The Democratic Party platform, for years, has made it clear that it is a pro-choice party. Likewise, the Republican Party platform, for years, has emphasized that it’s a pro-life party. There’s very little wiggle room in either case. In fact, John McCain, not too long ago, wanted to alter the GOP platform to say the party makes an exception for rape and incest, but McCain quickly backed down when Republican activists told him that would be unacceptable.
But on the Democratic side, this may be the subject of an interesting debate.
Before the Democrats convene in Denver, the Rev. Jim Wallis plans to urge Barack Obama to go along with adding an “abortion reduction” plank to the party platform.
“Abortion reduction should be a central Democratic Party plank in this election,” Wallis told ABC News. “I’ll just say that flat out.”
Wallis, who hosted a Democratic candidates’ forum on CNN last year, discussed his plans after defending Obama against Dr. James Dobson’s charge that the Illinois Democrat distorted the traditional understanding of the Bible when he spoke to Wallis’s Sojourners group in 2006.
Beyond his plans to make a personal plea to Obama, Wallis said that he pitched the idea last week to DNC Chairman Howard Dean. The Rev. Tony Campolo, who sits on the party’s platform committee, also supports the plank and plans to push it, according to Wallis.
Wallis said this isn’t about undermining the pro-choice language of the platform. “You don’t have to call for criminalizing anyone,” he said. “You don’t have to take a different stance about a woman’s right to choose. But you begin with the need for reducing abortion dramatically.”
I’m not at all familiar with the platform-creation process, but there might be something to this.
In 1992, Bill Clinton came up with what I’ve long argued was the ideal pro-choice message: “Safe, legal, and rare.” “Safe” addressed the horrific dangers of back-alley abortions that would result from a ban; “legal” addressed the constitutional reproductive rights afforded to all women; and “rare” made the concession that some find abortion morally offensive, but we can do more to prevent unwanted pregnancies — and by extension, lower the number of abortions.
In this sense, Wallis’ recommendation — depending on wording and details, of course — may be a way of formalizing in the platform the “safe, legal, and rare” construction that the party has embraced for a while anyway.
The abortion reduction plank that Wallis envisions would call for making adoption easier, supporting low-income women, and stepping up pregnancy prevention efforts.
Without calling for restrictions such as parental consent laws, Wallis believes that if the Democrats were to alter their abortion platform, it could help them make inroads among young evangelicals and Catholics.
“Taking abortion seriously as a moral issue would help Democrats a great deal with a constituency that is already leaning in their direction on poverty and the environment,” said Wallis. “There are literally millions of votes at stake.”
If the platform will continue to make clear that the party is a pro-choice party, and will only articulate Dems’ commitment to reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies through progressive means, then this shouldn’t be too controversial.
I’m reminded of a bill Senate Dems unveiled in 2005 called the Prevention First Act, sponsored by Harry Reid (pro-life) and Hillary Clinton (pro-choice), which aimed to reduce the number of abortions by taking prevention seriously — through a combination of family-planning programs, access to contraception, and teen-pregnancy prevention programs. Barack Obama and 25 other Senate Dems signed on as co-sponsors, and NARAL endorsed the effort. There was, Dems agreed, nothing inconsistent about being pro-choice and working to reduce the number of abortions.
(Predictably, the religious right criticized the idea — Dobson famously said “there is no middle ground” on abortion — and Senate Republicans refused to even consider the bill.)
I mention this because if Dems were on board with the Prevention First Act, then an “abortion reduction” plank to the party platform may not be too big a stretch. Something to keep an eye on.
