Revisionist History: Misrepresenting President Ronald Reagan's Abortion Record

Conservative voters long for another Ronald Reagan as president and his deeply felt pro-life views are still alluring to pro-life people long after his administration. Pro-life advocates always felt Reagan was "one of us" and understood their passion to protect unborn children -- but some revisionist historians would like nothing more than to confuse the record.

By misrepresenting President Reagan's abortion record, these historians can confuse and divide the grassroots pro-life community and make it more difficult to rally around future presidential candidate.

Florida State University associate professor of history Michael Creswell is the latest to engage in the practice.

In a Tuesday editorial, Creswell accuses pro-life advocates of "remembering Reagan's record selectively" and claimed "Reagan often embraced policies sharply at odds with conservative philosophy."

"Almost all conservatives oppose abortion," Creswell writes. "But in 1967, only four months into his first term as governor of California, Reagan signed into law a bill that resulted in millions of abortions due to a provision in the bill allowing abortions for the well-being of the mother."

"Times have changed. Few of today's conservatives would support a politician who signed a similar bill," he adds. "Among the 10 major Republicans who have run for president this year, only Rudolph Giuliani supported abortion rights."

Creswell conveniently tells just half of the story. And if his recounting of the history of Reagan's abortion actions ended there, pro-life advocates would have reason to be concerned.

But the facts go well beyond Creswell's revisionist history.

In the 2005 book "Essential Ronald Reagan," writer Lee Edwards points out that Reagan felt duped into signing the measure because his legal advisors told him it would leave the vast majority of abortions illegal.

He writes that Reagan came to "deeply" regret signing the bill.

In a period before Roe v. Wade, Reagan didn't have the advantage of knowing that abortion advocates and courts would misuse the health exception in the bill to allow virtually all abortions to become legal. That wasn't Reagan's intent at all, despite Creswell's presentation of Reagan as an abortion advocate whom pro-life voters would distrust.

Reagan's most able biographer, Lou Cannon, writes that Reagan have never really grappled with the issue of abortion, but that he experienced regret as soon as 1968 over signing the bill.

Reagan said that "those were awful weeks" when he realized the fallout from the legislation and that he would never have signed the bill if he had "been a more experienced governor."

As Edwards points out and Creswell leaves out, "When legislators in 1970 proposed new liberalizations in the abortion law, Reagan successfully opposed them."

Then Governor Reagan eventually wrote a constituent a letter making a now common pro-life argument.

"Those who summarily advocate a blanket population control [Reagan's emphasis] should think carefully. Who might they be doing away? Another Lincoln or Bethoven, an Einstein or Edison? Who shall play God?" Reagan wrote.

As a 1976 presidential candidate, he said of his signing the California abortion bill, "I wouldn't make the same mistake again" and added that he did "more soul searching and studying on the subject than anything else in my eight years" as governor.

By 1980, when he won his first term, Reagan advocated a solid pro-life position that abortion was wrong in every instance except very rare occasions when it might be necessary to save the mother's life.

I presented this information to Mr. Creswell in an email and the good professor responded by saying he didn't have room in his article to present the facts. Yet, a short paragraph would have disabused the false impression he left with his readers that Reagan backed abortion or that he doesn't enjoy enormous popularity with the majority of Americans who are pro-life.

Creswell also claimed Reagan did nothing to advance the pro-life cause as president.

"He also provided much rhetorical red meat to the anti-abortion activists, but that was about all," the FSU professor contended in his reply to me.

Never mind that Reagan wrote a seminal book on abortion -- "Abortion and the Conscience of Nation." For a sitting president to pen a tome about such a controversial subject is indeed a rarity and shows the great lengths to which Reagan both regretted signing the California abortion bill and desired to articulate a clear and unmistakable pro-life position.

Moreover, Reagan's putting the Mexico City Policy during his presidency to cut off taxpayer-funding of groups that promoted and performed abortions in other nations has saved literally millions of lives in the decades since.

As conservative columnist Warner Tood Huston has written, "In light of the evidence it cannot be said that Reagan was ever an 'adamant' pro-abortion supporter."

For someone to misrepresent Reagan's staunch pro-life views, "is a disgraceful attempt to co-opt the reputation of the most famous and successful politician of his age and an icon of the conservative movement."

If historians are so readily willing to misrepresent the history of presidents on abortion, one wonders how quickly they will cover up the radical pro-abortions views of the eventual Democratic nominee in this year's contest.

Emancipation Proclamation of Preborn Children

NOW THEREFORE, I, RONALD REAGAN, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim and declare the unalienable personhood of every American, from the moment of conception until natural death, and I do proclaim, ordain, and declare that I will take care that the Constitution and laws of the United States are faithfully executed for the protection of America's unborn children. Upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God. I also proclaim Sunday, January 17, 1988, as a national Sanctity of Human Life Day. I call upon the citizens of this blessed land to gather on that day in their homes and places of worship to give thanks for the gift of life they enjoy and to reaffirm their commitment to the dignity of every human being and sanctity of every human life.

Ronald Reagan

Presidential Proclamation

January 14, 1988

http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/004245.html

Why Pro-Life Presidents Matter

What if I told you the only significant influence the President has on the economy is in selecting the Chairman of the Federal Reserve?

