You could say this is a story
about the old adage: the more things change, the more they stay the
same.  

The rise of the concept of
"abortion reduction" as a worthy policy goal, currently being promoted
by some in the Democratic Party, has generally tracked the rise of the
Party’s fortunes over the past few years and the accompanying
decline in the likelihood that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe
v. Wade. The Democrats’ ascent, and Roe‘s resilience,
has been a tough reality for antiabortion leaders to face, but they
are not out of strategic and tactical options. Politics is the art of
the possible.   

Abortion reduction, currently
being sold as the "common ground" between the pro-choice and anti-abortion
camps, has its roots in anti-abortion strategy developed over several
months in 1996 by a coalition of 45 anti-abortion and religious right
leaders. The
America We Seek: A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern was also signed by several Democratic-leaning
activists, most significantly, former Governor Robert Casey Sr. of Pennsylvania
(father of the current Senator Robert Casey Jr.).  The manifesto
was published in the May 1996 issue of the flagship journal of Catholic
neoconservatism, First Things (edited by the late John Richard
Neuhaus); in The National Review; and on the web site of Priests for Life, headed by the
militant Fr. Frank Pavone.  The source of the opportunity to reduce
abortions, they found, resided in the holdings of 1992 Supreme Court
decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania,
named for the former governor.   

Among the forty-five were also
some of the leading proponents of abortion reduction ideas now ascendant
in Democratic Party circles: Jim Wallis of Sojourners; Professor David
Gushee, then of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Ron Sider
of Evangelicals for Social Action.   

"Now, as pro-life leaders
and scholars," they declared, "we want to propose a program of action…" 
And the core of that program was abortion reduction by erecting barriers
to access to abortion "in all 50 states" and creating incentives
for women to carry unplanned pregnancies to term.   

While the signers agreed that
the regulations upheld in the Casey decision "do not afford
any direct legal protection to the unborn child," they emphasized
that "experience has shown that such regulations–genuine informed
consent, waiting periods, parental notification--reduce abortions
in a locality, especially when coupled with positive efforts to promote
alternatives to abortion and service to women in crisis." [Emphasis
added] 

Abortion Reduction and Criminalization

This was, however, cast in
the context of the wider goal of criminalization. Having declared abortion
to be among other things, child killing, an act of "lethal violence,"
and a usurpation of the rule of law, the signatories added: "Any criminal sanctions considered in such legislation [then being
considered by Congress] should fall upon abortionists, not upon women
in crisis." They further urged Congress to "recognize the unborn
child as a human person entitled to the protection of the Constitution."   

They believed that "a broad-based
legal and political strategy is essential," and therefore, found "no
contradiction between a rigorous adherence to our ultimate goal and
the pursuit of reforms that advance us toward that goal."    

"Legal reforms that fall
short of our goal," they concluded, "but which help move us toward
it, save lives and aid in the process of moral and cultural renewal."  

Other prominent signatories,
led by host George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (the
official biographer of Pope John Paul II) included Catholic legal scholar
Robert P. George of Princeton; Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon,
(whom George W. Bush would appoint as Ambassador to the Vatican), James
Dobson of Focus on the Family, Ralph Reed of the then-powerful Christian
Coalition, law professor Michael W. McConnell of the University of Chicago;
Beverly LaHaye of Concerned Women for America; William Kristol then
of the Project for the Republican Future, now a contributor to Fox
News, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political philosopher at the University
of Chicago, and currently a co-chair of the Pew Forum on Religion and
Public Life.  

While this top drawer coalition
of antiabortion leaders of the day did not mention sexuality education
and contraception as legitimate means of preventing unwanted pregnancies
(and thus "abortion reduction"), at least three of them went on
to play prominent roles in the development of the "common ground"
agenda on abortion reduction recently announced by the Democratic Party-aligned DC think tanks, Faith in Public Life and Third Way, in their
document Come
Let Us Reason Together:  A Governing Agenda to End the Culture
Wars (CLURT). 
This document highlighted sexuality education (with an emphasis on abstinence),
access to contraception, and economic supports for adoption, as areas
of "common ground" on abortion.  

