God and Hillary Clinton (30 page)

Despite the emerging strength of the pro- and anti–embryonic stem cell movements, as this book has made clear, there is no religious issue that holds greater risk for Hillary's position as a religious Democrat than abortion. Not only has she been steadfast in her support of a woman's right to an abortion, but a careful reading of her speeches on the subject reveals the development of a kind of abortion apologetics by Hillary, where she has not merely affirmed a woman's right to abortion but has generated a series of counterattacks against various arguments that the pro-life movement uses to chastise abortion rights advocates. On this issue, Hillary Rodham Clinton the Methodist is a Fundamentalist, as dogmatic and filled with conviction as the most fire-and-brimstone preacher. With the exception of her talk in Albany in January 2005, she has spoken of abortion rights in an absolutist way, pitting good vs. evil, at times demonizing the other side.

Noticeably, she makes no mention of her Methodism when discussing the subject. Of course, if she did, it would not change anything: The United Methodist Church's
Book of Discipline
has been a major source of guidance for her on moral questions; the degree to which she matches her church on social concerns is uncanny.
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And her church's position on abortion is not pro-life; to the contrary, the United Methodist Church supports legalized abortion and is even a member of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
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The United Methodist Church's official statements on abortion have both reinforced and helped guide Hillary into her pro-choice position.
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Within her position, Mrs. Clinton has carefully avoided stating whether she believes life begins at conception, a sign of her shrewdness and a smart display of understanding that if she made such an acknowledgment, her pro-choice position drifts from its moral moorings. As noted by Greg Koukl of the Los Angeles–based ministry Stand to Reason, if the object in the womb is not a life begun at conception, then whatever one chooses to do with it is of no concern. The pro-choice argument is uncontroversial and unimpeachable if the object in the womb is not a human life. But once one acknowledges that the object is human life, moral considerations change. Hillary understands the stakes of conceding that life begins at conception. (The Democratic Party's last presidential candidate, John F. Kerry, did not know any better.) Surely this life-begins-at-conception paradox has occurred to Mrs. Clinton and thus likely troubles her, which is why she has avoided acknowledging it. That said, there is reason to suspect, however, that she personally believes that life does begin at conception. Consider two sources:

In an important piece in
New York
magazine, which led with Hillary's Albany speech, reporter Jennifer Senior shared a telling anecdote. Senior noted that the day after the speech, Clinton intimate Harold Ickes was in Washington expanding on Hillary's remarks; he was doing some legwork with Senator Clinton's pro-choice constituency: “I'm sorry, but when push comes to f—ing shove,” waxed Ickes, “my belief is that life begins at conception. And I think Hillary understands how hot-button this issue is for Democrats.”
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Presumably Ickes was explaining, inelegantly, that many Democrats, when pushed, concede the conception point—possibly even Hillary herself.

Of course, that is an inference. Less of an inference on her thinking is this assessment by her husband in his 2004 memoirs: “Everyone knows life begins biologically at conception,” says Bill Clinton, the man in whom Hillary has confided and with whom she has had more discussions than with anyone else on more subjects, including abor
tion. One would think that “everyone” must include Hillary. Bill added, two sentences later, “Most people who are pro-choice understand that abortions terminate potential life.”
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Bill Clinton continued the thought, taking it to a theological level: “No one knows when biology turns into humanity or, for the religious, when the soul enters the body.”
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Mother Teresa had an opinion on the question, telling the Clintons during the National Prayer Breakfast: “But what does God say to us? He says: ‘Even if a mother could forget her child, I will not forget you. I have carved you in the palm of my hand.'”

Pro-lifers are frustrated by what they see as Mrs. Clinton's cognitive dissonance on this matter: They find it odd that she champions the rights of children but only once those same children are out of the womb. She literally sees a world of difference between a child born on, say, March 23, and that same child on March 22 or February 22 or September 22; the former must be legally protected, whereas the latter's life is at the discretion of the mother alone. She makes statements like this: “The very core of what I believe is this concept of individual worth, which I think flows from all of us being creatures of God and being imbued with a spirit.”
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Presumably, she judges that the March 23 child is imbued with a spirit but not the same child days or weeks or months prior to birth.

Because of her longstanding support for abortion rights, there is little if anything that Hillary can do to have credibility in her assertion that she wants to find “common ground” with pro-lifers and to make abortions safe, legal, and
rare
. The only way that she might be able to accomplish convincing them of this would be for her (by 2008) to find and vote for a bill that does just that. At this point, however, it is difficult to imagine any such bill.

In an analysis of her abortion views, the
New York Times
noted that the only part of the abortion debate in which Hillary seems to have shown a detectable change over the years is parental notification—to which she has moved ever further to the extreme. The
Times
stated
that while in Arkansas, Hillary supported laws to notify parents when a minor sought an abortion, unless an exception was granted by a judge. Now, in New York, reported the
Times
, she supports the state law of “informed consent,” which is very different, and much less restrictive. Under informed consent, health care providers are told to give information about the risks of an abortion as well as other medical options only to patients, not to parents.
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At the writing of this book, Hillary had not switched her position on a single aspect of abortion or embryonic stem cell research. She opposed the following Senate bills, all supported by pro-life and rejected by pro-choice groups: S. 755, Informed Choice Act; S. 511, RU-486 Suspension and Review Act; S. 403, Child Custody Protection Act (parental notification); and S. 51, Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. Among them, her opposition to the Informed Choice Act had pro-lifers fuming as it sought to provide aid for ultrasound machines, so pregnant women considering an abortion would be able to view the unborn child in their womb before making a final decision. The abortion industry opposes these machines for the reasons that pro-lifers embrace them: Data show that when viewing the humanity of their unborn child through an ultrasound image, the vast majority of women considering an abortion change their minds. Thus, conservative Christian organizations like Focus on the Family have dedicated entire ministries to raising millions of dollars for the sole purpose of purchasing ultrasound machines for crisis pregnancy centers.

