THE BELL CURVE:Rhetoric outside, reasoning inside

The 34th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade — the Supreme Court decision that protected the reproductive rights of American women — came and went last week with the predictable anti-abortion messages.

Ila Johnson, in a creative stretch on the Pilot’s Forum page, described Roe vs. Wade as a soul mate of the Dred Scott decision, which ruled in 1857 that the 5th Amendment to the Constitution protected the rights of slave owners to take their human property into the territories.

I worked with that concept for a while, then, in an effort to bring the debate back to current realities and offer a little balance, I checked out a meeting last week at Newport Beach’s Temple Bat Yahm called God, Women, Faith and Choice. It was sponsored by Planned Parenthood and featured an impressive mix of local religious leaders.

Arriving there rather reminded me of the security checks at John Wayne Airport. I had to drive through a small, but highly vocal and decidedly unfriendly phalanx of protesters, armed with bullhorns and banners, into a parking lot where a man with a clipboard checked my name against a list of invitees, which I wasn’t. But since I wasn’t armed with a bullhorn or banner, I was signed in.

Because I got confused about which door to enter, I had to retrace my steps and was followed all the way, both going and coming, by two agitated young men who kept shouting at me: “Hey, mister, you going to learn how to murder somebody tonight?” The signs they carried offered a similar message. Compounds of the word “murder” were extremely popular among the demonstrators.

I was told at the door that name tags were required — apparently on the theory that protesters wouldn’t want to be identified. After enjoying a nonpolitical cookie and coffee, I entered the meeting room where about 100 people, many young and the majority female, were assembled before a podium and a group of panelists. When I entered, the moderator — the Rev. Stanley D. Smith, pastor of the First Christian Church of Orange — was saying, “Tonight we hope to bring in more light, not more heat, to this issue.” Given what I had just passed through, it seemed to offer an encouraging change of pace.

And so it did. The speakers who followed seldom raised their voices in offering reasoned presentations of the abortion-rights position that made me wonder if an occasional blast of heat might have been in order. The exception was Rabbi Mark Miller, whose take-no-prisoners style didn’t spend much time in any shades of gray. He stated his positions quite clearly, among them: that human life does not begin with conception, that the interests of the mother are paramount, that faith depends on one’s own conscience, and that it is a woman’s right and privilege to be free of any secular entity or government coercion in making decisions about her body.

Less forceful and more typical was the opening comment of another panelist who said: “I’m pro-choice because I don’t believe I have any right to impose my beliefs on anyone else. I don’t respect the dignity of people if I think I have the right to make choices for them.”

It was difficult to overlook the contrast between the two groups: heated passion outside and cool reasoning inside.

The behavior of the central figure in this dispute is symbolic of the contrast. I’ve known Norma McCorvey — who wore the mantle of Jane Roe with enormous discomfort — since a week after Roe vs. Wade came down 34 years ago, when I persuaded her to talk to me for a national magazine story. We met and corresponded regularly afterward until a few years ago, when she signed on with her former enemy in a search for love that the anti-abortion people offered her and the feminist groups who exploited her mostly didn’t.

The fight to revoke Roe vs. Wade is going to be ugly with a new Supreme Court — packed with socially conservative jurists appointed by President Bush — to review it. And the ugliness can only get worse as the hostility and inflated rhetoric grow. The possibility of either side — but especially the anti-abortion proponents — seeing the other in less than draconian terms seems hopeless. If the protesters calling me a murderer-in-training for being at Bat Yahm the other night are symbolic of what’s ahead, it is going to be a long, noisy and possibly, but hopefully not, violent path for Roe vs. Wade back to the Supreme Court.

But, as the Rev. Smith said in his introduction, “Because reproductive rights are constantly at risk, it is imperative to acknowledge the importance of Roe and to remember what it was like before that historic decision.”