Still far above the national average.
Posted on 04/11/2007 3:35:35 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took a step back last week in his previously promising effort to woo social conservatives. In seemingly casual and ill-considered remarks to CNN’s Dana Bash, Giuliani rattled the nerves of pro-lifers.
“Do you support taxpayer money or public funding for abortions in some cases?” Bash asked.
Giuliani replied: “If it would deprive someone of a constitutional right, yes, if that’s the status of the law, then I would, yes.”
Giuliani later stated that, as president, he would leave intact the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal abortion funding, except in cases of rape, incest, and pregnancies that jeopardize the lives of mothers.
“As I have indicated before,” Giuliani said, “I will not seek to change current law as described in the Hyde Amendment...”
Still, the damage was done. Conservative commentators, including some Giuliani fans, expressed their bafflement that Giuliani spoke so carelessly about the core concern of a key GOP constituency he has courted, and much of whose support he will need to win the GOP nomination. An NRO editorial even predicted that “an America with Giuliani’s favored policies would be a country with more abortion — probably reversing the 15-year trend of decline...”
This conclusion is dubious, and Giuliani should not duck it. His stump speeches, from the handful I have attended to others I have read or watched on TV, largely avoid abortion. Instead, Giuliani stresses his mayoral record on crime reduction, tax cuts, welfare reform, and more. This is a lost opportunity for Giuliani, because what he can say about abortion on his watch should please pro-lifers.
Between 1993 and 2001, while he was at City Hall, abortions across America fell from 1,495,000 to 1,303,000. This 12.8 percent decline, as reported by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, was sizeable. However, the downward trend in abortions under Giuliani was even more encouraging: Legal abortions in Gotham fell 16.9 percent, from 103,997 in 1993 to 86,466 in 2001, according to the New York State Office of Vital Statistics. (Abortions climbed 10.3 percent during the eight years before Giuliani.) As for taxpayer-funded Medicaid abortions, they plummeted an even faster 22.9 percent — from 45,006 in 1993 to 34,722 in 2001.
My NRO colleagues complained Monday that “New York City’s abortion rate had a long way to fall: Even after its decline, it remained much higher than the national average.” Yes, it’s true. Mayor Giuliani did not erase abortion in New York City. But it fell plenty on his watch. Does he deserve no credit for that?
Giuliani’s critics should pause and remember that these abortion reductions during his tenure did not happen in a conservative bastion like Lynchburg, Virginia, or Tulsa, Oklahoma. These dramatic declines occurred in New York City, arguably America’s abortion headquarters.
Had Giuliani turned the then-vacant Tweed Courthouse behind City Hall into a 24/7 free-abortion center, he would have been given a ticker-tape parade. Sex and the City-style feminists would have lined up to give him high-fives. The New York Times would have dropped the rolling pins it used to smack his noggin and picked up pom-poms to cheer him on.
“Rudy, Rudy — Sis boom bah; Free abortions —Rah rah rah!”
That never happened.
As New York State Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long told me: “I never remember seeing him promote the issue, to my knowledge.”
Added Joseph Zwilling, communications director for the Archdiocese of New York: “Off the top of my head, I cannot recall any instances when Mayor Giuliani’s and John Cardinal O’Connor’s different positions on abortion came to the fore while O’Connor was New York’s archbishop.”
Giuliani’s mayoral policy of giving occasional pro-choice speeches while doing nothing to promote abortion up-ends the tendency of Washington Republicans to give pro-life speeches while doing nothing to hinder abortion. (The partial-birth abortion ban, which Giuliani supports, is a rare exception.) Giuliani’s approach paralleled a drop in abortions that outpaced the national downward trend.
Unlike Giuliani’s successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Rudy could have required abortion lessons for OB-GYN residents in city-owned hospitals. Bloomberg’s pro-abortion policy accompanied a 5.2 percent increase in abortions, from 34,722 in 2001 to 36,523 in 2003. Giuliani easily could have implemented such a policy, or others like it, but he did not.
Did Giuliani ever actually do anything that reduced abortions?
Though tough to prove, Giuliani’s very deliberate policy of moving welfare recipients to work might have helped reduce abortions. As Giuliani graduated 57.8 percent of welfare recipients from public assistance to personal reliance, it seems reasonable that women who casually got pregnant while on relief (or otherwise would have) became more wary of impregnation when they had to show up for work. Likewise, moving men from the dole to employment may have inculcated in them a sense of personal accountability that would have encouraged them not to knock women up in the first place.
Giuliani also made a concerted effort to encourage adoption. This may have pushed abortions down.
While only 2,312 children were adopted in New York City in 1994, cumulative adoptions ballooned to 27,949 between then and 2001. This pro-adoption policy was directed by Nicholas Scoppetta — a former Justice Department colleague of Giuliani’s and current FDNY commissioner — himself a former foster child.
Giuliani also addressed parenthood in very traditional terms:
Seventy percent of long-term prisoners and 75 percent of adolescents charged with murder grew up without a father,” Giuliani said in his January 14, 1999 State of the City speech. “So, I guess if you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, a lot better than the City of New York, the United States Congress, the Social Welfare Agency, and Administration for Children’s Services, I guess the social program would be called fatherhood.”
This culture of responsibility, which vanquished Gotham’s dominant socio-cultural free-for-all, likely helped curtail abortions during Giuliani Time.
In short, Mayor Giuliani had eight years in America’s most abortion-happy city to make abortions as common as honking car horns. He did no such thing. Abortions fell on his watch, reversing an increase in abortions over the eight years before he arrived, and preceding an increase in abortions after he left.
