Wrapped in the Flag (37 page)

I shared the conclusions of Dr. John Willke, the chairman of the National Right to Life Committee, who held that the “psychic trauma of assault rape” made pregnancy unlikely. In his first book,
Handbook on Abortion
, Willke described a study of 3,500 cases of rape in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area that revealed “zero cases of pregnancy.”
²⁴
In several subsequent books and in his public speeches, Willke calculated that fewer than three hundred pregnancies
per year resulted from rape.
²⁵

I was shocked to discover that these so-called experts were wrong. The actual number of pregnancies resulting from rape is closer to twenty-five thousand per year.
²⁶

I’d learned in the pro-life movement that the abortion of “defective” children is considered a form of “eugenic engineering” that would “open the way to the systematic elimination of defective or ‘inferior’ people as a matter of government policy.”
²⁷
Then I read the stories of mothers and fathers who faced an excruciating choice when their unborn babies were diagnosed with terrible fetal anomalies. I read heartbreaking reports of pregnant women battling cancer who had to decide either to abort and continue their chemotherapy or to go untreated and hope they survived the pregnancy.

Pro-lifers couldn’t admit that their “100% pro-life” congressmen and senators slashed medical services for the poor, leaving tens of thousands of women without access to prenatal care. And we could never tell the inconvenient truth that cuts to federal nutrition programs took food out of the mouths of women and their babies.

Pro-lifers have never been able to admit that Planned Parenthood, the ultimate bogeyman, did more than abort babies. Millions of women rely on their local PP clinic for cancer screening, contraceptives, and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. And I’ve yet to run into a real pro-life advocate who accepts that, according to its latest annual report, less than 4 percent of Planned Parenthood money goes to abortion services. By law, those dollars must be kept absolutely separate from government money.

Pro-lifers do know that every year in the United States almost 1.3 million women have abortions. What I don’t hear from them is the fact that this is an awful choice for most of those women. Many of them do it alone, without the help of their parents or the support of the man who fathered the baby. I finally realized that these women are not evil or stupid or lazy. These women are terrified. For a hundred reasons, they feel that they cannot carry their pregnancy to term.

This number—1.3 million—has remained almost constant, both before and since
Roe
. So, all the yelling, protesting, debating, legislating, and posturing ignores this reality: we are no closer to helping these women than we were forty years ago.

Realizing that politicians were using the “pro-life” label to advance a right-wing agenda broke my heart, but I had to face the truth. I no longer fit in the movement I’d help build.

On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan, former Democrat turned conservative messiah, became the fortieth president of the United States. He had trounced President Carter in the Electoral College, grabbing 90 percent of the votes, after racking up an impressive win in the popular vote total.
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It was a landslide, with some pundits even dubbing it the “Reagan Revolution.”
²
Political scientists who lived to analyze and dissect elections characterized the Gipper’s winning coalition as the Old Right, New Right, Dixiecrats, Christian Right, and Americanists—a patchwork of conservatives melded into the new GOP.
³

For my parents, the win was personal, a vindication of everything they’d preached for the last twenty-five years. When the new president said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Mother and Dad were over the moon.
⁴
Finally, there was a real conservative at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

My parents had reason to gloat: some of their closest friends and associates had helped build the Reagan majority. Front and center was Paul Weyrich, architect of the New Right. Weyrich had come up with the term “Moral Majority” and convinced the preacher Jerry Falwell to use it to describe evangelical activists.
⁵
Mother also recognized the success of Senators Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, who had turned the South into GOP country, while Phyllis Schlafly was busy firing up her contingent of housewives. Mother’s newspaper, the
Wanderer
, got into the act by activating the conservative wing of Roman Catholics.
⁶
Of course, their greatest salute was for Robert Welch, who had unleashed the power of the John Birch Society.

“It’s glorious,” Mother said. “Finally, Christians are in power, and your parents were in on the ground floor.”

“You, however, have turned your back on your parents and your country,” Dad said to me. “I demand to know how you voted.”

“I thought we still had a secret ballot,” I answered.

“Don’t be a smart aleck, young lady,” Mother fired back. “We know you voted for Carter.”

I shrugged, provoking both of them even more.

“You’re a goddamn lib!” my father shouted. “I give up on you.”

My father may have given up, but he never let up. Almost every time we were together, he pushed, argued, cajoled, and threatened. Mother, ever vigilant about “fixing” me, joined in. They were determined to pull me from the grip of godless liberalism and remake me as a good right-wing, pro-Reagan, Christian Republican. For my parents, my pro-life work was not redemptive. Because I failed to adhere 100 percent to their agenda, I was forever a hopeless liberal no-goodnik.

