For observers of the national politics of women’s rights, April 9, 2010 was a banner day. Three significant threads emerged in the same national story on the same day:  Congressman Bart Stupak of Michigan isn’t seeking re-election, Dawn Johnsen gave up her nomination to a top legal job in the Obama administration, and Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced that he will retire late this summer.  These developments offer an opportunity to look at national abortion politics, while offering some conclusions as to why and how to maintain a progressive trajectory in politics, starting locally.

As I wrote earlier, as anti-choice Democrats, Congressman Stupak and Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska played major, less than helpful roles in the reform of healthcare.  For Obama administration supporters hoping for bigger changes to medical care and insurance delivery, the antics of Nelson and Stupak served only to frustrate real debate and block more profound reform.  Months before reform passed, even Democrats were so fed up that some progressive groups went nationwide seeking support for Connie Saltonstall, a pro-choice Democratic candidate who was set to challenge Stupak in the Michigan primary.  Hours before the reform vote, Stupak also managed to alienate the anti-choice fringe on the right that supported him.  The pro-lifers who once lauded his dogged insistence on the no-federal-funds-for-abortion Stupak amendment, were furious that he dropped it and voted for the bill without it.  Instead, he settled for the promise of an Executive Order guaranteeing what was in the withdrawn amendment.  When Stupak’s verbal flogging by anti-choice groups continued, unabated, days after the President signed his Executive Order, even Congressman Stupak admitted that the anti-choice forces had used him as a tool to try to prevent passage of any healthcare reform at all, thinking that the bill would not get enough votes to pass with his amendment attached.  With all of that writing on the wall, Congressman Stupak understandably lacked the requisite courage to run for his tenth consecutive election.

While all that was happening, it went virtually unnoticed outside Washington that Senator Nelson was also holding up President Obama’s nomination of Dawn Johnsen to head the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).  Professor Johnsen cannot take the job as a chief legal advisor to the executive branch without first being confirmed by the Senate.  During the year that her nomination languished in the Senate, Senator Nelson was clear and public in opposing the President’s choice because earlier in Professor Johnsen’s career, she served as the Legal Director for NARAL Pro Choice America.  Despite Johnsen’s impeccable credentials, including gender, and the support and confidence of President Obama, Senator Nelson concluded that her former job working for a women’s rights organization made her a bad choice for the OLC.  Senator Nelson opposed Johnsen’s appointment to the OLC, even though – if not because – some of his fellow Democrats believed she’d make a superb Supreme Court Justice.  In the end, with her nomination hung up in Washington for months on end, Professor Johnsen went back home to Indiana to resume her law school teaching career.  And on April 9, she called it quits on the bid.

With Justice John Paul Stevens officially announcing his retirement in plenty of time for the Senate confirmation process to proceed with a Democratic majority intact, the fate of the Johnsen nomination hangs in the air as a shot across the bow by Senator Nelson.  Justice Stevens has served for decades as a stalwart guardian of individual liberty, including liberty for women to make their own healthcare decisions.  He’ll already be a tough but very important act to follow in that regard, but now President Obama has to be wary of a member of his own party in the Senate as he ponders his next choice for the nation’s highest court.

As a local activist, I first heard of the existence of anti-choice Democrats when I watched several run for the state legislature from districts in my very conservative, Republican county.  It’s disheartening that even real progressives from outside my little corner of Missouri, some aspiring to statewide offices and beyond, have repeatedly been willing to embrace anti-choice Democratic candidates who hail from mostly Republican areas.  Local politics, I have been counseled, should be accepting of anti-choice Democrats with deeply held beliefs against abortion.  In the short term, I let myself believe that these deeply held beliefs were so deeply and personally held, they’d never be used to batter the rights of people that did not hold the same views.  I quickly learned that when Democrats espouse anti-choice views, they do so out of a firm and public commitment to work for the obliteration of choice.  For real progressives, the trouble with anti-abortion Democrats is that they leave us without hope at election time when it comes to women’s issues.  This is so because on most other issues BUT choice, there is room for bipartisanship.  In other words, those interested in maintaining reproductive freedom and science-based family planning already know we’re not safe from Republicans.  And while any Democrat might work for better jobs legislation than Republicans, for example, the employment opportunities created by a predominantly anti-choice legislature had better have on-site daycare because it will also vote against women, choice and sex education every time the opportunity arises.