CLURT did not mention erecting
further barriers of the sort legitimized in the Casey decision. Nor did it address the need to provide for better access
to abortion care, which unavailable in 87% of the counties in the United
States, according to the Guttmacher Institute.  

Among the seven principal authors
of CLURT, Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action also signed the
1996 antiabortion manifesto; while David Gushee, now of Mercer University
states in his curriculum
vitae
that he "participated in the drafting" of the document.  
Jim Wallis of Sojourners signed both.   

"Public policy has its limits,"
Gushee declared at the January 15th press conference
announcing CLURT. "We call for abortion reduction. I support this
because I believe that one of the things that must not be done to human
beings is to abort them; and yet those facing crisis pregnancies need
help to create the conditions in which they can sustain and protect
the lives for which they are now responsible."   

Abortion Reduction Reductionism 

What is remarkable is how one
of the signature antiabortion tactics of the 1990s has now migrated
into the Democratic Party under the guise of offering "common ground." 
Abortion reduction was once a matter of preventing people from exercising
their right to receive and to provide abortion care. Now a few politically
savvy Protestant evangelicals and an apparently growing number of Democrats
pols are willing to redefine historic ideas of the role of sexuality
education and family planning in terms of abortion reduction.  

Used in this way, along with
economic supports for pregnancy and adoption, pro-choice politicians
including President Obama use the term and its close variants to show
pro-lifers that they can better reduce the number of abortions than anti-choice
Republicans.  

It is clever politics. But
there is more to it. There are profound differences just underneath
the surface of a seemingly minor tug of war over semantics. These differences
are blurred by the invocation of common ground language. The difference
was cast in sharp relief last year during negotiations over the wording of the Democratic
Party Platform position on abortion.  Prolife
evangelicals led by Jim Wallis (and CLURT co-author Joel Hunter) disagreed
with pro-choice leaders over language that sought to reduce the need
for abortion as distinct from the number of abortions.  In the
end, the platform unambiguously supported Roe and recognized the need
for abortion. In exchange, the platform also called for greater support
for women who seek to carry their pregnancies to term and for the adoption
option. But the platform avoided the term "abortion reduction."  

But have Gushee, Wallis and
Sider changed their views? In 1996 they believed that there is never
a "need" for abortion; rejected the idea that it is ever a moral
choice; and unequivocally stated that criminalization was a goal of
antiabortion legislation — even while they also pursued abortion reduction
tactics under the rubric of Casey. Today, they face different
political circumstances and the Democrats have made some accommodations
in the platform that will likely be implemented in legislation.  

The CLURT statement joins a
few pro-choice think tankers with a few prominent moderate evangelicals
in agreeing on broad principles related to sexuality education and family
planning. But that’s it. Why then, is it important?  

It is important because of
the prominence of these groups in seeking to define what a faith-based,
common ground "governing agenda" might look like.  But it is
significant also because of what it does and what it does not do. 

First, in its summary language,
CLURT seeks to have it both ways, papering over vital differences with
the slight of hand of language. 

"Reducing abortions
(reducing abortion through reducing unintended pregnancies, supporting
pregnant women, and increasing support for adoption)" [Bolding in
the original]  

Second, the pro-choice agenda
has always been about expanding access to abortion such that everyone
who needs one can get one; and emphasizing that there should be comprehensive
sex ed and access to contraception so that women and girls can control
their own reproductive future and will not have to make the
choice between termination and carrying a pregnancy to term. But unlike
the Democratic Platform, there is nothing in the CLURT statement that
acknowledges the right to or need for abortion — let alone that universal
access is a dream that is far from realized. 

Third, there is nothing in
the CLURT document that suggests that Gushee, Wallis and Sider and their
ant-iabortion allies will not pursue Casey-based policies that
erect obstacles to abortion in the name of reduction, in those states
where it is politically possible to do so.  

