Republican and Democratic candidates for president and vice president clashed over abortion in their recent televised debates, butthe vice presidential candidates indicated broad agreement on other human rights questions such as society's treatment of racial minorities and homosexuals.

In the first of three scheduled debates between Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential candidate, and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential candidate, moderator Jim Lehrer of the Public Broadcasting System on Oct. 3 asked Bush whether he'd try to overturn the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the abortion pill RU-486.

The governor responded that he was disappointed by the ruling "because I think abortions ought to be more rare in America and I'm worried that pill will create more abortion and cause more people to have abortions." However, he said he wasn't certain whether a president has the power to overturn an FDA ruling. "I hope the FDA took its time to make sure that American women will be safe who use this drug," he said. 

However, he said, "I don't think a president can unilaterally overturn it. I think once a decision has been made, it's been made unless it's proven to be unsafe to women."

Gore responded that the FDA considered RU-486 for 12 years and "I support that decision. They determined it was medically safe for the women who use that drug."

He suggested that Bush was changing his stand on the abortion drug. "If I heard the statement the day before yesterday....he said he would order his FDA appointee to review the decision. That sounds to me a little bit different. I just think we ought to support the decision. "

"I said I would make sure that women would be safe who use the drug," retorted Bush.
 

"I think that what the next president ought to do is promote a culture of life in America," Bush said. "Life of the elderly and life of those women all across the country. Life of the unborn. As a matter of fact, I think a noble goal for this country that any child, born or unborn, need to be protected by law and welcomed to life."

He added: "I know we need to change a lot of minds before we get there in America. We can find common ground on issues of parental consent or notification. I know we need to ban partial birth abortions. This is a place where my opponent and I have strong disagreement. I believe banning partial birth abortions would be the first step to reducing the number of abortions in America. It is an issue that will require a new attitude. We've been battling over abortion for a long period of time."

Agreeing with Bush that abortion is "indeed a very important issue," Gore said that he as President he would be prepared to sign legislation that would ban the procedure known as "partial birth abortion" or "late term abortion" providing that "doctors have the ability to save a woman's life or act if her health is severely at risk."

But, he said, on the question of whether to permit abortions generally, "the main issue is whether or not the Roe-versus-Wade decision will be overturned. I support a woman's right to choose. My opponent does not."

Gore suggested that the next President may have the opportunity to appoint three or four justices of the nine-member U.S. Supreme Court. "Governor Bush has said he will appoint chief justices who are known for being the most vigorous opponents of a woman's right to choose. He trusts the government to order a woman to do what it thinks she ought to do. I trust women to make the decisions that affect their lives, their destinies and their bodies. And I think a woman's right to choose ought to be protected and defended."

Bush said while he is "pro-life on the abortion question," when it comes to appointing Supreme Court judges "I have no litmus test on that issue. I'll put competent judges on the bench. People who will interpret the Constitution and not use the bench for writing social policy. I believe that the judges ought not to take the place of the legislative branch of government. That they're appointed for life and they ought to look at the Constitution as sacred...."

Gore said "I know that there are ways to assess how a potential justice interprets the Constitution. And in my view, the Constitution ought to be interpreted as a document that grows with our country and our history." The Vice President said that Bush previously had used "code words" to signal his plan to overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion decision by saying he would appoint "strict constructionalists" in the mold of current Supreme Court justices Anton Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

In contrast, Gore said his own appointees likely "would uphold Roe versus Wade. If you look at the history of a lower court judge's rulings, you can get a pretty good idea of how they'll interpret questions."

Abortion, he reiterated, "is a very important issue because a lot of young women in this country take this right for granted and it could be lost. It is on the ballot in this election, make no mistake about it."

Two nights later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democratic candidate for vice president, and Dick Cheney, the former Defense Secretary who is now the Republican vice presidential candidate, were asked by moderator Bernard Shaw in another televised debate to discuss the question.

"What we'd like to be able to do is look for ways to reach across the divide between the two points of view and find things that we can do together to reduce the incidence of abortion," Cheney said. "We're thinking of such things as promoting adoption as an alternative, encouraging parental notification and we also think banning the horrific practice of partial-birth abortions is an area where there could be agreement. "

Cheney said he was not familiar with details of legislation introduced in the Congress to ban RU-486, but reiterated that Bush "made it clear the other night that he did not anticipate that he would be able to go in and direct the FDA to reverse course on that particular issue, primarily because...the decision they made was on the efficacy of the drug, not the question of whether or not we support abortion."

