c. 1997 Kansas City Star
OVERLAND PARK, Kan.—The state's largest group of abortionopponents has made its mark on state and federal legislative races,helping to elect like-minded officials in the Statehouse and toevery Kansas congressional seat.
Now, Kansans for Life is turning its attention to races itsleaders say can have even greater impact: city councils and schoolboards.
``It's the obvious place for anybody that wants to have a voicein what's going on in the country to get involved,'' said PatAdair, executive director of Johnson County's affiliate of Kansansfor Life.
In a newsletter mailed to 10,000 households in Johnson County,the group's political action committee endorsed 17 candidates forlocal offices. The group declined to endorse anyone in many of theraces.
Adair urged newsletter readers to vote Tuesday. To highlight theimportance of local elections, the note referred to a formercongresswoman: ``Remember Jan Meyers started out as an OverlandPark city commissioner.''
Some candidates have questioned the group's involvement in localraces. They want to know what abortion has to do with the schoolboard or city council.
Plenty, said Adair and Harry Biltz, statewide president ofKansans for Life.
First and foremost, elected leaders need to stand up and becounted on such an important issue, Biltz said. He comparesabortion to slavery, saying that citizens would have a right toknow if a candidate for any office was pro-slavery.
``I wouldn't want him to be my dogcatcher, and I wouldn't wanthim to be my mayor,'' Biltz said. ``If you're going to run forpublic office you ought to have some respect for human life.''
Adair said that issues tied to abortion could come before localoffice holders. For example, if an abortion clinic wanted to moveinto the city, the council would face the issue.
And as Adair's newsletter pointed out, city council and schoolboard members often go on to higher elected office.
``It is a steppingstone, and we might as well find out early onwho our friends are,'' Biltz said.
A letter sent to voters in Olathe makes those points, and urgesabortion opponents to vote on Tuesday. The letter, on behalf ofcity council candidate M. Gregg Baldwin, noted that former U.S.Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker started her career as a school boardmember.
``You have done a great job in the state and federalelections,'' the letter said. ``Now let's learn the importance ofthese local elections as well.''
Baldwin's opponent, Marge Vogt, took issue with the letter'scharacterization that she does not oppose abortion, but she willnot publicly state her views on the issue.
``I feel that it is not an issue,'' she said. ``It's a personalissue....It doesn't belong in a city council race.''
Vogt said no one from Kansans for Life contacted her about herviews. She did answer a survey by another group; she didn't answeryes or no to the abortion question, she said.
The issue has come up in the race for Blue Valley school board,too. Kansans for Life endorsed Darrel E. Dougan.
Dougan said he agreed with his opponent, Susan Asner, thatabortion isn't relevant to the school board race.
``What could a school board member do to affect the...abortionlaw in Kansas?'' Dougan said he asked the survey-taker whenquestioned about his abortion views.
``He said, `We want to educate our people on who we wouldsupport based on their ideas and philosophies,' '' Dougan said.
Asner and Dougan said they wanted voters to make a decisionbased on all the issues and the skills of the candidate, not justabortion. And they agree that abortion hasn't been much of an issuein their race, other than the group's endorsement of Dougan.
Biltz said the group would continue to place more of an emphasison local races, regardless of what critics think.
``This issue is important to a lot of people,'' he said. ``Theycan moan and groan all they want, frankly. I don't care.''
c.1997 San Francisco Examiner
SAN FRANCISCO—Partial-birth abortion is not about saving life.Partial-birth abortion is about killing—Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill.
This Republican Congress doesn't want a ban—it wants an issue.This isn't about abortion, this is about election-year politics _Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y.
Because the so-called debate is taking place in a grandstanding,male-dominated Congress, it isn't easy to determine just what theargument over late-term abortion is about.
Killing babies? Or a monstrous invasion of privacy during anuncommon but horrible time in the lives of a few thousand women?
The issue is stupefyingly simple if you listen to members ofCongress—most of them Republicans—who lead the fight tocriminalize a heartbreaking abortion procedure known as intactdilation and extraction: For reasons of no interest, an unspecifiednumber of women are simply choosing to murder their own babies intheir wombs. The doctors who help them do this (for whatever theirreasons) are criminals and should be imprisoned.
While the members of Congress can't be bothered with the whybehind intact dilation and extraction, they are extremelyinterested in the how. In hammering home their ``pro-life'' point,they meticulously lay out the details of a last-resort medicalprocedure that is a living nightmare to the women who undergo it.
Nowhere in their repeated descriptions, in their exhortationsagainst murder and inhumanity is an ounce of curiosity about thepregnant woman—let alone any consideration of her as somethingmore complex than a container.
But understand, the woman is an adult female who wants a baby. Awoman who hopefully and joyfully carries a developing fetus in herwomb until she finds out—well into the last third of herpregnancy—that the baby is so deformed, her trusted physicianadvises abortion.
The physician is a doctor who went to medical school and decidedto specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. A woman or man who tookthe Hippocratic oath to do no harm, and who, each day, saves lives,heals and brings children into the world.
Together, the pregnant woman and her doctor weigh their horribledilemma and ultimately choose what seems the lesser of a pair ofguaranteed horrors.
If this emotional process were not trauma enough, the woman andphysician must go through the motions of delivery. The woman'sseverely malformed baby is pulled feet first from her womb, throughthe birth canal and far enough out of her vagina so the doctor canextract the fetal brain, causing a collapse of the skull.
Pro-life or pro-choice, no one on the face of the Earth can callthis procedure anything but hideous.
And yet, the most vociferous ``pro-life'' members of Congresswould have us believe that they are the only people who recognizeand understand the hideousness. Thus they are the people who aremorally qualified to legislate what a woman may or may not do witha pregnancy gone terribly wrong.
What does that demand that we believe about women who choosethis terrible procedure?
We must believe that they are utterly out of touch with not onlytheir maternal instincts but with their humanity. That, at best,they are astoundingly ignorant; at worst, they are monstrouslyselfish.
Likewise, we must believe that the physicians who tend to thewomen have no heart. No reverence for life. That they, who bringlife into the world, are plain blind to the gravity of what they dowhen they perform a late-term abortion.
If we can imagine all that and believe it, then the ``pro-life''legislators are right: The issue of late-term abortion is simple;it's about immorality and crime. And lawmakers thus have everyright to fight their moral battle inside the bodies of a fewthousand most unfortunate women.
^Stephanie Salter is an Examiner columnist.
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