That these leaders were able
to agree in principle on sexuality education and family planning is
no small thing. But it is not the same thing as finding common ground
on abortion nor does it reflect a commitment to reducing barriers to
abortion or in any way increasing access.  

The concept of "abortion
reduction" as a public policy has come a long way since 1996, and
at the same time, no distance at all. 

Abortion providers serving Wisconsin residents could recoup nearly $1.8 million in legal fees they amassed while fighting an anti-choice law that was first blocked in 2013. However, spokespeople for the State of Wisconsin have raised the possibility of an undisclosed settlement.

In a U.S. District Court filing dated July 28, the providers requested an award of “attorneys’ fees, costs and expenses” that could be recouped under the Civil Rights Attorneys’ Fee Awards Act of 1976. On Wednesday in response, Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel asked the court to extend the due date for the state to respond from August 18 to September 1. The request was granted, according to court documents.

“The parties are currently discussing settlement of the plaintiffs’ motion. An extension of the briefing schedule would allow the parties the opportunity to explore the possibility of a settlement of this issue,” Schimel said in the court filing.

The providers seeking money include Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, Inc., Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Milwaukee Women’s Medical Services, which conducts business as Affiliated Medical Services. The sum requested includes $1.7 million in attorneys’ fees, $44,253 in billable costs and $22,545 in out-of-pocket expenses, according to the court filing.

The providers amassed the fees fighting Wisconsin Act 37 of 2013, a Republican-initiated law that required doctors to have hospital admitting privileges within 30 miles of the location where an abortion was to be performed.

U.S. District Judge William Conley of the Western District of Wisconsin blocked the law’s enforcement soon after Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed it in 2013.

The state attorney general twice appealed to the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which affirmed the lower court’s decision both times; the U.S. Supreme Court also declined to take the case a day after overturning a similar provision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.

In a Court of Appeals opinion issued in November 2015, the court said there was no evidence that “transfer agreements provide inferior protection to the health of women undergoing abortion compared to admitting privileges.” The opinion concluded by saying the unconstitutional statute was burdensome and curtailed citizens’ constitutional right to an abortion.

“The statute may not be irrational, yet may still impose an undue burden—a burden excessive in relation to the aims of the statute and the benefits likely to be conferred by it— and if so it is unconstitutional,” the court said.

If not blocked, the law would have forced pregnant people in various parts of the state to travel at least an extra 200 miles round trip to access legal abortion, according to a previous Rewire report.

Johnny Koremenos, a spokesperson for Schimel, had indicated in statements to the Journal Sentinel and the Wisconsin State Journal earlier this month that the state would fight the charges for legal fees. He said Schimel would challenge the providers’ request “to ensure that the state is not paying more than it should be for those fees,” according to local news reports.

Koremenos did not respond to Rewire’s request for comment.

Walker also supported fighting the fees, his spokesperson told the Journal Sentinel.

Ismael Ozanne, the district attorney for Dane County, was also named as a defendant in the providers’ lawsuit, along with several state medical examining board members.

Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin spokeswoman Iris Riis told Rewire the money Planned Parenthood is seeking in this case is only a recoup of the legal fees already spent fighting the unconstitutional admitting privileges law.

“There would not be any leftover money to allocate to services or any fund. It would just cover what was already spent. Governor Walker’s administration appealed multiple definitive rulings, wasting countless taxpayer dollars in the process. That action also drove up our legal costs,” Riis said.

Riis said the plaintiffs do not know when Conley will issue the ruling that will determine whether Schimel will have to compensate them for legal fees.

Andrew Wiseman, a deputy clerk in the U.S. District Court, Western District of Wisconsin, told Rewire the court could not offer a prediction about the date of Conley’s ruling.

Affiliated Medical Services, which operates a clinic in Milwaukee, is being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, while private attorneys are representing Planned Parenthood.

