The Daily Background

Tuesday night is the second formal televised Republican debate. Many will be watching Rudy Giuliani to see how he handles the issue of abortion.

During the first Republican presidential primary debate on May 3rd, MSNBC moderator Chris Matthews asked former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani about his stance on abortion, noting that he was virtually alone on the stage in his pro-choice views.

“I hate abortion,” Giuliani answered, before saying that he respected a woman’s right to have sovereignty over her body. He added however, “I would encourage someone to not [have an abortion]. When I was mayor of New York city, I encouraged adoptions; adoptions went up 65-70 percent, abortions went down 16 percent.”

Twelve days later in the second GOP debate, Giuliani once again claimed responsibility for an increase of adoptions during his term as mayor in response to a question about abortion. Only this time, according to the former mayor, adoptions hadn’t gone up 65-70 percent; they’d gone up twice that.

“Adoptions went up 133 percent during the eight years that I was mayor, compared to the prior eight years,” Giuliani said that night. Nobody seemed to notice the slight change in the Republican frontrunner’s statistics.

Which number was right? Neither one, it turns out. According to an independent analysis of adoption statistics during Mr Giuliani’s time as mayor done by the nonpartisan organization FactCheck.org, adoptions only rose 17% overall from fiscal year 1995 to 2002.

And in fact, it’s not even clear how much of this 17% increase in adoptions Mr Giuliani can rightfully take credit for. According to the New York Times, the phenomenal increase in abortions in New York City right after Giuliani took office was not the result of discouraging abortion and encouraging adoption instead, but rather arranging adoptions for children in foster care at a faster rate that in previous years.

Many of the children who were getting adopted all of a sudden had been born in the previous mayoral administration that he now relishes comparing his record to.

After problems with foster care were resolved in the 1995 and 1996 fiscal years, abortions increased a mere 9% in 1997 and actually decreased for the rest of Giuliani’s time in office. And this was during a period of time when the national number of abortions were actually rising, mostly due to the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 that President Clinton signed into law.

If anything, the rise in adoption numbers seem merely to be an incidental increase, and not the result of any anti-abortion campaign that City Hall was waging at that time. There is no evidence that Giuliani’s Administration convinced more women to choose the route of adoption over abortion, or that the mayor had made any particular efforts to do this. Actually, as mayor, Guiliani gave hundreds of dollars in donations to Planned Parenthood– money that went to funding more abortions, not less.

Mr Giuliani has not only favored private funding of abortions in the past, but also advocated for public funding- a position that puts him at odds with many in his own party. At an event in 1989 during his first campaign for City Hall, Giuliani proclaimed “I disagree with President [George H. W.] Bush’s veto last week of public funding for abortion!” The audience, a group of pro-choice women, applauded loudly. He also said that women who could not afford abortions should be aided by the government.

Giuliani has more recently suggested that he supports the Hyde Amendment, which outlaws almost all public funding of abortion.

Filed under: Z-Feature