Is It Possible to Be an Anti-Abortion Democrat? One Woman Tried to Find Out

ST. LOUIS — Joan Barry has been a member of the Missouri Democratic Party for 53 years. As a state legislator, she voted regularly for workers’ rights, health care and programs for the poor.

So when the party began writing a new platform after its crushing losses in 2016, Barry, a member of its state committee, did not think it was too much to ask for a plank that welcomed people like her — Democrats who oppose abortion.

At first the party agreed and added it. Missouri’s Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill, even called Barry to praise her.

But within days, Barry began receiving angry emails and Facebook messages. People called her a dinosaur, a has-been and worse. Her children started to worry.

“My daughter called me and said, ‘Mom, your life is in danger,'” Barry, 77, said in her home in suburban St. Louis. “'You’d better get some mace.'”

For most of its history, Missouri was a barometer of the American middle. For a century, it voted for the eventual winner of every presidential election except one.

But in 2008, Missouri broke with its past, voting against the winning candidate, Barack Obama. By the end of his presidency, Democraticfortunes haddeclined precipitously, dragged down by raw culture war battles that plagued the state. In 2016, the party lost all but one statewide office seat, including the governorship, according to Terry Jones, a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Democrats hold just over a quarter of the seats in the state’s Legislature. None are in rural districts.

This has left McCaskill — one of the most endangered Democrats this fall — in a tricky spot. To win, she must woo what is left of the conservative Democrats, as well as independents and some moderate Republicans. Meanwhile, many progressive voters in Missouri say that now is not the time to compromise, especially in the aftermath of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Perhaps nowhere is this tension more clear in Missouri than on the issue of abortion.

“Right now it’s really important to stand for something,” said Carolyn McMahon, a creative director at an ad agency, who was lingering at an event held by the abortion rights group NARAL in August at a bar in central St. Louis. “Being ambiguous is not the way to win votes.”

But older Missouri Democrats say the party cannot rely simply on the energy of a small liberal base.

“The energy of these progressive folks is a small part of the entire electoral picture,” said Jay Nixon, the Democratic former governor of Missouri. “I understand it’s easier to see and analyze and write about, but I do not see it controlling this election or future elections here in Missouri.”

He added of Barry, who tried to broaden the party’s platform on abortion: “I consider Joan a rational, reasonable person. She was trying to solve problems, not cause them.”

“We were just sitting there,” said Jalen Anderson, 26, chairman of the platform committee for the Missouri Democratic Party, who got his start in politics in high school volunteering for Obama. “The feeling at the time was just defeat. There wasn’t a party anymore really.”

Eventually, the party decided that the only way forward was to start from scratch, so a group of 15 party members, including Barry, began traveling the state on a listening tour. They talked to residents in community centers, libraries and union halls about what the party should stand for.

Barry thought her plank might help the party reclaim some districts that seemed hopelessly lost to Republicans.

She worried that the Democratic Party had moved too far left on abortion. Gone were the days when the party, under President Bill Clinton, called for abortion to be “safe, legal and rare.” She also noticed fellow Democrats showing contempt for her when they learned her stance on abortion.

She recalled a cocktail party conversation with a woman who asked why she was not seeking help from NARAL during her run for state Senate in 2008.

“I said, ‘Oh boy, you know I don’t think that would work,'” Barry replied. When she explained that she opposed abortion, the woman “looked at me like I had the plague. She had this horrible look on her face of just disgust and she walked away from me.”

On June 30, when dozens of Democratic State Committee members gathered in a university conference room in Jefferson City to vote on the new platform, Barry nervously introduced her plank. It said that the party recognized “the diversity of views” on abortion and “we welcome into our ranks all Missourians who may hold different positions on this issue.”

To her surprise, it passed.

Shortly after the vote, Pamela Merritt’s cellphone started pinging with texts. An abortion rights activist who was a member of the platform committee, Merritt had not attended the vote, but started hearing about it almost immediately from angry friends demanding an explanation.

“My stomach dropped,” said Merritt, who had agreed to join the committee after the party’s steep losses of 2016, thinking she needed to do more than criticize from the sidelines.

In her view, Missouri Democrats needed more progressive politics, not less.

“I don’t understand Democrats who quote Truman and FDR and then act like they are terrified to run as an actual Democrat,” said Merritt, 45, who lives in St. Louis. “You have to believe in something in order for somebody to believe in you. You can’t be such a watered-down thing.”

The fight over abortion in the party, she said, epitomized that. So she sprang into action, talking on Facebook and Twitter with hundreds of angry progressives, some of whom were threatening to stop their donations, calling her fellow committee members, and ultimately the party’s chairman.

“I felt horrified that someone would associate me with that bizarre, regressive anti-woman language,” she said. The party was trying to placate people who opposed abortion at the very moment that abortion was most under threat, Merritt said. Days before the vote, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy had announced his retirement and the court had backed anti-abortion pregnancy centers. Missouri, one of the most restrictive states in the country, is now down to one abortion clinic.

“The last thing we needed was for that language to linger,” she said of the plank. “It was a foul stench that needed to be addressed sooner rather than later.”

As the days went by, progressives discovered that Barry had taken the language from a national anti-abortion group, Democrats for Life of America. Barry acknowledged she had, but said the words expressed exactly what she wanted to say. The wording was also similar to language in the 1996 national Democratic Party platform.

On Aug. 11, the Democratic State Committee voted to take the plank out. Barry was saddened, but she did not leave the party.

“I love the Democratic Party and I love what it stands for, but it’s like they were saying you are not part of us,” she said. “It was the final nail in the coffin.”

After praising Barry for her plank in a message on her home answering machine, McCaskill stayed silent. Throughout her campaign, she has tried to give the issue of abortion a wide berth, a stance that has infuriated progressives. When she weighed in against Kavanaugh — eight days before his explosive Senate hearing with Christine Blasey Ford — neither abortion nor treatment of women were among her reasons.

That is simply savvy politics, said Christopher Kelly, a retired judge from Columbia who served nine terms in the Legislature, several with McCaskill. He said McCaskill has a near perfect Democratic voting record on abortion, and believes the struggle points to a larger problem among young progressives.

“They operate in this fantasy,” he said, “that we’re going to have a political renaissance or enlightenment, where everyone is going to decide that their ideas — the ideas of the lefties — are now their ideas.”

He added: “You will not win seats, because even though people might agree with you on some of the issues, you will scare them away. You will seem alien to them.” He said history does not support the claim that more anti-abortion Democrats in the Legislature translates to less abortion rights. Many of the restrictions have come more recently, he said, since Republicans have gained the majority.

“When you become contemptuous of conservative Democrats, you promote the election of their opponents,” said Kelly, who believes it was a mistake to scrap Barry’s plank. “And their opponents are 100 percent worse for the environment, 100 percent worse for working people, 100 percent worse for LGBT people, for women, for black people, for immigrants.”

Merritt admits that some districts may be difficult for Democrats to win, but that is partly because the party has not really tried to persuade people. Candidates need to seize the chance this fall to teach people why Democratic ideas are better, she said.

“I believe 110 percent that if we run on full-throated, unapologetic progressive politics, we will win,” she said.

She added: “At a certain point, when you compromise your values, you are not winning. How far are we going to bend over before we tumble and fall?”