It’s Time for a New Generation of Role Models to Step Up

Sarah Weddington was in town the other day. She’s been in a lot of towns lately, sometimes two in a single day.

She’s been traveling so much that she can recite the airlines’ safety spiel verbatim, and she does that in her speeches, which are a hoot. (On Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry, whom she met moments before both appeared on a TV talk show: “They brought him into makeup because he had so many zits.”)

Sarah’s in a better mood these days, happier, more rested, she says. That’s because, for the moment, we’ve won. That’s we , Sarah and I, even though I’ve only just met her, and we , those of us who think along the same lines.

“We are really live-and-let-live people,” is how Sarah describes our type. We are pro-choice.

If you don’t know who Sarah Weddington is, chances are good that you stand on the younger side of a generational divide. I remember first hearing about her in 1973, the year I graduated from high school, and feeling so grateful that she had come along, up out of Texas all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course, back then, I thought 27 was old , old enough to be a heroine, or a “role model” in the dry term of today. That’s how old Sarah was when she successfully argued Roe vs. Wade before the black-robed men who sanctified The Law.

It was the first case that she’d ever argued (law firms weren’t exactly tripping over themselves to offer young women jobs outside the secretarial pool), and she did it for free, for a cause. Ours.

Now, 20 years later, Sarah’s speaking itinerary resembles a victory tour, at last. “What a difference a President makes!” she tells her audiences right off.

They laugh and they clap at that, look around, nod. More than 600 people showed up to hear her at Planned Parenthood’s luncheon in Orange County, and she says the turnout has been equally robust everyplace else.

“A celebration,” Sarah calls it, meaning it, certainly glad for it. But there is something else. It’s sort of a deja vu .

We’ve been through this before.

Certainly Sarah never anticipated, nor wanted, to essentially devote her life to protecting a women’s right to an abortion. But Roe vs. Wade didn’t do it for long. The anti-abortion movement organized, radicalized and bit back. It’s been guerrilla war.

“I feel like I’ve been pinned down by sniper fire for the last 20 years,” Sarah was telling me over coffee the other day.

The abortion battle has been like a seesaw, she says. Who’s in and who’s out. It’s never mattered more to women. To the victors goes control over our lives.

On the 20th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, President Clinton reversed a decade of Republican edicts that had sought to block access to abortion even while, technically, legally, women hadn’t lost their right to choose.

The gag rule, which restricted abortion counseling at federally-funded clinics to doctors only, was one especially clumsy attempt at a backdoor abortion ban that I was especially happy to see go.

The research prohibitions, equally ludicrous, on fetal tissue and RU 486, the French abortion pill, are now gone. And those of us who are pro-choice are hopeful, too, that the Freedom of Choice Act will become law, one that will guarantee all women the right to make up their own minds, and hearts, about whether they should give birth.

But, no, few of us are naive enough to think that this will end the guerrilla warfare once and for all. Tactics are changing, but not the goals. The anti-abortion movement is running a warm and fuzzy television ad campaign right now.

We live-and-let-live types are handicapped here. The very nature of our position--”I may not have an abortion myself, but it’s not up to me, or anybody else, to tell you what to choose”--doesn’t make for very dramatic symbols. A coat-hanger, for example, resonates with an older generation, now pushing menopause.

Sarah realizes this, of course. She’s 47, and she wears her gray hair in a bun. Instead of the Methodist minister’s daughter that she is, she looks more like his wife.

Which is just another example of how sound-bite symbolism can deceive.

For the cover of her book, Sarah says she wrestled with this image problem too. She settled on words, big, bold and true. “A Question of Choice,” her book is called. Published just before the November election, she meant it as a rallying cry.

She’ll rewrite the final chapter for the paperback version coming out in spring. Her outlook before the election was too grim.

Yes, now there is reason to smile. But complacency is something else. We live-and-let-lives would like to go on with the rest of our lives. We’ve grown tired of talking (and screaming) about abortion for all these years.

We need new Sarah Weddingtons, old enough to be heroines, young enough not to think that an impossible task. They will not be complacent about reproductive rights, but they will broaden the agenda to equal rights, and access, for all.

Sarah says she’ll give herself a sabbatical this fall, to write her next book. “Some Leaders Are Born Women,” it will be called.