All politics is local in the sense that most national figures started out in the halls of Missouri, Michigan, Nebraska or other state governments.  Progressives involved in state and local politics can’t allow themselves to indulge in the fiction that we should support candidates who are mostly with us on the issues.  The real battlefield for reproductive freedom is in the state legislature, where new choice restrictions are put in place and real damage to women’s freedom is done almost weekly.

While party leaders may come late to the realization that anti-choice Democratic candidates always put women’s rights at risk, grassroots progressives in Republican strongholds that have no pro-choice candidate can look outside their districts and direct their investments of time, talent and resources in candidates elsewhere.  Not only does this assure that the right people with majority views on reproductive education and choice are working for us – and more importantly, not against us – at the state level, it may also serve to prevent the elevation of some of the anti-choice locals to the national political scene.

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Back in the 70s and 80s, the Democratic Party was a fairly uniformly libertarian organization.  It was the party of civil rights for minorities, gender equality and the guarantee of basic civil liberties for all, including those liberties expressly reserved for women under the principles of Roe v. Wade.  But when the party of tolerance began to compromise its more progressive principles by permitting the less liberty-minded under the big tent, it created a contingent of religious extremists in its own ranks who were willing to sacrifice progress in order to advance a myopic agenda of outlawing abortion.

Replaying the highlights of the healthcare reform process, it is plain that the anti-choice showboating of a few Democrats came closer than any concerted resistance by Republicans to putting off reform for another generation or more.  Though the question before Congress was how to fix the healthcare crisis, it seemed all that Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan and Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska wanted anyone to talk about was who would pay for abortion insurance.  With Nelson and Stupak focusing public attention on the hot- button abortion diversion and away from the relevant issues of how to curb costs and keep the insurance industry accountable, it’s no wonder the rest of the Democrats resorted to backdoor deals to save the very life of reform, in place of vigorous discourse on the substantive issues.  After all, most politicians would rather take a beating than publicly debate abortion rights, even when abortion rights are the real focus of government action.

But vigorous debate over the contours of reform was not all that was lost.  Late last year, through a series of appeasement talks with Senator Nelson who is both anti-choice and anti public option, Democratic Senate leadership bowed to the threat that he and the other anti-choice Democrats would not support any reform at all: the result was a complex set of restrictions on abortion coverage by private insurance companies.  But the most devastating result of these negotiations, at least relative to systemic reform, was omission of the public option.  Caving in to  enormous pressure to move forward with reform, without getting mired in debate over reproductive freedom, Democratic leadership quietly removed the  public option. That move was part of the deal with Senator Nelson to bring the rest of the anti-choice contingent into the list of supporters of the Democratic plan.

As it turned out, the abortion diversion was a handy way for Nelson to avoid flack he might otherwise have taken for being against the public option as a stand-alone issue.  When declared his opposition to the public option back in early 2009, the media was obliged to mention the inconvenient truth that Nelson owed his political career to the private insurance and pharmaceutical industries that had bankrolled his campaigns with over $2 million in contributions.  Without the stalking horse of opposing abortion rights, it was easy to draw a straight line from Nelson being paid for by the big players in the private insurance sector and his being opposed to a public alternative.  By playing the fetal rights card much later in the debate, when the Democrats were facing increasing pressure to produce a reform package and move on to other pressing domestic matters, Nelson was able to reduce public option to just so much collateral damage.

