January 26, 2004, 8:43 a.m.
Clark’s Choice
On abortion, he’s in the mainstream of his party.

So everyone has been jumping on General Wesley Clark for saying that he supported a right to abortion up until the moment of birth. This position, the critics have said, is extreme and outrageous. I certainly agree with those characterizations. But hasn't anybody noticed that the position Clark announced is the position of all of his Democratic rivals and of the party he now calls home? If his position is extreme and outrageous, so is theirs.

Clark has now "clarified" his views. The latest formulation is that he supports a woman's right to choose abortion before viability, and supports her right to choose abortion after viability if her "doctor" thinks it is necessary. He does not want to go into the question of when viability occurs, but then why should he? It makes no practical difference. He wants a woman to be able to get an abortion at any stage of pregnancy so long as an abortionist says she should have it. The government should not, then, be able to prohibit any abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

All the Democratic presidential candidates take the exact same position. All of them say they are for Roe v. Wade. There's a widespread myth that Roe allowed abortion to be prohibited in the third trimester so long as an exception was made for maternal health. The companion case Doe v. Bolton takes away that apparent concession, since it says that "health" has to be defined to include, among other things, emotional and familial factors. Casey did not modify this essential holding of Roe. States may be able to regulate abortion in some ways — they can pass some kinds of parental notification laws, for example — but they cannot prohibit abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

Actually, the consensus Democratic position is more extreme even than this. Last week, Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat, introduced the Freedom of Choice Act of 2004. Its co-sponsors include Joe Lieberman, the most conservative candidate in the Democratic presidential field, and will probably soon include a few of his rivals.

The Freedom of Choice Act is marketed (as previous versions have been) as a codification of Roe. It does codify Roe in the sense of requiring states to permit abortion on demand. But it goes further. Roe doesn't require government funding of abortion, but Senators Boxer and Lieberman would. The bill clearly requires the states and the federal government to fund abortion — a fact about which Senator Boxer is perfectly candid in her press release. The bill also nullifies states' "informed consent" laws, which the Supreme Court has upheld but which Boxer regards as mandatory "anti-choice propaganda." The bill would, as the National Organization for Women exults, "strike down a host of federal and state restrictions."

Clark's position is certainly extreme in its distance from what most voters want — let alone from what justice demands. But the positions of Lieberman, Boxer, and their colleagues are just as extreme. Nothing about abortion bothers today's Democratic party more than that it isn't more widely available.

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