Posted on 09/22/2003 5:21:05 PM PDT by madprof98
The leader of one of the nation's most influential abortion rights organizations announced Monday that she would give up her post next spring.
Kate Michelman, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said she would step down after 18 years to care for her ailing husband. A mother of three and grandmother of five, she also plans to spend next year actively trying to defeat President Bush, who opposes abortion rights.
"I made the decision to step down from the day to day work of running a large national organization so that I could both meet those family responsibilities and devote myself actively to the most urgent priority facing the pro-choice movement — electing a president who will protect our right to choose," she said.
Michelman said she planned to leave the presidency after NARAL's April 25 march in Washington to support abortion rights. When the march was announced in June, she said one goal of the demonstration was to mobilize voters for 2004.
"The next four years will almost certainly see at least two Supreme Court vacancies," Michelman said. "If George W. Bush is allowed to fill those seats, it will mean the end of reproductive privacy and the end of Roe v. Wade (the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion). I intend to do everything I can to see that does not happen."
NARAL spokesman David Seldin said Michelman had not yet decided what role she would play in the 2004 election, but could not both run a national organization and be as active as she would want to be next fall.
Seldin said the group would launch a nationwide search for Michelman's successor. She will remain with NARAL as president emeritus.
Michelman led NARAL as the abortion issue evolved from a pitched battle between the pro- and anti-abortion rights camps to a more nuanced struggle that shifted from the courts to the legislature, from the federal government to the states and from the central question of abortion to debates over who could get what types of procedures and when.
The evolution took the debate from the stark divide at Wichita clinics in 1991 to the debate over parental notification, waiting periods, abortion pills and so-called "partial-birth abortion."
In a January interview with CBSNews.com, Michelman said the hundreds of state abortion restrictions passed since 1995 "make it very difficult for women to effectuate and act on their choice."
But the fact that no direct assault was made meant there was little organized opposition. Polls even showed a slight erosion of support for abortion.
In January, as the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade approached, Michelman saw all that changing, with a swing back to the days when abortion itself was at risk, and women in general were alarmed. She expressed fear that the Republican president and Congress might soon seek to reverse the Roe decision. "We have a very serious problem here," she said. "It could happen. It really could happen."
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