For his part, Congressman Stupak had hit the brakes on supporting reform as early as the spring of last year, citing the possibility that a fraction of a woman’s insurance premiums covering abortion might be paid with federal money.  But even after restrictions on abortion coverage and funding for abortion coverage were in the bill for good, he insisted that the Stupak Amendment be added as well.  For Stupak and those in the anti-choice fringe trying to use him to stop reform, the Senate bill restrictions along with the no-federal-money-for-abortion guarantee in the Hyde Amendment were simply not enough assurance.  In a pyrrhic victory for those who wanted healthcare reform legislation without more anti-choice language, Stupak got an eleventh-hour Executive Order stating that that no federal funds would be used to pay for abortion coverage. That promise was enough, and he withdrew his amendment.

While the anti-choice histrionics of these Senators and their allies relative to healthcare reform were far from the first signs of trouble, they may finally be seen as a costly enough diversion to convince Democratic Party leaders to insist that deeply held anti-abortion convictions remain deeply held on a personal level and deferred to the Party platform at all times relevant to legislative debate and the formation of public policy.  Not only are these show-downs a divisive exercise within the party, they also put disunity (or worse) on display.  Meantime, the price Democrats may pay this November for missteps and half-steps on the way to healthcare reform remains to be seen as does Rep. Stupak’s ability to overcome a concerted progressive effort to replace him with a moderate Congressman from his own party.  Unfortunately, Senator Nelson has the next three years to call in his insurance and drug company favors before his next election and at least that much time for an opportunity to make a bigger political name for himself in the context of dealing with a potential vacancy on the very U.S. Supreme Court that could revisit Roe v. Wade.

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Roe v. Wade became the law of the land in 1973.  For many, it is alarming that the Supreme Court had to enforce the U.S. Constitution by prohibiting individual states from criminalizing women living through crisis pregnancies who would otherwise seek legal, medically appropriate services to terminate them.  It is no less alarming that, 37 years after the Supreme Court moved to ensure that the right to choose be exercised legally and safely, the U.S. Congress is about to let the mere potential of the exercise of women’s constitutional right to choose abortion keep 30 million Americans from receiving access to basic healthcare.

Nothing drives home the point that the still-male-dominated government doesn’t trust women, even to exercise a basic civil right guaranteed by the Supreme Court two generations ago, than a healthcare reform package that may well be derailed over what some Congressmen insist allows too free an exercise of that right under the government’s program.  Meantime, where was the vigorous debate over whether and to what extent federal money will be spent on pharmaceuticals that will enable men beyond the age or physical condition permitting a natural ability to fornicate from continuing to do it with medical intervention?  Forget whether or not his doctor believes that his life or health might be at risk from refraining from sex altogether.

The incarnation of the healthcare bill most likely to pass through the reconciliation process – if it comes to pass at all – is guaranteed to include cumbersome and excessive regulations that will require companies administering federal healthcare dollars to discriminate against women.  And these restrictions are in place before even a penny of healthcare reform money is put into the healthcare system by the federal government.  The pace at which these restrictions, which will immediately have a disparately anti-female impact on the risk-pooling landscape under healthcare reform, will manifest in further anti-female market-driven behavior by the insurance industry remains to be seen.  And with the public option off the table, at least in the short term, there is no hope of market correction and equalization through the use of public-policy-driven competitive forces being brought to bear on a skewed market.  Of course, with anti-equal protection zealots dictating every move  Congress makes on healthcare reform, the hope of any public option that would mitigate in favor of equal healthcare rights for women is probably just a pipe dream.

So even in the context of healthcare reform, women are relegated to second-class beneficiaries, if there are to be any beneficiaries at all.  This is exactly why Roe v. Wade still matters and why every day that women remain underrepresented in the federal government is another opportunity for backsliding into further inequality and oppression.  Considering the evolution of the present healthcare measure, none of us – male or female – can afford to live in a post-feminist America.

Photo credit: Getty Images, Inc.

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