Thus, it defies logic to believe that Giuliani would cause a hike in abortions as president of a nation in which abortion is increasingly unpopular and as leader of a party whose members largely and correctly equate abortion with murder.
Giuliani has a positive story to tell on abortion, just as he does on Gotham’s tax burden (down 17 percent) and on homicide (down 66.6 percent). Rather than tiptoe around this wooly mammoth at the kaffee klatch, he should confront it directly. Pro-lifers would feel more respected if Giuliani would address their concerns rather than skirt them.
Giuliani also can help extract his bandwagon from this pothole by energetically embracing the Hyde Amendment — a law with which politicians Left, middle, and Right have made peace. Rudolph W. Giuliani cannot repeat this loudly and often enough:
“Congress got Uncle Sam out of abortion funding in 1976, and I will keep Uncle Sam out of it.”
Ah, Deroy Murdock. Why am I not convinced?
Well, Rudy’s comments last week have shown that he has no concept of how our Constitution works. That alone disqualifies him; your attempts at dancing around the issue don’t change what Rudy believes one bit.
With a few clicks from a keyboard, Deroy would have you believe that Rudolph single-handedly reduced abortions throughout the U.S. What he conveniently forgets is the Republican Congress and its Contract With America.
Where are the aborting statistics after Rudolph left office?
Also note that the statistics don’t differentiate New York City from New York State.
Still far above the national average.
However:
.....: Legal abortions in Gotham fell 16.9 percent, from 103,997 in 1993 to 86,466 in 2001, according to the New York State Office of Vital Statistics. (Abortions climbed 10.3 percent during the eight years before Giuliani.) As for taxpayer-funded Medicaid abortions, they plummeted an even faster 22.9 percent — from 45,006 in 1993 to 34,722 in 2001. My NRO colleagues complained Monday that “New York City’s abortion rate had a long way to fall: Even after its decline, it remained much higher than the national average.” Yes, it’s true. Mayor Giuliani did not erase abortion in New York City. But it fell plenty on his watch. ....
From Human Events:
Rudy's Strong Pro-Abortion Stance
As these comments from a 1989 conversation with Phil Donahue show, Rudy Giuliani is staunchly in favor of abortion:
"I've said that I'll uphold a woman's right of choice, that I will fund abortion so that a poor woman is not deprived of a right that others can exercise, and that I would oppose going back to a day in which abortions were illegal.
I do that in spite of my own personal reservations. I have a daughter now; if a close relative or a daughter were pregnant, I would give my personal advice, my religious and moral views ...
Donahue: Which would be to continue the pregnancy.
Giuliani: Which would be that I would help her with taking care of the baby. But if the ultimate choice of the woman - my daughter or any other woman - would be that in this particular circumstance [if she had] to have an abortion, I'd support that. I'd give my daughter the money for it."
Worse yet, Giuliani even supports partial birth abortion:
"I'm pro-choice. I'm pro-gay rights,Giuliani said. He was then asked whether he supports a ban on what critics call partial-birth abortions. "No, I have not supported that, and I don't see my position on that changing," he responded." -- CNN.com, "Inside Politics" Dec 2, 1999
It's bad enough that Rudy is so adamantly pro-abortion, but consider what that could mean when it comes time to select Supreme Court Justices. Does the description of Giuliani that you've just read make you think he's going to select an originalist like Clarence Thomas, who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade -- or does it make you think he would prefer justices like Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy who'd leave Roe v. Wade in place?
Rudy's abortion stance is bad news for conservatives who are pro-life or who are concerned about getting originalist judges on the Supreme Court.
An Anti-Second Amendment Candidate
In the last couple of election cycles, 2nd Amendment issues have moved to the back burner mainly because even Democratic candidates have learned that being tagged with the "gun grabber" label is political poison.
Unfortunately, Rudy Giuliani is a proponent of gun control who supported the Brady Bill and the Assault Weapon Ban.
Do Republicans really want to abandon their strong 2nd Amendment stance by selecting a pro-gun control nominee?
Thanks. I still think Rudi is highly over-rated as a conservative. I will probably not vote for him.
So Deroy thinks the courageous, “pro-life” thing Rudy can do is to “embrace” a law that has been on the books for years and which neither party has shown any interest in overturning.
Apparently, Rudy’s speaking the truth last week really hurt him more than some are willing to admit. Rudy’s got all the big guns out now (Simon, Murdock, New) trying to do damage control, re-directing our gaze, in a “Pay No Attention to that man behind the curtain” way.
My biggest fear of Rudy is that he truly seems to believe that women should have a right to choose abortions. So either once in office he will return to his principles and support abortion rights, or he will act against his principles just to get elected and re-elected.
In the first case, the pro-life position is severely injured, along with the unborn. In the second case, a person who will give up their core principles to get elected can’t be trusted in anything. What other “core values” will Rudy abandon for political expediency?
So, CW, is it your day today? I guess it’s good to circulate the work among the brethren.
IF YOU WANT ON OR OFF THIS HIGH VOLUME PING LIST PLEASE LET ME KNOW!
Perhaps because you don't want to be?
Because Rudy's own words and beliefs contradict Deroy Murdock, who is supposedly speaking for Rudy?
Abortion was not addressed in the "Contract with America."
And, unless I am wrong, Giuliani did not directly address abortion either. According to the article it was his policies that reduced abortion. A similar parallel can be drawn with the "Contract With America".
It didn't work back then and it doesn't work now.
Have you noticed that the Rudybots keep telling us that the POTUS can’t do anything to affect abortion, and at the same time they keep trying to claim that Rudy reduced abortions as Mayor of NYC? I guess we are to believe that the Mayor of NYC is more powerful than the POTUS on such issues.
um...yeah...sure...
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