The debate (gore buckling on pro-choice??)

Ampersand B. Deutsch ennead at teleport.com
Wed Oct 4 23:17:44 PDT 2000


Clinton's position all along has been that he'd sign a partial-birth abortion ban so long as the ban made exceptions to protect the life and health of the mother. The only reason he kept vetoing the thing every two years is that the Republicans refused to put in the language about protecting the health of the mother (they voted down an amendment to that effect more than once).

Considering Gore's pro-life tendencies when he was in congress, it's no surprise that he's with Clinton on this one. A fighter for reproductive rights, he ain't.

It's all a showboat, of course. Every time they passed that bill, the Republicans knew that Clinton would veto it, and they suspected that if Clinton didn't the Supreme Court would. But this way the Republicans got to push a high-profile anti-abortion bill every two years, and Clinton got to show feminists that he vetoed an anti-abortion bill every two years, and no actual leglislation got made into law to confuse things. Everyone wins. Probably they were all pissed off that the Supreme Court more-or-less declared the ban unconstitutional last term...

--BD Feeling a little bit cynical about abortion politics tonight.... http://www.teleport.com/~ennead/ampersand/vanguard/hostage.html

----- Original Message ----- From: <JessEcoh at cs.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 8:58 PM Subject: Re: The debate (gore buckling on pro-choice??)


: In a message dated 10/3/00 10:05:17 PM Central Daylight Time,
: carlremick at hotmail.com writes:
:
: > The only surprise to me was that Gore was emphatically more bellicose in
: > terms of foreign policy than W. Other than that -- boring.
:
: the surprise for me was -- did i HEAR this right?? -- gore offering to
: sign a bill banning so-called "partial-birth abortions" (with some caveats
: about exceptions for the health of the mother)... or has gore been saying
: this all along, and i'm so out of touch i didn't know about it?? what the
: hell??
:
:
: --jesse
: grumpier than usual
:
:



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list