U.S.-POLITICS: Republicans Seek Equal Rights for Fetuses

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 12 1996 (IPS) - When they adopt their platform this week for the U.S. presidential election, delegates at the Republican National Convention will seek to confer equal rights for a new group of individuals — unborn fetuses.

Reflecting the influence of conservative, “pro-life” Christian groups on the party, the Republicans are likely to declare support for a sweeping series of protections for the unborn, which critics argue would lead to the world’s strictest abortion laws.

Among the most controversial platform proposals agreed to by the Republicans in advance of their convention that opened today in San Diego, California, is an attempt to apply the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which confers equal rights on all citizens, to fetuses.

“We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children,” the draft party platform states.

“Our purpose is to have legislative and judicial protection of that right against those who perform abortions,” the platform adds.

To that end, the Republicans call for their presumptive presidential candidate, former Sen. Bob Dole, to appoint federal judges who will seek to overturn ‘Roe v Wade’, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that allowed for legal abortions in the United States. The party also seeks a ban for abortions even in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother’s life.

“It’s a very absolute and complete ban,” says Anika Rahman, acting director for the International Programme of the Centre for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP).

If the Republicans implement the platform proposals, the CRLP argues, abortion laws in the United States will actually be more restrictive than those of ex-President Nicolae Ceausescu’s pro- natalist regime in Romania and Chile during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and in the years since.

Both the restrictive policies of those governments, the Centre contends, helped to spark higher mortality rates among mothers forced to seek illegal abortions.

Ceausescu’s stated belief that “giving birth is a patriotic duty … (and) those who refuse to have children are deserters, escaping the law of natural continuity” had disastrous effects for Romanian women, the CRLP states.

“Prior to Ceausescu’s abortion law, Romania’s maternal mortality rate was the same as other European countries,” Rahman says. But, she argues, the restrictions on abortions put in place from 1966 until Ceausescu’s downfall in 1989 boosted maternal mortality rates in Romania to a level 10 times that in any other European country.

During that 23-year period of restrictive abortion policy, the Centre estimates that more than 10,000 women died from unsafe, illegal abortions. The maternal mortality rate in Romania, however, fell 50 percent in the first year after the laws were repealed, the CRLP asserts.

Chile’s pro-natalist policies, a legacy of Pinochet’s long dictatorship, remain in place today. As in the Republican Party platform, Rahman notes, the Chilean penal code makes all abortions illegal, including those needed to save a mother’s life.

But, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a New York- based group which studies family planning worldwide, some 160,000 Chilean women continue to obtain abortions illegally each year. A 1995 study by researcher Lisa Remez found that up to 30 percent of all Chilean women of child-bearing age had tried to obtain abortions at some point in their lives.

The cost of illicit abortion is heavy in Chile, with some 40,000 women hospitalised there each year from illegal pregnancy termination.

Prior to Roe v Wade, maternal mortality was also high in the United States itself. A 1992 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found a five-fold decrease in the number of maternal deaths caused by legal abortion from 1973, the year abortion was legalised, and 1985.

“Abortion is safest for a woman when performed early in pregnancy and by a well-trained, experienced physician who is working in a setting that is equipped to handle complications that might arise,” the JAMA study concluded.

“As access to safer, earlier legal abortion becomes increasingly restricted, there is likely to be a small but measurable increase in mortality and morbidity among women in the United States,” it warned.

Despite such findings, Republican delegates shaped a platform in recent weeks that adopts a much harder line on abortion than the party’s candidate, Dole, himself recommends.

Dole failed in a bid to include a plank in the platform calling for tolerance of pro-choice views, although he had said it would be “a piece of cake” to get one adopted.

In fact, the platform may even be to the right of most of the delegates attending the San Diego convention.

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll released Monday, some 38 per cent of all delegates believe abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or incest, or to save a mother’s life. More important, 57 per cent of the delegates responded that abortion is not “the kind of issue” that requires a change in the Constitution.

“The U.S. general public has always been pro-choice and believes that abortions should be available,” Rahman says. “I’m glad to hear that it is also contrary to what a majority of the (Republican) delegates believe.”