Another day, another secret recording made in an abortion clinic.

At least, that’s the very strong impression given by some of the scenes contained within the documentary film HUSH, which premiered late last year and is currently making the rounds of film festivals and anti-choice conferences in the United States and internationally, including the National Right to Life Convention that took place in Virginia last month.

The film is the creation of Mighty Motion Pictures and Canadian reporter Punam Kumar Gill, who says in the film that she is pro-choice, a “product of feminism.” It purports to tell the story of “one woman,” Gill, who “investigates the untold effects of abortion on women’s health.”

HUSH—which claims in the film’s credits to have received support from the Canadian government—attempts to cast itself as neither pro-choice nor “pro-life,” but simply “pro-information.” The producers insist throughout the film, in their publicity materials, and in private emails seen by Rewire that their film is objective and balanced.

That’s how they pitched it to Dr. David Grimes, a highly respected OB-GYN and a clinical professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who agreed to do on-camera interviews for the film. Grimes now says the producers and reporter misled him about their intentions.

“There was no balance,” Grimes told Rewire. “It’s a hatchet job. It’s obvious.”

Indeed, HUSH relies almost exclusively on interviews with renowned anti-choice “experts” whose work has been discredited, many of whom are featured in Rewire‘s gallery of False Witnesses. They trot out many of the worn theories that have been rejected by medical and public health experts—namely, that abortion is linked to a host of grave physical and mental health threats, “like breast cancer, premature birth, and psychological damage.”

The innovation of HUSH, however, is that it has reframed these discredited ideas within the construct of a conspiracy theory.

When Anti-Choice “Science” Goes Conspiracy Theory

As a piece of propaganda, the use of the conspiracy theory has the advantage of removing the debate over abortion’s safety from the realm of logic. In HUSH‘s topsy-turvy world, the medical establishment becomes the scare-quoted “Medical Establishment,” and the more distinguished or authoritative a person or organization, the more suspect they become.

For reasons that remain murky, the film’s thesis is that the world’s leading reproductive and health organizations—including the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the World Health Organization, along with all of their staff, contractors, and affiliated experts—have been hiding information about the risks of abortion.

This is most apparent when the reporter, Gill, tells the viewers that “if women have the right to abortion, they should also have the right to know” about the risks she believes she has identified.

Later, the film shows graphics highlighting the states that have various informed consent laws—some of which are literally called “A Woman’s Right to Know” acts—that force providers to give patients false information about the safety of abortion. Rather than concluding that the authority of the state has been used to mandate that doctors provide medically unsound “counseling” using the very junk science that Gill presents throughout the film, she hews to the back-to-front logic of all conspiracy theories. In her view, the existence of these laws shows that the risks are real, but that the faceless, nameless “they” still won’t let women in on the their deadly secrets.

In Gill’s world, the unwillingness of organizations to speak with her becomes evidence that they are hiding something.

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists tells Gill that it won’t fulfill her requests by giving her an interview because the science is settled; Gill sees this as a sign of conspiracy.

“This is where I started to feel equally suspicious of those denying any link,” Gill tells the viewer, her voice floating over inky footage of the U.S. Capitol at night. Lights from the Capitol dance on the velvety surface of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and Gill confides: “I felt like I was digging into something much deeper and darker.”

A comical scene ensues where Gill is astonished to find that turning up with a film crew on the grounds of the National Cancer Institute does not suddenly persuade it to grant her an interview with one of its experts.

“What was going on here?” says Gill in her voiceover. “It was like they really didn’t want any questions being asked.”

In fact, the National Cancer Institute had replied to Gill’s multiple requests with links to its website, which contains the conclusive studies that have long since dispelled the notion that any link exists between abortion and breast cancer. The film shows footage of those emails.

Furthermore, Grimes provided Rewire with copies of emails he had exchanged with the film’s producers during its production, in which he gave them citations to relevant studies and warned them that the work of the anti-choice “experts” they had approached had been thoroughly debunked.

