Abortion taking front row in 2004 election

WASHINGTON — Every Jan. 22 is tense in Washington. Thursday was no exception. It was the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that allowed abortion on demand.

So every Jan. 22, Washington swells with protesters from all sides. One cannot throw a rock in any direction without hitting a protester. I walked through the National Press Club that day as it had four abortion-related press conferences — all at the same time.

Subway cars fill with people wearing pro-life or pro-choice buttons en route to or from various big events. They don't speak much to each other. If they do, it is either snide whispers — or outright yelling insults as they exit. Mostly they just glare at each other.

After all, pro-life advocates see their opponents as murderers. Pro-choice folks see opponents as essentially Nazis trying to take away their rights.

Unlike protesters, as a reporter I am forced to listen to both sides. Listening is always the first baby step toward finding solutions — at least those solutions short of all-out war.

If you have never truly listened to the other side, let me quote what I found as the most compelling comments from each that I heard during this round of protests. Then decide who is right, and if hope exists to bring sides together in ways other than how we solved America's little disagreement over, say, slavery.

First, let me quote from a speech by Kate Michelman, maybe the nation's best-known abortion-rights advocate as president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

"For me, the seeds of that activism were planted in my own searing, humiliating experience with a pre-Roe abortion," Michelman said. She had three toddlers back in 1970 and had just been abandoned by her husband as she was pregnant with a fourth — and she was desperate.

She saw no way she could handle the pregnancy or the additional child and sought an abortion. She said an all-male board of doctors questioned her in demeaning ways before allowing what she argues should have been her choice alone.

Interestingly, Michelman's profession was working with kids. "There's nothing . . . quite as rewarding and as satisfying as plopping down on the floor, at work, with a gaggle of kids piling into your lap for story time."

She said that in such work with youngsters, often with single mothers, "I became more and more aware of the lasting consequences for all involved of the conditions into which children are born." She said parents should choose if and when the time is right for a child to be born into their family — not the government.