Abortion Foes Held Captive by Extremists, Gore Says

WASHINGTON —  Vice President Al Gore, speaking on the 24th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision making most abortions legal, charged Wednesday that foes of abortion rights have become captive to what he termed “a minority” within their ranks who oppose family planning programs.

Seizing on President Clinton’s inaugural call to find “common ground,” Gore declared that much unites those who oppose abortion rights and those who defend a woman’s right to the procedure. But he said that in the interest of healing a national rift and making abortions rarer, the mainstream of antiabortion activists must be willing to disavow those among their ranks who believe “that family planning . . . is morally wrong.”

He added: “If they were willing to abandon that aspect of their common front, then there would be much we could do together to make abortions rare.”

Addressing a group of abortion-rights activists, Gore alternated between striking strident and conciliatory notes, apparently seeking both to reassure a traditional constituency and to reach out to more moderate members of the movement to drive down the 1.5 million abortions performed yearly in the United States.

“We are not going to let choice be taken away. I say that firmly, plainly. . . . That’s not going to happen,” Gore said in a speech to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. “But I do believe there is much we can do together.”

Gore also referred to recent bombings in Tulsa, Okla., and Atlanta at clinics where abortions are performed and pledged that the administration would “find the terrorists who committed these heinous acts and we will pursue you to the fullest extent of the law.”

Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life, said that it was a “complete smoke screen” for Gore to suggest that moral opposition to family planning programs, which some object to because they provide advice on contraception, has kept antiabortion activists from cooperating with the Clinton administration.

“We’ve never opposed these [family planning] programs or increases in funding unless they directly assisted abortion providers,” Johnson said. “But Clinton has insisted on interjecting abortion into every family planning program, and that’s what’s made them controversial.”

Speaking to the abortion-rights group before Gore, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton gently chastised both sides of the abortion debate, saying: “This is never an easy issue and anyone who thinks they have the ultimate truth on this is . . . wrong.”

The first lady endured a firestorm of opposition from antiabortion activists when the administration proposed to make abortion a covered service for all in its ill-fated health care reform package.

In her appearance Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton repeated her husband’s formulation that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” And she called for a dialogue with abortion opponents--”people of good faith who do not share extremism as their rallying cry.”

In Long Beach, an estimated 400 antiabortion activists marked the Roe vs. Wade anniversary at the Sheraton Long Beach hotel, hearing former Pennsylvania Gov. Robert P. Casey urge that they make their votes count. “People who are pro-choice must pay a political penalty for being pro-choice,” Casey declared.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, told the group that things are looking up politically for abortion opponents, citing results in last fall’s elections.

The comments of Gore and Mrs. Clinton came as antiabortion forces rallied in Washington and promised a bruising fight this year in a bid to outlaw a late-term abortion procedure that they call “partial-birth” abortion. The Senate last year failed, by a slim margin, to override Clinton’s veto of a ban on the controversial procedure.

But in the wake of victories for several antiabortion-rights Senate candidates in last November’s election, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said Tuesday that Senate Republicans have made it a top legislative priority to vote again on the issue in the coming session.

On the steps of the Capitol and across the street at the Supreme Court, protesters Wednesday pressed their call to outlaw all abortions as murder. Tens of thousands of antiabortion activists marched from the Ellipse--virtually the White House’s backyard--to Capitol Hill in the annual “March for Life” procession. Addressing the group, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) lambasted the president for his veto of the bill banning the late-term abortion procedure and said that Clinton will be remembered as “the abortion president.”

Times religion writer Larry B. Stammer contributed to this story from Long Beach.