Feminists for Life Keys on Prevention, Not Abortion

WASHINGTON — If there is a No-Woman’s Land, it is the political space occupied by a group called Feminists for Life of America.

They are spurned by many of their activist sisters, for whom a woman’s right to reproductive choice is paramount. And fellow members of the antiabortion movement--a group not largely drawn to fiery feminist rhetoric--find them deeply suspect.

But Feminists for Life--a 23-year-old group that has just launched one of its first major outreach efforts--soldiers on in an obscure corner of the antiabortion movement: prevention.

Certainly, says executive director Serrin Foster, the group favors changes in the law that would end legal abortions. But making abortion illegal, she adds quickly, is not the group’s main focus. Its main focus, she says, is “getting to work on the root causes”--the reasons women get abortions.

To their sisters in the National Organization for Women and the National Abortion Rights Action League, the Feminists for Life say that too many women have “chosen” abortion out of a lack of attractive alternatives.

The baby’s father is nowhere to be found, or has offered financial support for an abortion but refuses further help. The government threatens to cut off welfare aid if another child is born. A woman’s college health plan offers no maternity care and little in the way of pregnancy support, although counselors are quick to refer female students to abortion clinics. For the woman who dares to buck the odds and have her baby, day care--not to mention the thousands of other things a mother and baby need--is expensive and difficult to find.

This, say the Feminists for Life, is not much of a choice.

To those active in the effort to make abortion illegal, the Feminists for Life are persistent in posing the thorny question, “What then?” As in, after women have been denied the legal choice of an abortion, what then is going to be done for them and their babies?

It is a question, say some of the group’s members, that many of the most ardent abortion foes have little time for.

“We’re finding that all pro-lifers are not the same,” Foster said. The antiabortion movement is regarded as one “that only cares about the fetus.” And while the criticism is unfounded among many activists, Foster added, it is clearly true for some.

Their convictions have led the Feminists for Life to form coalitions with all sorts of odd bedfellows. With a nationwide membership of 5,000, strategic placement--not numbers--is the group’s strength.

Last summer, the organization joined liberal groups to fight the GOP-backed welfare reform proposal that would have denied any increases in aid to women who have additional babies while on assistance.

Members have been active in efforts to stiffen penalties for fathers who fail to pay child support--policies that have rallied support from right to left. And they have joined with leading conservative groups to press for federal initiatives that would give unmarried mothers greater incentives to identify the father of a child at birth.

They also were energized this summer by one of the antiabortion movement’s most visible fights--the congressional bid to outlaw late-term abortions called, by critics, the partial-birth abortion.

Now, the Feminists for Life are targeting colleges, where the women most likely to get abortions are. The Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that of the 1.5 million abortions performed in the nation yearly, at least one in five is to a woman in college or graduate school. Some 44% are performed on women in the 18-to-24 age group, and many are in colleges.

As a result, they are pressing college and university administrators to adopt policies that support pregnant women with special housing, maternity coverage and on-site day care. And they are urging counselors to include references to reputable national groups that support women having “crisis pregnancies” when a student comes to them with a positive pregnancy test.

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It is not a new idea that drives the Feminists for Life. The group counts among its heroines a handful of feminist icons it considers crusaders against abortion, such as suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katy Stanton.

“Every woman knows if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one before its birth,” said Victoria Woodhull, another group heroine and the nation’s first female presidential candidate, who ran under the banner of the Equal Rights Party in 1872.