Women Had Roemer's Ear on Abortion Veto : Legislation: The Louisiana governor consulted family members and Cabinet officials. Listening to them sparked a personal turning point.

Women Had Roemer’s Ear on Abortion Veto : Legislation: The Louisiana governor consulted family members and Cabinet officials. Listening to them sparked a personal turning point.

By ROBERT SHOGAN

July 31, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES POLITICAL WRITER

MOBILE, Ala. — As he was pondering whether to sign the nation’s strictest abortion bill last week, Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer listened to his estranged wife, Patti, his 23-year-old daughter, Caroline, and the three women members of his Cabinet. All, Roemer said Monday, independently arrived at the same conclusion: “Veto.”

Then Roemer did just that.

As Roemer explains it, their collective judgment served as a catalyst in transforming his once firm and unqualified opposition to abortion into what appears to be a much broader and more permissive stance, a position which Roemer now feels urgently obliged to communicate.

“That’s why I am destroying my breakfast this morning,” he told a Times reporter as his eggs got cold on his plate in a hotel coffee shop in Mobile, where the Louisiana Democrat was attending the national governors conference.

At a press conference last Friday, Roemer explained his veto mostly through objections to some of the bill’s provisions. The bill would have banned abortion except in the case of threat to the mother’s health or in cases of aggravated rape or incest. Doctors who performed an illegal abortion could have been sentenced to 10 years in prison.

But on Monday, Roemer emphasized that facing the veto, and listening to the women around him, was a personal turning point.

“This is the biggest issue of this decade,” Roemer said. “And it doesn’t relate just to abortion--it relates to the values of women.

“If I talk to 100 women, what 80 of them say is ‘I don’t want an abortion, I’m not looking for an abortion. I’m looking for a place in the decision process. It’s my body and my family and it ought to be my choi”

When Roemer entered Congress 10 years ago he consistently voted against federal funding for abortion and supported a constitutional ban on abortion. “I believed then that abortion on demand, or abortion as a substitute for birth control, was not in best interests of the unborn or of families.

“I still feel that way. However, 10 years ago I would allow no exceptions to that rule. And looking back I was wrong.

“To be concerned with the unborn, who have no voice, is good,” Roemer said. “But (to be concerned) at the expense of those who are alive, mothers whose lives are threatened, who have been illegally violated, seems to me not compassionate, not fair, not decent, not pro-life.”

In the process of reaching his decision to veto, Roemer also appears to have arrived at a changed approach to political leadership.

When he first took office in 1988 the 46-year-old Harvard-educated former congressman quickly became known for his expansive ambitions to reform the errant ways of his state’s government and his headstrong commitment to getting things done his own way.

“I am talking now as a politician who has prided himself on his ability to speak,” Roemer said. “I can turn people around when I speak.”

But from his trials as governor, Roemer discovered that speaking is not enough. “What I have added now is the ability to listen,” he said. “Let me put it the other way, my greatest power might be in listening, not in speaking.”

The listening on abortion started within his own family. “My daughter talked to me a lot,” Roemer said. “She is pro-choice and anti-abortion.

“She explained to me, ‘I’m not after an abortion. I’m after my value to make a decision,’ ” he said.

“Both my daughter and wife reflect what a majority of women think. They are opposed to abortion on demand, but they would like to have the value to make a choice.”

In battling with the Louisiana Legislature on the issue, Roemer insisted that any abortion legislation must at the least contain exceptions for rape and incest. He decided to veto the bill after concluding the exception for rape was not strong enough.

Earlier, he had vetoed an even tougher version of the bill, which would have allowed an abortion only in the event the mother’s life was at stake.

Now Roemer expects the Legislature, which adjourned after passing the law, to reconvene Aug. 18 to consider overriding his veto. But Roemer says he hopes for a compromise.

Meanwhile, for all his traditional Southern adherence to the concept of states rights, Roemer has begun to wonder whether that principle is suitable to the abortion controversy. “This may be one of those issues that are best served not locality by locality but on a national basis,” he said.