A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  In early November, as a House vote approached on America’s biggest health care overhaul ever, Catholic and evangelical leaders saw an opportunity to accomplish something they couldn’t get done during a collective five terms—or two full decades—under President Reagan and both President Bushes. While many Catholics had turned away from the 2004 Democratic Catholic presidential candidate John Kerry, a majority had supported Obama in 2008 and felt they had political leverage with him. In recent years, women’s groups had placed less emphasis on abortion rights and the nation’s support for abortion had gradually eroded to around 50 percent, from its earlier height of 75 percent. Now, with health care reform as the primary Democratic issue, both Republicans and the Catholic Church smelled vulnerability.

  After Senator Ted Kennedy died in August 2009, Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley approached the president at the church altar at Kennedy’s funeral and appealed to him not to back publicly funded abortions. The United States had 68 million Catholics and Cardinal O’Malley wanted the president to know that although the Church backed health care reform, the Vatican adamantly opposed abortion. It was a moment of great historical context. When running for president in 1960, the Catholic senator John Kennedy had diligently tried to convince Americans that if he won the White House, he wouldn’t take orders from Rome. Half a century later, the Vatican was about to weigh in heavily on American politics.

  On Friday, November 6, Nancy Pelosi got a call from Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Washington, D.C.’s, former archbishop, who reiterated the pope’s position on the abortion issue. Legally, the Catholic Church could not lobby for political causes and continue to maintain its tax-exempt status, but this kind of pressure was not technically considered lobbying (many Americans disagreed with this interpretation of the law and felt it should be changed). Ever since Cardinal O’Malley had gently muscled President Obama at Kennedy’s funeral, Catholic officials across America had been talking with worshippers and local church officials about supporting health care reform—but opposing any public funding of abortion. The U.S. Conference of Bishops, the Church’s Washington-based advocacy group, was staffed by 350 members who maintained close contact with Washington lawmakers. The organization sent out flyers to every parish in the country, asking Catholics to pray for restrictions on abortion and to phone their representatives and ask them to “fix these bills with pro-life amendments.”

  Evangelicals kept just as busy working their constituents. Since 1935, the highly secretive Washington Christian fellowship known as the Family had built a membership including scores of U.S. senators, congressmen, White House officials, military officers, corporate executives, and other politicians and ambassadors outside the United States. The Family was widely regarded as the best-connected fundamentalist Christian organization in the nation, if not the world. Its resident headquarters on Washington’s C Street had twelve bedrooms, nine bathrooms, five living rooms, four dining rooms, three offices, a kitchen, and a small chapel. Rooms were rented out to those in Congress for a reported $600 a month for room and board. The Family’s core purpose, according to its leader, Douglas Coe, was to offer public officials a place for Bible study, prayer meetings, and worship services, or to have a forum in which to share their personal troubles (in 2009, two Family members, Senator John Ensign of Nevada and Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, became embroiled in sex scandals). The group sponsored the National Prayer Breakfast, attended by every sitting U.S. president since 1953.

  Coe also talked about the need to make a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. In a 1989 lecture, he proclaimed, “Jesus said, ‘You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself.’ Hitler—that was the demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people.”

  Coe saw parallels between Jesus’ demands and those of the Red Guard during the Chinese Cultural Revolution: “I’ve seen pictures of young men in the Red Guard of China…They would bring in this young man’s mother and father, lay her on the table with a basket on the end, he would take an axe and cut her head off…. They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of the mother-father-brother-sister—their own life! That was a covenant. A pledge. That was what Jesus said.”

  Two Family members were the longtime Pennsylvania Republican congressman Joe Pitts and Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat. On November 6, after Speaker Pelosi got the call from Cardinal McCarrick, Stupak told her that if she wanted to get her health reform bill through Congress, she should meet with the Catholic bishop’s staff, now assembled down the hall in his office. She took his advice and spoke with the group for three hours.

  Congressmen Stupak and Pitts then introduced the Stupak-Pitts amendment, barring the use of federal funds for abortion coverage, except in cases involving rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life. If women wanted abortion coverage, they’d have to buy it separately. The amendment blindsided House Democrats. Stupak knew that virtually no Republicans were going to vote for the health reform bill in its present form and forty to sixty conservative Democrats would vote against it unless the amendment was accepted. He had Pelosi boxed in.

  She then met with leaders of the 190-member Pro-Choice Caucus, explaining to them that without the Stupak amendment the bill was dead. Shouting matches and tears erupted in her office, with many in the caucus feeling betrayed by their leader. As Pelosi frantically tried to keep the reform bill on track, the word went out from America’s Catholic hierarchy to announce “at all Masses” that priests and parishioners should tell House members: “Please support the Stupak Amendment that addresses essential pro-life concerns…If these serious concerns are not addressed, the final bill should be opposed.”

