The Do Nothing Strategy: An Expose of National Progressive Politics

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In a long and difficult battle with other national pro-choice groups about how the debate on so-called “partial birth” abortion should be framed, principals of some of the national pro-choice organizations decided that those of us saying—so-called “partial birth” abortion bans were attempts to ban all abortion—had to be stopped. National pro-choice leaders decided to fight our message by calling pro-choice leaders on the state level and telling them not to work with us. The Executive Director of the National Abortion Federation concluded that our efforts to develop an accurate message should be destroyed. They knew that Fifty plus One had received funding to do trainings across the country to change the debate on so-called “partial birth” abortion. Whether or not our message was accurate, they felt threatened. The representative of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL—Now known as NARAL-Pro-Choice America) said that she would tell her affiliates that I was “a rogue with a dangerous political message.” This despite the fact that from 1986-1992, I led one of the most successful NARAL affiliates in the nation. In fact the national NARAL field office at the time referred to our affiliate as, “The Maryland Miracle.”

The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP—Now called the Center for Reproductive Rights) pointed out to other national groups, that together we could reach out to more states. The response of the others: “Why do we need to be in any more states? We don’t need to be in 16 states instead of 10, what good does that do us?” They were going to actively work against us and refuse to talk with me from now on. If I couldn’t use their message, the others didn’t want CRLP working with me to “legitimize” our efforts.

Many leaders of the national pro-choice movement are still debating the issue on the playing field designed and defined by their opposition, discussing the frequency and need for late-term abortions. Even worse in pursuit of this inherently losing strategy the movement destroyed its credibility by making up statistics about the frequency of certain late-term abortion procedures. They never put the partial-abortion bills in proper perspective as an effort to ban all abortions. By contrast in Maryland we did use the message that so-called “partial birth” abortion bans were designed to ban all abortion to defeat the legislation introduced into the Maryland state legislature, proving the effectiveness of the message.

Since the term “partial birth” abortion has no legitimate medical meaning, some in the media have begun an uninformed, dangerous trend by saying that “partial birth” abortion is medically known as dialation and extraction abortion (D&X). Assigning a legitimate medical term to this legislation is something that anti-choice legislators strategically avoided. They want a broad ban on abortion. Six staunchly anti-choice U.S. Congressmen including Henry Hyde, Charles Canady and James Sensenbrenner said in a letter dated March 18, 1996 on an earlier version of the bill: “H.R. 1833 does not ban ’D&X’ or ’Brain Suction’ abortions...the ban would have the effect of prohibiting any abortion [that meets our definition]...no matter what the abortionist decides to call his particular technique.” If George Bush appoints one more anti-abortion Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, this interpretation could well become the law of the land, in effect overturning Roe v. Wade.

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