Lieberman said the FDA, after 12 years study, "made a judgment based on what was good for women's health. A doctor has to prescribe and care for a woman using it. I think it's a decision we ought to let stand because it was made by experts."

He added: "Al Gore and I respect and will protect a woman's right to choose. And our opponents will not. We know that this is a difficult personal, moral, medical issue, but that is exactly why it ought to be left under our law to a woman, her doctor and her God. "

Lieberman said teenage pregnancies have decreased by 20 percent over the last eight years as a result of programs "such as family planning and programs that encourage abstinence. But when the health of a woman is involved, I think the government has to be respectful."

He added: "I supported, in fact, a bill in the Senate that would have prohibited late-term abortions except in cases where the health or life of the mother was involved. I did not support the so-called partial-birth abortion bill because it would have prohibited abortion, that form of abortion, at any stage of the pregnancy regardless of the effect on the health and life of the woman, and that's unacceptable."

* * *

Asked at their Oct 5 debate about "racial profiling," -- the police practice of stopping for questioning persons who because of their race may seem out of place in given areas -- both vice presidential candidates were prompt to denounce the practice.

"I have a few African-American friends who've gone through this horror," said Lieberman. He said one is a man who works at the White House and was "stopped, surrounded by police for no other cause that anyone can determine than the color of his skin. That can't be in America anymore."

Such a practice, he said, "makes me want to kind of hit the wall because it is such an assault on their humanity and their citizenship. And we can't tolerate it anymore. That's why I've supported legislation in the first instance in the Congress--because it's the most we could get done -- to do hard studies to make the case of the extent to which racial profiling is occurring in our country."

Additionally, Lieberman said, if the Gore-Lieberman ticket is elected, the new administration would issue "an executive order prohibiting racial profiling. And secondly, the first civil rights legislation we would send to Congress would be a national ban on racial profiling."

Cheney said that as a white male, who has never been part of a minority group, he can't fully understand what a victim of the practice feels. But he said he could "try hard to put myself in that position and imagine what it'd been like....It has to be horrible experience. ..The sense of anger and frustration and rage that would go with knowing that the only reason you were stopped, the only reason you were arrested was because of your color of your skin, would make me extraordinarily angry. And I'm not sure how I would respond."

He added that while progress has been made in the United States in race relations, there still are areas where much improvement is needed. "We still have achievement gaps in education, income differentials, differences in life span. We still have, I think, a society where we haven't done enough yet to live up to that standard (whereby) as Martin Luther King said, we judge people on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin."

Shaw next asked whether "a male who loves a male, and a female who loves a female, (should) have all the constitutional rights enjoyed by every citizen?"

Lieberman called the question "difficult." He noted that the Declaration of Independence asserts that "all of us are created equal and that we're endowed, not by any bunch of politicians or philosophers, but by our Creator, with those inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. At the beginning of our history that promise, that ideal, was not realized or experienced by all Americans, but over time, since then, we have extended the orbit of that promise. And in our time, at the frontier of that effort is extending those kinds of rights to gay and lesbian Americans who are citizens of this country and children of the same awesome God just as much as any of the rest of us are."

The Democratic vice presidential candidate added that he was a co sponsor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act "which aims to prevent gay and lesbian Americans who are otherwise qualified from being discriminated against in a workplace."

However, he said, "the question you pose is a difficult one for this reason: it confronts or challenges the traditional notion of marriage as being limited to a heterosexual couple, which I support. But I must say I am thinking about this because I have friends who are in gay and lesbian partnerships who've said to me 'isn't it unfair that we don't have similar legal rights to inheritance, to visitation when one of the partners is ill, to health care benefits?' And that's why I am thinking about it and my mind is open to taking some actions that will address those elements of unfairness, while respecting the traditional religious and civil institution of marriage."

Cheney, who is the father of a lesbian, said "we live in a free society and freedom means freedom for everybody. We don't get to choose and shouldn't be able to choose and say 'you get to live free, but you don't.' And I think that means that people should be free to enter into any relationship they want to enter into. It's really no one else's business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard.

The Republican vice presidential candidate said a "tougher problem" is whether gay and lesbian relationships should receive the same kind of sanction as heterosexual marriage. "That's not a slam-dunk," he said. "I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions and that's appropriate. I don't think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area ... I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into."