In a nod toward appeasement, I promised to keep an open mind about the new president. But beyond his devotion to Nancy and his love for Jelly Bellies, I couldn’t find anything I liked about the man. When he railed against the homeless on national television, I stopped looking. “You can’t help those who simply will not be helped,” our president declared on
Good Morning America
. “One problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, is people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.”
⁷

Right up to the end of his second term, Reagan continued to insist that his policies had nothing to do with the increase in homelessness or, for that matter, in the increase in joblessness. Steven Roberts, writing in the
New York Times
, wrote of the president’s views, “Mr. Reagan, who frequently insists that his policies have caused few economic hardships, repeated a suggestion he has made before that jobless workers are unemployed by their own choice.”
⁸

In my little town of Marshfield, Wisconsin, Reagan’s policies forced drastic cutbacks in residential mental health programs. Suddenly, there were men and women pushing their possessions in Shopko shopping carts and huddling in doorways to sleep. It was evident that these folks needed help, and the Reagan Revolution guaranteed that they wouldn’t have any, at least not from government.

Just like my parents, the good Christian in the White House hated any government program targeting people in need. Mother, Dad, and Ronald Reagan imagined a utopia where the poor and the sick would be taken care of by a magical combination of private charity and benevolent business. The fact that their scheme was fiction made no difference.

According to William Kleinknecht, in his book
The Man Who Sold the World
, President Reagan believed that “sustaining the poor and healing the sick should be the responsibility of private interests, not the government,” and he set out to make that happen.
⁹
His first round of budget cuts for social programs amounted to more than $128 billion, an amount that was supposed to be made up by increased private-sector philanthropy.

Private giving did increase under Reagan, but not enough to close the gap, not even close to that. Even more alarming, though, was that much of the private giving was going to support universities, museums, and the arts, and not to help the needy. “In fact,” noted Kleinknecht, “the amount of money donated for health and human services actually declined in Reagan’s first term.”
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To many observers, the Reagan administration “made a mockery of the promises to reduce government waste while preserving programs for the ‘truly needy.’”
¹¹
I fell into that group. As I watched the Department of Housing and Urban Development scandals, the Iran-Contra mess, and the Savings and Loan debacle unfold, I came to believe that Reagan was a phony, in every way. He proved what P. J. O’Rourke, the libertarian satirist, said, “Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.”
¹²

No matter what I thought, my mother and my father were no more likely to budge from their vision than Ronald Reagan was. After all, the president was the same guy who’d explained to a
Time
reporter back in 1976 that “fascism was really the basis for the New Deal.”
¹³

A few months after President Reagan left office, Anthony Lewis, writing in the
New York Times
, described his legacy: “The intangible cost of the Reagan years . . . are the costs of hostility to the role of government, of indulgence toward private greed, of insensitivity to the needs of the weak in our society.”
¹⁴

Despite the negative impact of Reagan’s policies, the man passed into GOP mythology, where he took his place as the high priest of conservatives. For me, however, he personified the worst in right-wingers and their policies.

The Reagan victory sent the right wing into a dance of joy. Even the John Birch Society joined in the celebration. In January of 1981, Robert Welch highlighted the “very encouraging developments on the political front,” while tipping his hat to JBS members who “proved conclusively that an informed and energetic few can make a whale of a difference.”
¹⁵

Later on in the same bulletin, JBS staff member William Guidry exhorted members to stay vigilant: “Mr. Reagan has suggested the Department of Energy and the recently instituted Department of Education as likely targets of expulsion. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, soon to be chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, has set his sights on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by vowing a senatorial assault on the institutionalized racism
known as ‘affirmative action.’” JBS members were encouraged to write to senators and congressmen to urge “that legislative action against these and other regulatory monstrosities be initiated as soon as possible.”
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By July, though, the wave of euphoria had vanished, and the JBS was up in arms, no pun intended, about the Reagan administration’s decision to sell arms to China as part of the effort to push back against Soviet expansion. Robert Welch attacked this policy as inconsistent with the “repeated pronouncements of opposition to communism that, in large part anyway, helped to put the new administration in office.”
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The Chinese arms sale was not the only foreign policy move of Reagan’s that alarmed the JBS. His administration forgave millions of dollars in Polish debt, a move described by Birchers as “bailing out the dictators with our tax money.”
¹⁸
That same month, Reagan shored up support for President Jose Duarte’s government in El Salvador, which the JBS referred to as “a decidedly Leftist creation of the Carter Administration.”
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And after Reagan’s famous “Tear Down This Wall” speech, given in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, the JBS continued to point out the “chasm between Mr. Reagan’s words and his actions.”
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On the domestic front, the president’s tax policy also raised red flags. In an open letter to Reagan in August of 1982, the JBS wrote, “Something is wrong. . . . You campaigned strongly in 1980 for a three-year, thirty percent tax cut, and in 1981 you used your influence with Congress to get that cut approved. But, with your approval, Congress may soon impose a tax hike of $99 billion on an economically battered public, the
largest single tax increase in American history!
Why, Mr. President, why?”
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