, to make laws which limited abortions to cases of rape or incest.

Well last Monday, the court took up an issue that has nagged it in three previous appeals, which has to do with teenager pregnancies and the question of the parent's right to know or to intervene. There were two cases.

In Minnesota, the court ruled that that state can require a pregnant girl to inform both parents before having an abortion, so long as she has the alternative of a judicial hearing. In Ohio, a state law requiring only one parent to be notified was upheld provided the girl had the same alternative of a judicial hearing.

The Right to Life has claimed this as an interim victory on the way to illegalising abortion altogether. The Pro-Choicers say that in a country where only 60% of teenagers live with both parents and where in the black communities more than half of all teenagers live with one parent at most, almost always the mother and where runaway teenagers don't live with either, the Pro-Choicers say the rule will be very difficult to enact.

In the meantime, the conflict between the Right to Lifers and the Pro-Choicers, which has been bristling for 17 years, goes raging on.

Now how about the right to die? Down the past two decades there have been several grisly cases of men and women, both young and old, who have lain for years in a vegetable state and whose next of kin have wanted to have removed the mechanical devices that alone kept them, technically, medically alive.

Time and again, the state courts have denied such a victim any right to die, even when the patient was accessible enough to beg for surcease.

Monday's case was brought by the parents of a young woman who's been comatose for more than seven years. Her parents want to have her feeding tube disconnected.

Missouri's law said "no". The parents came at last to the Supreme Court to assure it that they knew that their daughter would have wished, in a vegetable state, to die. However, the court, by the narrowest possible majority, 5-4, upheld the Missouri law because the parents had not produced clear and convincing evidence of the young woman's wishes.

But – and it's a big, liberating but something never said before in the long history of the court – that there is a constitutional liberty to choose to die, to refuse unwanted medical treatment if the patient has anticipated such a medical crisis and made clear his/her wishes.

Where did the founding fathers in their wisdom grant this permission? Well according to eight of the nine justices, in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, "no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law".

This decision blew a great gust of relief through the medical and legal professions, which in all such cases – and there are 10,000 pulsating vegetables alive in this country at this moment – in all such cases the doctor may have longed to pull the plug but didn't dare for fear of a suit for malpractice, worse for murder. It has happened many times.

But the morning after the court spoke, across the country there was a happy rush of old folk, and some young, to get the printed forms known as "living wills", which maybe attached to a will and which precisely state the artificial means to prolonging life which the signatory wishes ahead of time to reject.

Forty-one states have laws honouring living wills, nine do not, but even in the 41 there has not been till now a guarantee from the highest court that a living will is a foolproof, family proof, hospital proof, lawyer proof protection against anyone who insists on keeping the faintest flicker of brain life in a comatose human vegetable.

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