  Outside on the streets of Washington, abortion protesters stood next to the U.S. Capitol, carrying signs showing piles of bodies at the German concentration camp Dachau. The signs’ caption read, “National Socialist Healthcare.” Other placards displayed grisly photos identified as aborted fetuses.

  On Saturday, November 7, with the vote coming that evening, Democrats launched a counterattack. If the bill passed, said Congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado, it would amount to the broadest “restriction of a woman’s right to choose” in her lifetime. Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, told The New York Times that “abortion is a matter of conscience on both sides of the debate. This amendment takes away that same freedom of conscience from America’s women. It prohibits them from access to an abortion even if they pay for it with their own money. It invades women’s personal decisions.”

  That night the House voted and sixty-four Democrats favored the Stupak-Pitts amendment, which passed 240–194, sending tremors through the Democratic Party’s national leadership. The House’s health reform bill, with the Stupak-Pitts amendment included, passed 220–215, gutting public funding for abortion. Exactly one Republican, Congressman Anh “Joseph” Cao of Louisiana, had voted for the bill. Representative DeGette now promised to kill this legislation if the Stupak-Pitts amendment wasn’t stripped from the final version.

  Feminist and women’s rights groups immediately launched a public relations battle against the amendment:

  “Stop Abortion Coverage Ban!” read an online solicitation from NARAL Pro-Choice America, which warned that women could lose the right to use “their own personal, private funds to purchase an insurance plan with abortion coverage in the new health system.”

  “Stop Stupak!” read the headline of an online petition doubling as a fund-raiser for Emily’s List, which solicited contributions for female candidates who supported abortion rights.

  President Obama had called for the health reform bill to be on his desk for his signature by Christmas 2009. He hoped to talk about the passage of this historic legislation at his State of the Union speech in January 2010. But the fight over abortion would threaten to take away the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and to weaken Obama’s
presidency.

  The battle over sex and reproduction was intensifying not just nationally, but globally.

  Within weeks of the emergence of the Stupak-Pitts amendment, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán of Mexico, recently retired as the Vatican’s chief spokesman on health care, declared to a magazine in Rome that homosexuals and transgendered people would not get into heaven. On the Web site Pontifex, he said that taking a “morning-after pill” to prevent pregnancy was comparable to “an assassination” and that every abortion was a crime that “merits punishment.” Like Scott Roeder, he backed up his assertions with quotations from Saint Paul, referring to the first chapter of his Letter to the Romans, in which Paul chastened those who’d turned against God through erotic behavior:

  “Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity.”

  People who rebuffed God were “filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”

  On November 20, more than 150 Christian leaders issued a statement reaffirming their opposition to abortion and gay marriage. The 4,700-word document, called “The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience,” admitted that “Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage,” but rejected same-sex marriage. Allowing gay marriage would open the way for “poly-amorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships.”

  The document said that President Obama’s desire to reduce the need for abortion is “a commendable goal,” but his health care reforms would likely increase the number of elective abortions. “The present administration is led and staffed by those who want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and who want to provide abortions at taxpayer expense.”

  Signees of the Manhattan Declaration included fifteen Roman Catholic bishops, including Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York and Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington; Focus on the Family’s founder, James Dobson; the National Association of Evangelicals president, Leith Anderson; and seminary leaders, professors, and pastors.

  Not even a member of the nation’s most famous Catholic family was spared the Church’s wrath for backing women’s rights and the laws of the United States. The Rhode Island Roman Catholic bishop Thomas Tobin banned U.S. Representative Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, from receiving communion in his state because of the congressman’s support for abortion rights. The war over abortion had extended to Rome, and was deepening in the American south.

  In Atlanta, anti-abortion groups erected sixty-five alarmist billboards proclaiming that “Black children are an endangered species.” Georgia Right to Life, in partnership with the Radiance Foundation, sponsored the billboards, featuring a worried-looking African-American boy and suggesting that Georgia’s black women had a disproportionately high number of abortions. In 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), nearly 58 percent of Georgia’s abortions were performed on black women, even though blacks made up about 30 percent of the population. Only New York and Texas reported a higher number of abortions performed on black women, but this didn’t appear to endanger black children as a group. Based on CDC numbers, the fertility rate among black women, or births per thousand females of childbearing age, remained higher than the national average and had increased in recent years.

