Antiabortion Groups Meet For Strategy Session Amid Criticisms From Some Advocates

Strategists, academics, attorneys and Supreme Court experts from "established" antiabortion groups on Tuesday met in Washington, D.C., to discuss how to reduce the number of abortions, the Los Angeles Times reports. The groups -- including Concerned Women for America and Americans United for Life -- considered calling for:

Laws requiring physicians to tell women more detail about how fetuses are terminated during abortions;

Physicians who perform abortions to be required to report demographic and medical information about their patients; and

State-funded public health campaigns that would tell women abortion could cause psychological trauma.
"We're looking at a whole gamut of ideas," Daniel McConchie, vice president of Americans United for Life, said, adding, "We're very confident we'll be able to pursue the next stages without a huge amount of dissention." According to the Times, the groups have not decided which campaigns or states they will focus on initially.

Criticism From Antiabortion Advocates
Some of the "biggest groups in the [antibortion] movement," such as Focus on the Family and the National Right to Life Committee, are being criticized by some antiabortion advocates for "turning a godly cause into a money-grubbing industry," the Times reports (Simon, Los Angeles Times, 6/6).

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and many other antiabortion group leaders applauded the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in April to uphold a federal law (S 3) banning so-called "partial-birth" abortion. However, the heads of five small protestant and Roman Catholic groups in an open letter to Dobson published as advertisements on May 23 and May 30 in the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Washington Times, respectively, called the decision "wicked" and said Dobson is misleading Christians by praising it.

Brian Rohrbough -- president of Colorado Right to Life, who signed the letter -- said, "All you have to do is read the ruling, and you will find that this will never save a single child because even though the justices say this one technique is mostly banned -- not completely banned -- there are lots of other techniques, and they even encourage abortionists to find less shocking means to kill late-term babies." The heads of the American Life League, Operation Rescue/Operation Save America and Human Life International also signed the letter.














Tom Minnery, vice president of Focus on the Family, said that Dobson hailed the Gonzales v. Carhart ruling "because [Focus on the Family] and most pro-lifers are sophisticated enough to know we're not going to win a total victory all at once. We're going to win piece by piece" (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 6/4). According to the Times, the advocates who are criticizing the large antiabortion groups have promised to "keep escalating their attacks."

Some abortion-rights advocates are concerned about the "splintering" of antiabortion groups but others say it is positive, the Times reports. "It may mean we're fighting on more fronts," Janet Crepps, senior staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said. Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said, "Whenever your opponents squabble among themselves, it's a good thing" (Los Angeles Times, 6/6).

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