After seeing the film, Grimes emailed the producers inquiring why they hadn’t simply asked him to connect them with additional experts.

“Had you truly wanted more pro-choice researchers to speak to these issues, I could have named scores of colleagues from the membership of the Society for Family Planning and Physicians for Reproductive Health who would have been happy to help,” Grimes wrote in a note he shared with Rewire. “You did not ask. That some organizations like the National Cancer Institute did not want to take part in your film in no way implies a reluctance on the part of the broader medical community to speak about abortion research.”

It seems that Gill—whose online biographies give no indication that she is a scientist—would not have been satisfied in hearing about existing research. She tells the viewers that, in her view, “more study is needed to determine the extent of the abortion-breast cancer link,” and concludes that “to entirely deny the connection is ludicrous.”

In an interview with Rewire, Grimes noted that doing such research would be viewed as unethical by reputable scientists.

“That issue is settled, and we should not waste limited resources that should be directed to urgent, unanswered questions, such as the cause of endometriosis and racial disparities in gynecologic cancers,” he said.

Grimes made his dissatisfaction clear to the producers. He wrote to them: “My inference after viewing the film is that you are suggesting a large international conspiracy of silence on the part of major medical and public health organizations, the motivation for which is not specified.”

The corollary to the suspicion cast over the most reputable research and representative bodies is that the film transforms the marginal status of the anti-choice “experts” into a boon.

Seen through HUSH‘s conspiracy theory lens, the fact that the work of people like Priscilla Coleman, David Reardon, and Angela Lanfranchi is rejected by the medical establishment becomes proof not of the unsoundness of their ideas, but rather that a conspiracy is afoot to silence them.

Instead of presenting this small but vociferous group of discredited activists as outliers—shunned because their theories have no scientific basis, or because they lack any credentials relevant to reproductive or mental health, or because they have repeatedly mischaracterized data—HUSH paints them as whistle-blowing renegades determined to set the truth free.

A tearful Lanfranchi recounts the story of patients who came to her with aggressive breast cancer in their 30s. Lanfranchi says she strove to understand “why this was happening,” and realized that each of these young women had had abortions, which she then concluded had caused their cancer. Lanfranchi said her hopes that the public would learn of this risk were dashed over time.

“Over the years I’ve realized that, no, it didn’t matter how many studies there were,” she tells viewers. “That information was not going to get out.”

Joel Brind says that he has worked with a colleague whom he says he later discovered was pro-choice, but that their views on abortion never came up. “This is about science,” he tells Gill. “This is about the effect on women and whether or not abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. Period.”

Gill asks both Lanfranchi and Brind whether they are trying to “stop abortion,” or whether they “want abortion to go away.” Both answer that all they want is for women to be informed when they exercise their choice.

The film makes no mention of the fact that both have been anti-choice activists for decades; they have each testified in support of anti-choice laws in both legislative and judicial proceedings, and both have participated in the extreme right-wing, anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ World Congress of Families.

To the extent that HUSH acknowledges these activists’ bias, it is couched in a softer light that is linked, implicitly, to their religious views—a reality raised by Grimes in his on-camera interview, in which he notes, accurately, that the anti-choice “intellectuals” often lack the relevant medical or scientific qualifications to do the type of work they purport to do, but that they do tend to share religious convictions that lead them to oppose abortion and contraception.

That allows the producers to imply that the False Witnesses are perhaps victims of discrimination; to suggest that their work is being discounted because of the activists’ religious beliefs, and not because the work itself has been thoroughly debunked. Play the ball, not the man, appears to be the producers’ plea.

It’s a conspiracy theory twilight zone: where medical groups withhold information for reasons so cloudy that they cannot be articulated, but where people who have for years worn their beliefs on their sleeves cannot be evaluated with those political views in mind.

