The Difference On Choice

There's actually quite a bit of cause for cheer with the Democratic Party platform, so let this be the first in a series.

Via Dylan Matthews, it looks like the forces of Jim Wallis didn't manage to overcome the Democratic platform this year. Here's the plank on reproductive health:

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.

The Democratic Party also strongly supports access to affordable family planning services and comprehensive age-appropriate sex education which empowers people to make informed choices and live healthy lives. We also recognize that such health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions.

As Matthews notes, that's even stronger than the language of recent years, when the mantra was "safe, legal and rare." There's that bit about "reducing the need for abortions" but I would imagine that most reproductive rights advocates would strongly support that as it's constructed.

Contrast this with John McCain's retrograde position on choice, which is as reactionary as anyone on the theocon right;

The campaign website of the same man who, eight years ago, said Roe shouldn't be overturned now says, "John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench." He sent heartfelt words to the National Right to Life Committee's annual convention: "I am pro-life," he told them, "because I know what it is like to live without human rights, where human life is accorded no inherent value. (NOTE: John McCain NEVER talks about his POW service -ed.) And I know that I have a personal obligation to advocate human rights wherever they are denied ... when we fail to respect the inherent dignity of all human life, born or unborn. " McCain's advisers have said that he will not fight to soften the Republican platform on abortion, and McCain himself has said that it would be "difficult" to choose a pro-choice running mate [...]

During his political career, McCain has participated in 130 reproductive health-related votes on Capitol Hill; of these, he voted with the anti-abortion camp in 125. McCain has consistently backed rights for the unborn, voting to cover fetuses under the State Children's Health Insurance Program and supporting the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which allowed a "child in utero" to be recognized as a legal victim of a crime. He has voted in favor of the global gag rule, which prevents U.S. funds from going to international family-planning clinics that use their own money to perform abortions, offer information about abortion, or take a pro-choice stand. And he has voted to appoint half a dozen anti-abortion judges to the federal bench, as well as Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. During the Bork hearings, McCain attacked the Court's creation of a right to privacy in Roe v. Wade: "Whether one is pro-or anti-abortion," McCain said in an October 1987 hearing, "it is difficult to argue that the Court's opinion is not constitutionally suspect."

Some of these votes were, politically speaking, no-brainers for anyone vaguely in the pro-life camp. But McCain also joined efforts supported only by the radical wing of his party. He voted, for instance, with only one-fifth of the Senate to remove family-planning grants from a 1988 spending bill and with only 18 senators that same year against allowing Medicaid to pay for abortions in cases of rape or incest.

In 1994, the year after abortion provider David Gunn was killed outside a Florida clinic, McCain voted with 29 members of the Senate against establishing penalties for violent or threatening interference outside abortion clinics. Many solidly pro-life Republicans--Mitch McConnell, Kit Bond, John Danforth--voted in favor of the bill, called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE). "We tried to get as many co-sponsors as we could, and we postured the thing as anti-vigilante violence," recalls Judy Appelbaum, a Washington lawyer who was counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy at the time and the lead Hill staffer on the bill. "We argued that, even if you oppose abortion, you should not condone these actions." According to Appelbaum, law enforcement officials, newspaper editorialists, health care providers, and law-and-order politicians all supported the bill. "There were a number of very anti-choice senators who voted for FACE," she says, "and [McCain] wasn't one of them." Instead, McCain joined senators like Orrin Hatch and Jesse Helms in opposition.

Despite a 25-year voting record on the issue, McCain has publicly sought to shade his statements and give everybody the impression that he's some kind of moderate on women's health. It's completely untrue, and this not only encompasses the 0 ratings from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, but his opposition to the Title X family-planning program, which offers free birth control and breast cancer screenings for low-income women. He's voted for abstinence-only education, against teen-pregnancy prevention programs, for parental notification laws for contraception programs, against mandating that health insurers cover birth control, for the "global gag rule" and for defunding United Nations agencies that provide family planning services for the poor.

McCain has tried in the past to limit his public statements on choice, but the record is very clear. The statements from those who know him best is clear. He's not just a hard-core conservative but a particularly brutish one, seeking nothing less than the control over women's bodies and women's health. This is a very important set of information to make public and widespread.