NARAL chief relishing role as messenger
Bruce Hight
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, December 17, 2006 Nancy Keenan came by during a visit to Austin last week, and she's still grinning about the outcome of the Nov. 7 election. She has reason to. Keenan, a former state representative and state school superintendent from Montana, is president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the most prominent — or notorious, depending on your view — organization campaigning to preserve for pregnant women the decision whether to get an abortion. (She's also a Catholic.) She met here with local abortion-rights advocates before the Legislature convenes on Jan. 9 and visited with Sarah Weddington, the Austin lawyer who in 1973 won the Roe v. Wade case before the U.S. Supreme Court, which established the right of American women to abortion. "We're very excited about the election — we had some big wins," Keenan said. "We were successful at the national level, with 23 new pro-choice seats in the House with ousted anti-choice incumbents," plus three in the Senate. Abortion rights forces also won a major victory in red-state South Dakota, where voters turned down a strict abortion ban by a 55-45 margin. With Keenan was Carol Drennan, interim executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, who counts six more abortion rights lawmakers in the Legislature after Nov. 7. Iraq and corruption played the biggest roles in giving Democrats control of Congress. But not every Democratic candidate supported abortion rights. In Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, was anti-abortion and beat the incumbent, Republican Rick Santorum, another abortion opponent. But Keenan said abortion rights candidates fared well even in red states such as Arizona: "We very much targeted independent Republican women" in several states, she said. The argument over abortion has raged since the Roe decision, and people have tired of it, Keenan said. But she thinks a public confrontation at the other end of life helped abortion rights advocates. "I'll tell you when I saw the difference in the country and that was around the time of Terry Schiavo," Keenan said of the brain-damaged Florida woman who was on life support for 15 years. Her husband decided to remove the life support, and the courts had agreed. But the Republican majority in Congress, with President Bush's approval, in March 2005 rammed through a special bill to keep her alive. However, the courts rejected that bill, too, and Schiavo was finally allowed to die. "That's when I think the American public went, 'Whoa,' and I literally, almost physically, felt there was this stop, when people were watching that tragedy play out and they said, 'What is this and where does government belong?'" Keenan emphasizes access to birth control as a safe, effective way to reduce abortions, and she can point to progress on that front, too. After much delay apparently motivated by politics, the Food and Drug Administration this year finally approved over-the-counter sales of Plan B, an oral contraceptive that can be used after sex. Abortion opponents have not quit the field. Drennan cited a bill filed by state Rep. Frank Corte, R-San Antonio, aimed at discouraging women from using Plan B. It would require pharmacies that dispense the pill to post a 18-inch by 24-inch sign that includes a warning that Plan B may not just prevent fertilization but effectively act as an abortion agent. Keenan and other abortion-rights advocates also are up in arms over the recent appointment by President Bush of Dr. Eric Keroack to direct family planning programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Keroack served as medical director of A Woman's Concern, a Christian group that calls commercialization of contraceptives "demeaning to women." Anti-abortion and abortion rights forces alike are awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could sharply curtail, or even end, constitutional protection for women who seek an abortion and give states far more regulatory power. Keenan hopes the court heard this message: "The lesson from South Dakota is that people don't want government involved in their personal lives."
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