After asserting that she is, herself, pro-choice, Gill says she “finds validity” in the claims of the anti-choice advocates, and that she finds it “sickening” that the “media and health organizations have spent their energies closing the case and vilifying those who advocate in favor of the link, instead of investigating any and all reasons why breast cancer rates among young women have increased and women are dying.”

The producer, Joses Martin, did not answer Rewire’s questions about the experts he and his team had selected, other than to say, “We are very proud of the balanced approach that we’ve taken in this documentary that is neither anti-abortion nor pro-abortion.”

Another Instance of Secret Recordings Made in Abortion Clinics

What troubles Grimes most about the film is not so much that he was cast as the face of an international conspiracy by virtue of being the sole pro-choice physician to appear on camera, but that he may be associated with people who appear to have made secret recordings in at least one abortion clinic.

The footage and audio in question have been heavily edited, and it is difficult to discern what is real from what has been staged or spliced to give certain effects.

Early in the film, Gill is shown standing in the entry path to what the producers identify as a “Seattle abortion clinic.” As she makes her way inside, the footage swaps to guerilla-style, hidden camera shots, which capture wall artwork that appears in some Planned Parenthood clinics. Viewers see Gill’s face in the waiting room, as well as blurs of other people there. The film then swaps to audio recordings without any video footage. Gill can be heard posing as a patient, receiving counseling from a woman who is identified as a “health center manager.” This audio is used twice more during the film.

In Washington state, it is a crime to make audio or video recordings of people without their consent. Similar laws are in place in California, Florida, and Maryland, states where David Daleiden and his co-defendants from the Center for Medical Progress made their surreptitious videos of Planned Parenthood employees and members of the National Abortion Federation.

Grimes asked the producers whether they had obtained permission to make any of those recordings; Rewire asked the producers whether the recordings were in fact made in Seattle.

The producer, Joses Martin, replied to Grimes that he would “not be disclosing the name or location of the clinic or the name of the individual recorded to yourself or anyone else.”

“We have kept this information undisclosed and private both in the film and out of the film to not bring any undue burden on them. We’re certainly not implicating anyone involved of wrong doings, as was the goal in the Center For Medical Progress case,” Martin wrote in an email shared with Rewire.

In an email to Rewire, Martin did not answer our specific questions about the recordings, but asserted, “We did not break any laws in the gathering of our footage.”

Planned Parenthood had no comment on whether the crew had obtained consent to film inside its clinics, or whether Gill had misrepresented herself throughout her conversation with the counselor. Nor did the organization comment on the increasing use of secret recordings by anti-choice activists within its clinics. In a federal suit, Planned Parenthood has sued Daleiden for breaches of similar laws in California, Florida, and Maryland.

The branch of the Canadian government that the producers credited with supporting the film was less sanguine when informed about the apparent use of secret recordings made in American abortion clinics.

The film’s credits say that it was produced “with the assistance of the Government of Alberta, Alberta Media Fund,” but when Rewire contacted that Canadian province to learn why it had funded a piece of anti-choice propaganda, a spokesperson distanced the fund from the film.

“We have entered into conversations with the production company but we do not at this point have a formal agreement in place, and we were not aware that the production had been completed,” the spokesperson said. “We’re not able to comment on any funding because to date we have not funded the project. Thank you for bringing the use of our logo to our attention and we’ll be in touch with the producers to discuss.” The producers did not reply to Rewire’s question about their use of the logo.

Ironically, while the producer, Martin, did reply to emails from both Grimes and Rewire (albeit without answering specific questions), the reporter, Gill, remained silent. She never answered questions about what she knew about the backgrounds of the False Witnesses to whose work she lent such credence. She didn’t respond to our questions about whether she obtained permission to record video or audio within abortion clinics, or where those clinics were located. And she didn’t reply to our questions about the nature of her relationship with the extreme anti-choice group Live Action, who also received a credit at the end of the film.

To a reporter such as Gill, such silence would surely have been deeply suspicious.

Rewire Investigative Reporter, Amy Littlefield, contributed to this report.