Word: ryans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Interestingly, the arduous work of getting traditional adversaries on the abortion issue to endorse the Ryan-DeLauro effort had relatively little to do with concerns about the substance of specific provisions. Instead, the bill's backers found they needed to give people on both sides time to learn to let down their guard a little after decades of skirmishes. "We had to reach a level of trust," says DeLauro. "Because so often this issue has been one about which there was nothing other than trying to score political points...
...encourage trust was to make changes that Rachel Laser, director of the culture program of the think tank Third Way, says were designed to "turn down the heat." Laser began her career in the pro-choice community and agreed four years ago to help Ryan craft a common-ground bill. She shouldered the task of patiently hearing out each group's concerns and turning them into a final product that could garner broad support without being uselessly watered down or split into two. When abortion-rights advocates, for example, objected to a provision to have abortion providers obtain what...
...bill. President Barack Obama provided an additional boost in his commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame, in which he urged groups to come together to reduce the number of abortions. "This Administration has lowered the provocation levels," says Joel Hunter, a pro-life Evangelical who supports the Ryan-DeLauro bill. "That's allowed all of those who have traditionally focused on just one part of the agenda to begin to mature in the way we approach politics and take a chance on working with each other...
...course, this is abortion politics, so there are still speed bumps ahead. The most immediate is the roiling fight over whether to include coverage for abortion services in health-care reform. Ryan is trying to broker a deal for pro-life Democrats that would basically codify the status quo, in which private insurers are neither required nor prevented from offering abortion services and no federal funding is involved. More than anything, the fight risks aggravating old wounds that could end these newly formed - and still tentative - partnerships and send the bill's many supporters into adversarial camps again...
Suspicions continue to fester. Frances Kissling, a liberal Catholic and an abortion-rights advocate, declared her "unqualified" support for the Ryan-DeLauro bill earlier this week and promptly launched a broadside at pro-life supporters of the effort in an essay on Salon. "While the new anti-abortionists do not use the same words as their older counterparts," Kissling wrote, "they are thinking the same thoughts...