Features

Perhaps millions of Americans play state lotteries because they are dreamers or, more prosaically, just mathematically challenged. A good libertarian might argue that policy makers should simply shrug and let people spend money as they choose. It’s a free country, after all. The rich have portfolios, stockbrokers, and shrinks; the middle class have stocks, computers, […]

When Vice President Al Gore promised to retire the national debt by 2013 and even to run surpluses in the case of a recession, I assumed that he was merely trying to score a political point by contrasting his own fiscal conservatism with the recklessness of rival George W. Bush’s proposed tax cuts. But after […]

Exactly eight years ago, I trudged through New Hampshire sleet and slush, telling anyone who’d listen that Bill Clinton would do wonders for the American economy. Now, as the nation lurches into a millennial election year, most Americans seem largely content. The economy has faded as an election-year issue. But it shouldn’t have—there are Two […]

R emember pro-choice Republicans? They asked for so little–and they usually got it. But the elected officials among them could at least be counted on to show up and make a bit of a fuss at conventions and party functions. Remember a Bill Weld or a Christine Todd Whitman vaguely threatening a floor fight (even […]

Americans are profoundly ambivalent about abortion. A majority of voters accept the formulation of the pro-choice movement that abortion should be legal, safe, and rare. Yet most Americans consider the procedure distasteful and will accept an array of restrictions on it, particularly if they see abortion as undertaken lightly or irresponsibly. The public’s very ambivalence […]

Two important abortion cases will be decided by the Supreme Court this term. In Hill v. Colorado, the Court will rule on the constitutionality of statutory buffer or bubble zones–no-speech zones around abortion clinics and individuals entering clinics, in which even peaceful anti-abortion protests are prohibited. In Stenberg v. Carhart, it will determine the constitutionality […]

In 1996 the newly Republican Congress approved nearly$440 million in public funds over five years to teach celibacy. The law comes upfor renewal next year. The local programs supported under this legislation teachthat abstinence is the only appropriate way to prevent pregnancy and sexuallytransmitted diseases (STDs). Indeed, the limited information aboutcontraceptives permitted in such classes […]

If Maple Grove Senior High chose a prom queen, AshleyGort would have had a good shot at the crown. Ashley, a petite and popular juniorwith delicate features, wore deep-sea blue to the event, accessorizing her fullybeaded gown with a blue necklace like the one Kate Winslet wore in Titanic and matching blue rhinestones scattered over […]

Life is one long emergency for most advocacy groups–whose members are apt tobe united by the belief that they’re besieged. To an outsider who lacks theirpolitical passions, however, they seem less besieged than overwrought. So casualsupporters of abortion rights may be unimpressed when the National Organizationfor Women (NOW) declares an official state of emergency in […]

The article was buried far down in section a of The New York Times on Wednesday, February 26, 1997. But it hit supporters of abortion rights like a punch to the gut. Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted that he lied when he’d said that partial-birth abortions were rare […]