While the role of the president in “managing the economy” is often overstated, most serious voters would rightly dismiss such a narrow claim as absurd. Yet how often do we hear the similarly daft assertion that the only significant role the president plays in advancing the pro-life agenda is nominating Supreme Court justices?

The fact is that the president has a limited but substantial and broad-based role in protecting life and defending the most vulnerable in society. Here are five examples of why it matters that the president is pro-life:

1. Preserving the Pro-Life Riders — Each year pro-life provisions or “riders” are attached to the annual appropriations bills which prevent public funds from supporting abortions, abortion providers, or abortion promoters. The pro-life riders are attached to funding legislation and typically come up in the appropriations process or Department of Defense reauthorizations. As AdvanceUSA notes, under President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, federal regulations were clearly written to prevent recipients of Title X funds from referring for abortions or combining family planning services with abortion services (ex: working at the same location).

Examples of pro-life riders include:

The Dickey-Wicker provision which prohibits federal funding for research that harms or destroys human embryos.

The Kemp-Kasten Amendment which prevents funding from going to those who support or participate in a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.

The Hyde-Weldon provision which offers conscience protections for health care entities that refuse to provide or encourage abortions. It requires federal funds to be withheld from any state that discriminates against a hospital, insurance provider, or individual doctors and nurses for refusing to participate in abortion.

The Mexico City Policy, first enacted by Ronald Reagan and later reinstituted by George W. Bush, which prohibits USAID (foreign aid) money from going to any organizations that promote or perform abortions.

Other provisions that are more specific include bans on funding for: abortions for federal prisoners, abortion in the District of Columbia, abortions through the Federal Employee Health Benefits program, abortions through Peace Corp, and abortion through the international HIV/AIDS bill.

A pro-life president can threaten to use the veto—as Bush has often done—to prevent the removal of such riders. A pro-choice resident, however, would almost certainly veto any legislation that included these pro-life provisions.

2. Filing of amicus briefs in cases before the judiciary — Where a case may have broader implications, amicus curiae briefs are a way to introduce those concerns, so that the possibly broad legal effects of court decisions will not depend solely on the parties directly involved in the case. Both John Roberts, as a Special Assistant to U.S. Attorney General, and Samuel Alito, as Assistant to the Solicitor General, submitted briefs defending the pro-life cause. Reagan's Solicitor General Charles Fried also called for Roe to be reversed in a brief. While the briefs themselves rarely decide the outcome of a particular case, they are useful in limiting the scope of a particular legal change or interpretation

3. Issuance of executive orders — Executive orders help direct the operation of officers within the executive branch. They also have the force of law when made in pursuance of certain Acts of Congress, when those acts give the President discretionary powers. For example, on the 4th day of the Clinton presidency, Jan. 23, the 20th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Bill Clinton signed, in a televised Oval Office ceremony, a series of executive orders undoing the pro-life policies of the Reagan-Bush era. The orders repealed the Mexico City policy, repealed prohibition on federally-funded clinics referring for abortion, lifted the ban on military abortions, and lifted the ban on fetal tissue research.

As Carl Bernstein wrote in his book, A Woman in Charge,

“Hillary had pushed unequivocally for the orders, but Bill's pollster argued that she was dead wrong on the timing of such a hot-button issue; by acting on abortion policy as one of the administration's first pieces of business, the president and, worse, Hillary, would be perceived as governing from the left. But Hillary regarded the prohibitions in question as a powerful symbol of Reagan-era policies, and an opportunity to declare boldly that the Clinton era had begun. There was an additional appeal: it was fiscally neutral, monetarily cost-free, and not subject to a drawn-out legislative process.” (p. 256)
4. Selection of political appointments — The President fills many political appointments that have a direct and significant impact on the pro-life cause. Examples include Health and Human Services (responsible for enforcing the Hyde Amendment, etc.), the FDA (e.g., approval and regulation of abortifacients), and the State Department (which sends multiple delegates to UN conferences like CEDAW and Population and Development, where the international battle for human dignity is waged).

The Justice Department is another agency that has a key role, specifically in deciding how to defend law cases involving US statutes. For example, Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno cleared the way for the nation's first assisted suicide law by deciding that physicians may provide lethal doses of medicine to terminally ill patients without losing their licenses to write prescriptions. She did so by overturning the position taken by the head of one of her own agencies, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which had said that doctors who prescribe drugs under Oregon's assisted-suicide law could face severe sanctions.

5. Using the “bully pulpit” — The term “bully pulpit” comes from President Theodore Roosevelt's reference to the White House as a “bully pulpit,” meaning a wonderful platform (Roosevelt often used the word “bully” as an adjective meaning superb) from which to persuasively advocate an agenda. As Reagan showed, there is simply no better single platform for advocating the pro-life cause than from within the Oval Office.

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Christians have an obligation to the most vulnerable members of our society to elect politicians who have both a robust view of human dignity and the temerity to govern accordingly. We betray this duty when we downplay the role the executive branch in advancing the pro-life cause. Judges and legislators matter; but presidents matter too.

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