Bush's stance on abortion - 27 January 1989

We’ve been talking since November, as we always do once every four years, about the new president’s honeymoon and how long it will last.

President Bush’s honeymoon ended with a bang this week, as honeymoons tend to do, with the birth of a baby or, rather, with the question which we thought had been answered 15 years ago about whether an American woman has a right to prevent or abort the birth of her baby.

A right in this country is not about what most people today or the Congress today think is right but what the men who wrote the Constitution 200 years ago would have thought if the question had ever come up.

Am I saying that those brilliant and thoughtful men who got out that remarkable 18th-century document anticipated, for instance, the showing of hard-core, down-to-the-buff pornographic films and would have approved them as being expressions of freedom of speech?

I think it extremely unlikely but the present Supreme Court of the United States, which is the ultimate judge of our rights, has said yes and when in 1973 Texas and Georgia exercised their own law which forbade a woman to have an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy the Supreme Court, by a thumping majority of seven to two, overturned that law and by implication overturned restrictive abortion laws that were on the books in 44 other states.

At that time everybody thought – and the pundits wrote – that this was what they call "a landmark decision", that, like the abolition of slavery or the prohibition of making or selling alcohol, that it was settled once for all, but remember that there are 50 state legislatures and when a law in any one of them has been struck down by the Supreme Court the people who are hurt don’t always sulk, lick their wounds and forget it. They regroup and rewrite the overturned law and put it up in another form.

The abortion issue has never faded away and perhaps never will, and it was declared from on high that no state might prevent an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy then how about the first three months or how about allowing abortions only in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger?

These questions and many more arguments have been kept alive and will be tested in other laws drafted by other states. The Supreme Court indeed has four different state laws all about abortion coming up before it this term. Different judgments can be given in each case according to the stated circumstances and overturning any one of them does not mean that the blanket law Roe v Wade of 1973 would be automatically abandoned, but this is such a burning human issue that most of us can’t bear to act like lawyers, leaning back for months and years saying "Well yes, on the one hand... and, then again, on the other hand...".

Most people have drastically simplified the issue into two downright opposing sides – the people who are against abortion under any circumstances, who call themselves Right-to-Lifers, and the people who are for abortion under practically all circumstances and call themselves Pro-Choice, meaning a woman’s right to keep or not to keep her baby.

Of course it was one of the biggest issues in the election campaign and Mr Bush followed Mr Reagan down the line of being anti-abortion but then saying, for himself, yes in cases where the mother’s life might be endangered that would be different.

So the election was over and we assumed that the burning issue would cool off for a while, but the day after Mr Bush became president was the 15th anniversary of the famous or infamous case of Roe v Wade and outside the White House there was a mighty parade of Right-to-Lifers chanting and waving their signs calling Pro-Choicers murderers.

It was doubly embarrassing for President Bush because he’d just appointed to his cabinet as secretary of health and human resources the first, so far the only, black man, a Mr Sullivan, who caused a stir at the start because he’d been known and publicised as a pro-abortion man.

Now, however, he assured Mr Bush in accepting the nomination that he was on the president’s side. A few days later his true stand seemed to wobble again because he was reported as being “not opposed to abortion under all circumstances”. At the moment he seems to want to have it both ways which, in a Cabinet officer who’s expected to agree with his boss, is a hard thing to do.

Anyway, he has embarrassed the president and most openly the Republicans on the committee that will listen to him and other witnesses and have to confirm or reject him. The senior Republican on that committee appeared on a television interview the other night and admitted that he and his party were in an uncomfortable spot.

He thought Mr Sullivan would probably be confirmed chiefly because he’s the only black man Mr Bush has chosen and to kick him out at this point would trigger an awful backlash, not only from Pro-Choicers but from blacks of any persuasion.

The choice of Mr Sullivan – made before he was thoroughly quizzed about his beliefs – looks like a blunder second only to Mr Bush’s hasty choice of Dan Quayle as vice president, in the at the time impulsive belief that since he was of the baby-boomer generation and the issue of children’s day care for such was then very hot in the campaign debates, that Mr Quayle would be a shrewd, nay an ideal, choice.

I haven’t mentioned Mr Quayle since he ascended to the second highest office, or as the Washington correspondents are never tired of hissing, “a single heartbeat away from the presidency”. The consensus is that he is doing a fine job, that’s to say he can’t be seen to be doing any job at all which is right and proper for a vice president who has no constitutional duties at all, apart from presiding whenever he feels like it over the debates in the Senate.

As for his general or particular executive abilities which have not been tested in any way, we have the word of Mr Richard Nixon speaking after lunching with Mr Quayle that “he is not the intellectual midget he has been made out to be”.

One of the curious things that’s happened about the changing of the guard is the revising of judgements about the old boy who has gone off into the sunset. The right applauded him, the centre applauded him. The left of centre demurred over the memory of Iran-Contra but praised him too.

The left – it’s an interesting puzzle why in America in the Reagan era there is very little out-and-out left – but the left, such as it is, lamented him in his eight years and gave us yet again blood-curdling reminders that the Reagan prosperity will have a fearful price to pay.

But I notice, in looking over some European papers, a note of embarrassment, of second thoughts, of agonised reappraisal on the part of leftish or liberal papers that have had no misgivings in the past four years in damning Reagan’s foreign policy and what they take to be the heedless prosperity he engineered or wished into being.

What jolted these papers into at least a rethinking exercise was the undeniable, the incredible, popular rating with which Mr Reagan left office. No president since scientific polls – or any other polls – have been taken has touched him. Eisenhower, whom all of us agreed long ago was beloved beyond compare, went out of office with 59 Americans in 100 saying he was a great and good man. Ronald Reagan left with 68 Americans in 100 cheering him on his way.

One of my favourite liberal papers manfully faced up to this enigma and decided after all he had something. What he had, it says here, was – wait for it – “simplicity”. I quote, “When the great test of responding to a new Soviet Union came, then he simply saw the need. When there was ambassadorial business to be done, communicating with ordinary people, then simply he relished it. When a nation made miserable by the toils of the '70s needed a little pick-me-up then simply he was there, and when he changed his mind about something like the evil empire his simplicity tugged Congress to ratification in his wake.”

I don’t think this really probes the mystery to the root but it’s on the way. He touched ordinary people by speaking their language and responding, without shame or a second thought, to their instinctive feelings at the time.

I watched his visit on a hideous, hot day to the families of the crew that perished when the Challenger blew up. I watched it with a close friend who likes to be described as a professional liberal and one who has deplored most things in the Reagan reign.

When he’d embraced these people and inclined a grieving face to theirs there was no suggestion of artfulness. He felt it, and looked it, and there were tears in my companion’s face. She said “Well I suppose if you’re looking for leadership that’s it.”

The papers I’m talking about all rehearsed, of course, his indifference to facts, his allergy to details, the immense scandal of the Iran-Contra affair, which somehow didn’t wreck him because I think he seemed distraught and baffled by it, as we were distraught and baffled.

This absolutely transparent emotion was what saw him through dreadful times. On Iran-Contra, a senator on the investigating committee said afterwards that the most amazing thing to him about the outcome was that most of the Congress didn’t blame the President so much as feel sorry for him.

Over 20 years ago after I’d spent a day interviewing then Governor Reagan, I wrote about him, “He sounds like a decent, deadly serious, baffled middle-class man. It may be his strength among the voters that in a country with a huge middle class he faithfully reflects their bewilderment at the collapse of the old middle-class standards, protections and, perhaps, shibboleths."

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