  In early 2010 in Utah, Governor Gary Herbert signed a controversial law stating that women who sought illegal abortions could be charged with criminal homicide. The push for the new bill came after a seventeen-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her in the stomach in an effort to end her pregnancy.

  That May, Sister Margaret McBride, a member of a Phoenix Catholic hospital’s ethics committee, was excommunicated for her role in allowing an abortion to take place at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center. Both the nun and the surgery, considered necessary to save the life of a critically ill patient, were condemned by Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix diocese.

  “The Catholic Church,” said Bishop Olmsted, “will continue to defend life and proclaim the evil of abortion without compromise, and must act to correct even her own members if they fail in this duty.”

  XXXXIX

  The inside of Dr. Warren Hern’s Boulder office held the slightly acrid scent of medicine being practiced and the sense of being in a near-total female environment, women coming and going in the halls carrying files, women employees consulting with women patients about reproductive questions, women eating sandwiches with women over lunch in a back room and talking about women’s issues. The walls were lined with artistic photographs Dr. Hern had taken on his travels around the globe, many from impoverished Third World countries with little or no medical care. The quiet, gentle atmosphere within the office stood in sharp contrast to the locked doors, bulletproof glass, and barred windows that had turned the exterior of this abortion clinic into a fortress. One Monday in early November 2009, as the health care struggle intensified two thousand miles to the east in Washington, I drove to Boulder to meet with Dr. Hern. Since Tiller’s death, he’d become more of a focal point for abortion foes. Protesters had just camped outside his office for forty days and nights, and as we spoke in one of his waiting rooms, Hern said that he couldn’t walk out the clinic’s front door because “I’m afraid they’ll shoot me.” He also couldn’t walk across the street to another medical facility to get paperwork on some of his patients. He couldn’t drive his car into the lot next to his office, where visitors parked, because “that’s how they shot George the first time, when he was behind the wheel.”

  He led me out a back door and through a security gate. Walking with him in the streets of Boulder, I was keenly aware that until last May only three high-profile, late-term abortion doctors remained in the United States—Drs. Tiller, Hern, and Carhart—and only two were left. As we passed through a crosswalk, he warily looked in all directions and over his shoulder.

  “A local Catholic church,” he said, “supports the protesters who came to my office during those forty days. They should lose their tax-exempt status for harassing me.”

  We went to a nearby restaurant with an open-air patio and he wanted to sit outside on this warm, magnificent Indian summer afternoon. Facing the street, he ordered a glass of wine, as he had little planned for the rest of the afternoon, and we both took in the towering view of Boulder’s renowned Flatiron Mountains, rising majestically reddish in the perfectly clean autumn sunlight. Dr. Hern looked as if he needed to unwind from the recent siege at his office—if not the past thirty-six years.

  Like Tiller, he’d never intended to be involved with reproductive medicine or abortion, but after helping a few pregnant women early in his career and experiencing the enormity of their relief and gratitude, he’d been drawn into the field. When Boulder decided to open a clinic soon after Roe v. Wade, he was the natural choice to run it and had been doing this work ever since. Now seventy and an avid skier, he was fit and tanned, with a powerful-looking torso and arms, but his strongest feature was his face. He had sad eyes, a hawk’s nose, grayish hair flopping down across his forehead, and cheekbones worthy of the American pioneers who’d come west and survived endless summers and winters on the prairie. Born in Kansas, he’d moved to Colorado at age three and made it his home.

  Raising his glass of wine, he recalled how he and Tiller had talked on the phone every week and skied together in the Rockies, building a friendship despite the very different ways they saw the world. With an irreverent smile, Hern said that when his own tightly knit group of physicians got together, they liked to
tell stories about prominent Republican anti-abortion politicians who secretly paid for their wives or mistresses to end their pregnancies.

  “We’re in a position to know about these things,” he said, “but George never did this with us. Gossip wasn’t his style. He was committed to helping people, even those who totally opposed him. He was much more tolerant than I am. Battle with me and I’ll fight back. George was a very polite and considerate man, the model of Christian forbearance.”

  A few years ago, Gail and Robert Anderson, a devout Catholic couple in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had learned that cystic masses were covering their unborn baby’s left lung and building up pressure on the undeveloped heart. Gail was twenty-seven weeks pregnant and would have to deliver her child through a C-section. Under the very best scenarios, the infant would be on life-support machines for months until the suffocated heart had been repaired and the masses removed from the lung. Women from Gail’s parish, with whom she’d regularly protested outside an abortion clinic in Metairie, Louisiana, came to the Andersons and tried to talk them into keeping their baby. After great prayer and anguish, they decided not to and contacted Dr. Tiller. The car ride from Baton Rouge to Wichita was the longest of their lives.