Talking It Over

I first heard about a small explosion near the Planned Parenthood headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., a few hours before the Vice President, Tipper Gore and I were scheduled to speak nearby at a luncheon honoring women who have led our nation's efforts on behalf of family planning and protecting a woman's right to choose.

The explosion occurred on the 24th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision Roe vs. Wade and just one week after bombs had exploded at family planning clinics in Atlanta and Tulsa.

By the time I arrived at the Mayflower Hotel at noon, it seemed likely that the Washington blast was an accident and not a willful act of violence. We later learned that the timing and location of the explosion were indeed coincidental.

Still, the tension generated by one small incident reminded me of the degree to which emotion has shaped the abortion debate. Now, after years of fiery rhetoric, finger pointing and heated recriminations, it's time for people of good faith — on all sides of the abortion issue — to lower the decibel level and seek common ground.

As I told those gathered at the luncheon in Washington, abortion is always a difficult and delicate subject. I have met people who passionately disagree with each other on abortion but nonetheless recognize the complexities and anguish that women may confront in certain circumstances.

The key is to find ways to respect our differences, expand the dialogue and join together with those who do not share extremism as their rallying cry. By doing this, we can continue to make progress toward a common goal of reducing abortions, lowering the rate of teen-age pregnancy and giving women opportunities to make the choices that are best for themselves and their families.

I believe that my husband's formulation on abortion is still the right one: Abortion should be legal, safe and rare. Over the past four years, his administration has worked hard to affirm the legality and safety of the practice as well as to encourage attitudes and values that will make abortion rarer than ever before. And we should all be heartened that the rate of legal abortions in the United States has fallen to its lowest level in two decades.

One of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to reduce abortions is to promote family planning — here and abroad. We now have ample evidence that in countries where family planning is available to women, the rate of abortion declines, the spacing of children increases and the health of mothers and their children improves.

The importance of family planning as an alternative to abortion hit home to me recently when I was reading a book about the lives of women in countries around the world.

One woman from Russia described how, after marrying her husband, she had two children and four abortions. Abortion, she suggested, was the only means she had to limit the size of her family. Family planning was simply not available.

Where family planning is not an option, women often resort in desperation to unsafe practices that threaten their health and the well-being of their families. A few years ago, I visited a maternal hospital in one of the poorest regions of Brazil. Half of the patients had been admitted to deliver their babies. The other half were there for complications resulting from self-induced or back-alley abortions. The state Minister of Health explained to me in a public meeting later that day, "We want to give poor women the same information and access to family planning that well-to-do women have always had."

That should be our goal in the United States as well — both at home and in our foreign policy.

As Vice President Gore said at the National Abortion Rights Action League luncheon last week: "How can we as Americans, schooled in the deepest respect for a proper relationship between the individual and the awesome power of the state, say that the government of the United States of America with all of its resources, all of its distance and insensitivity to these fragile and complex circumstances pressing in upon that individual woman ... must come in and order her to do what it has decided is the right thing and not her?"

The Vice President's words are a reminder that in many countries decisions about reproduction continue to be imposed on women against their will. In China, which I visited in 1995, I spoke out against policies of forced abortion and sterilization that allow the government to decide the size of every woman's family. Some months later, I was in Romania, where the previous Communist regime had a policy requiring every woman to have five children. Some women described to me the degradation and humiliation they felt each month when they were taken, as part of their work units, to local hospitals and forcibly examined to determine whether or not they were pregnant. Those who were pregnant were then monitored by secret police to make sure they gave birth and didn't abort the pregnancy.

What we have tried to do in promoting choice in our country is to say that decisions about reproduction are among the most difficult and most intimate a woman must make. And each woman must be able to make them in private consultation with her conscience, her God, her family and her physician.

We will never reach unanimity on an issue as complex and controversial as abortion. But if we start talking to each other — and listening to what each other has to say — we may discover that we have more in common than we think.

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