Titling the act the Informed Choice Act was clever, since the goal of ultrasound technology is to give the mother maximum information about what is growing inside her—so much information that she can view the moving life inside. This allows for a fully “informed” “choice.” And yet Hillary, even though she states emphatically that her goal is to make abortion rare, does not support the act. Politically, this would have been an easy bill for her to back; she could do so by arguing that it indeed more fully informed a woman's choice. The abortion lobby would have protested but would surely still view
her as a reliable stalwart for the cause. By opposing it, pro-lifers will claim Hillary is “pro-abortion” more than “pro-choice”—a charge that really gets under her skin.

Also in keeping with providing would-be mothers with more information about the choice of a lifetime is the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, which mandates guidelines requiring an abortion provider to inform pregnant women considering an abortion that the child that they are about to abort feels pain during the abortive process, another determinative piece of information that often has the effect of changing the mother's mind. Here, too, Mrs. Clinton voted against the bill.

It is very telling how Mrs. Clinton mirrors her husband on this issue. Her husband held a moderate position in several policy areas, but not abortion. Bill Clinton was the “Planned Parenthood President,” the most pro-choice individual ever to occupy the Oval Office. While he constantly and consistently searched out areas on which he could stake a moderate position—such as welfare reform—his stance on abortion was never middle-of-the-road and always extreme.

Significantly, recent memos obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch revealed what many long suspected: that Mrs. Clinton herself was behind Bill's unwillingness to move closer to the middle on the abortion issue. Among the documents was a memo from Domestic Policy Council staffer Bill Galston, written only months into the start of the Clinton presidency, suggesting that President Clinton “lower the public profile” of the increasingly radical abortion policies of the administration. Galston cited a number of abortion topics and strategies, including those of the abortion “working group” that included “the First Lady's office.” At the “decision” section of the Galston memo, Bill Clinton handwrote a note asking, “What does Hillary think?” This and other memos led Judicial Watch to justifiably conclude that Mrs. Clinton was “at the center” of Clinton administration
decision making on the issue—and was even “the driving force of the White House's abortion policy.” Thus, Hillary is likely the primary reason that Bill refused to moderate on this one issue.
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Not coincidentally, as an elected figure herself, Mrs. Clinton has followed this same path. Hillary likewise looks hard for issues on which she can stake a moderate stance, and she has found a few, namely in defense and foreign policy. Like her husband, however, she refuses to moderate on the subject of abortion. A President Hillary Clinton would recapture the crown from her husband, taking abortion rights to new levels.

What exactly would she do? In addition to filling the federal bench with pro-choice judges, she would reverse the following moves by President George W. Bush:

On his first day in office, Bush authorized a ban on all U.S. funding of international abortion rights groups, reversing President Bill Clinton's executive order. Even before that, when he was president-elect, Bush held a private talk with the pro-choice Republican Colin Powell, several weeks before naming him secretary of state. He told Powell that as his secretary of state Powell would be expected to purge any vestiges of the Clinton State Department's program to promote global abortion rights. Powell told Bush he would follow his lead.
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For Bush, other Clinton reversals soon followed. In January 2003, Bush signed the “Sanctity of Life” bill, and then, two months later, in March 2003, he did not veto the Republican Senate's passage of a ban on partial-birth abortion. Several months later, in November 2003, he signed the ban passed by Congress. George W. Bush also began commemorating each January 22 anniversary of
Roe v. Wade
as a National Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life Day.

Of course, while pro-lifers dread the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton reversing these actions, the thought excites pro-choicers. Asked if he would expect Hillary to change these policies, William F. Harrison, the Arkansas abortion doctor and Hillary's personal friend
and onetime ob-gyn, exclaims: “Oh, absolutely…. I hope to God she does.” He and other pro-choicers are counting on Hillary: Though into his seventies, Harrison does not want to slow his rate of activity at his Fayetteville Women's Clinic; he plans to continue to perform about twelve hundred abortions per year. The key, says Harrison, will be whether the electorate can appreciate both the Clintons, whom he says history will judge “with a much more reasoned and rational mind than the idiots who have hated [them], seemingly for no more reason than Christ was hated.”
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Seeing the clear rift between her stated policy stances and religious voters, Hillary has decided to try a new strategy: At the end of 2006, she hired Burns Strider, a leading party strategist on advising candidates how to reach out to pro-life evangelicals, a group that provided a surprisingly high number of votes in November 2006 to the pro-choice governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, and the Ohio governor-elect, Ted Strickland.
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The hiring of Strider may be a signal that Mrs. Clinton realizes that symbolic gestures on the abortion debate, such as telling pro-choice crowds in Albany that pro-lifers are not cavemen, will not be enough to satisfy religious “values voters.” The selection of Strider also demonstrates that Hillary recognizes that the Democrats' success in November 2006 took place during an unusual election that was more of a statement on George W. Bush's policies in Iraq than social issues like abortion. In 2008, Bush will not be on the ticket. Who will the Republicans run?

Regardless of the GOP nominee, even possibly a pro-choicer, Hillary will struggle to peel off pro-life religious voters until she takes concrete policy stances that soften her abortion extremism. Until that happens, she, like John Kerry and Al Gore, may find it difficult to change that blue-red state configuration in 2008. To the extent that she hopes that her faith will be a draw to some voters, and to the extent that she hopes to draw a single religious voter beyond the
religious left, Hillary's position on abortion will be the determining factor.