An Abortion Provider and a Pro-Life Lawyer Found Common Ground
We were on opposite sides of a Supreme Court case, but we found there was a lot on which we agreed.
About six months earlier, we had been on the opposite sides of a Supreme Court case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. The justices were considering a case the clinic had brought challenging a Missouri law I had helped draft, which declared that human life begins at conception. The day after the high court upheld the law, the Post-Dispatch ran side-by-side photos of her and me on its front page as representatives of each side in the debate. The photo made her look as if she were crying, although she was in fact straining to hear a question.
In the wake of that case, popular opinion was that the court would soon get out of the abortion debate and return the issue to the states. It didn’t happen. But, amid that uncertainty, for a time there was an opening to a less acrimonious path.
Over the next few months, Ms. Isaacson-Jones and I met and expanded our group to include her colleague Jean Cavender and longtime Missouri pro-life leader Loretto Wagner. We all stuck to our principles on abortion, yet the areas of agreement were surprisingly broad and the meetings were surprisingly friendly.
None of us wanted to see poor women in situations where they felt economically compelled to have abortions. On the pro-life side, that meant support for allocating more of society’s resources toward assisting such women to make birth a more viable choice. The pro-choice side recognized that giving birth is a choice too, and that women shouldn’t be denied that choice because they lack the means to exercise it. Providing aid for such women was perfect common ground.
In a June 1991 Post-Dispatch op-ed, we jointly proposed that people on both sides of the abortion debate could also find common ground on “aid for pregnant women addicted to drugs, providing treatment and follow-up care for crack-cocaine babies, reducing teen pregnancy, increasing the availability of pre-natal and post-natal care and providing financial assistance for single-parent households.”
Over the next few years, activists formed a national organization called the Common Ground Network for Life and Choice with an office in Washington. All four of us were involved. Ms. Isaacson-Jones and I wrote a booklet for the organization, “Adoption as Common Ground.” Under her leadership, Reproductive Health Services offered adoption placement. Two of the organization’s participants were invited to the White House to discuss common ground with First Lady Hillary Clinton. The organization had two well-attended national conferences. Things seemed to be moving in a positive direction. People were talking. And then it stopped.
In the years following the Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which modified but essentially upheld Roe, the momentum for common-ground solutions slowly waned. Today the opportunity and need for a common ground movement is perhaps stronger than it was on that day in 1990 when Ms. Isaacson-Jones picked up the phone to speak with a man she had never met and with whom she had strong disagreements. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of courage you don’t see much anymore.
In words that apply as well today as they did 30 years ago, the four of us ended our mutual op-ed by calling for people on both sides of this issue to move forward “based on reason and justice rather than bigotry and rhetoric.” We argued that our common enemies were “poverty, ignorance and prejudice” and concluded that “whether one is pro-life or pro-choice, crisis pregnancies are fraught with painful, personal, heartbreaking problems. The common sense of common ground—our common humanity—can ease this pain.”
Today those words may sound naive, but they are no less relevant—and no less true.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-abortion-provider-and-a-pro-life-lawyer-found-common-ground-roe-v-wade-supreme-court-clinic-debate-women-children-11651591057?mod=e2two