Miers once donated to Texas anti-abortion group
By Matt Curry
Associated Press
October 4, 2005
Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers donated $150 to a Texas anti-abortion group in 1989, the president of the organization said Monday.
Miers, who has never served as a judge, has a thin public record on abortion. President Bush named Miers to the Supreme Court on Monday to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has voted to uphold abortion rights. "One would have to assume she is at least moderately pro-life, but how far that commitment goes, I really don't know," Kyleen Wright, president of the Texans for Life Coalition, told The Associated Press on Monday night. Sarah Wheat, executive director of NARAL Pro Choice Texas, said the donation raises concerns. "Before the U.S. Senate affirms someone to a lifetime appointment, we need to know whether she has strong personal views about the right to privacy and reproductive health care decisions," she said. Wright said the donation earned Miers a listing as a "bronze patron" in the program for the anti-abortion group's annual dinner. She said she doesn't know if Miers attended the event and doesn't know her personally. "There was about 31 other bronze patrons, almost all of them officeholders or candidates. As best I could tell checking my records, that was the only donation (from Miers)," she said. "My computer records don't go back to the 1980s. She's obviously not intimately acquainted with anyone on my staff." The group, headquartered in the Dallas suburb of Irving, was called Texans United for Life at the time of Miers' gift. "I'm not familiar with her being very involved," said Wright. "No one I know in the pro-life or pro-family movement knows her, locally or around the state." Miers, a prominent Dallas lawyer, was elected to the City Council in 1989. She served three years. As president of the Texas State Bar in 1993, she was a leader in an unsuccessful fight to persuade the American Bar Association to reconsider its pro-abortion rights stance by submitting it to a nationwide referendum. At the time, she questioned whether the group should "be trying to speak for the entire legal community" on an issue that she said "has brought on tremendous divisiveness" within the organization.
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