Nothing Less Than Perfect

By Richard Stengel

When the red light of the television camera winks on, most people also light up, becoming warmer and more animated than their everyday selves. But when Faye Wattleton, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, sits before the camera's eye -- something she is doing with ever greater frequency these days -- she turns chillier and more controlled than her already well-disciplined self. Her speech becomes stricter, her smile tighter. Wattleton monitors herself closer than the camera does, for she is intent on being nothing less than perfect, as though a single dangling modifier or wayward statistic will bring her down, and with her the movement in which she so fervently believes.

Wattleton wears the burden, though she would call it the honor, of being a role model. As a black woman, divorced mother and crusader for family planning, she feels the pressure of being held up as a symbol, and she is determined neither to let up nor to let anyone down.

But she feared that all she had worked for was in danger when the Supreme Court handed down its Webster decision this past July, permitting states to narrow a woman's access to abortion. Planned Parenthood, the nation's oldest and largest family-planning organization, is also the premier institution providing abortions around the country, and Wattleton is fiercely dedicated to protecting that service. She had visions of Roe v. Wade being overturned, and spoke darkly of a return to the era of back-alley abortions.

"Since Webster," she said to a group of suburban supporters at a fund raiser recently, "we now must fight this battle in 50 states." Cold fire stirs in her voice. "If we can't preserve the privacy of our right to procreate, I can't imagine what rights we will be able to protect. It's a temptation to grow weary with all the battles still to be fought. But it's also an opportunity to show the finest we can be."

Webster turned out to be just such an opportunity. The decision had the unintended consequence of rousing the moribund pro-choice movement. Wattleton had long maintained that a silent majority of American women did not want anyone tampering with their reproductive freedom. "Now the majority is getting noisy," she says. Witness the recent national Mobilization for Women's Lives and the elections in New Jersey and Virginia in which voters selected pro-choice Governors. Wattleton asserts that she does not want her teenage daughter to be fighting the same battles she is. To that end, this woman who looks like a Hollywood version of a corporate queen is bringing her signature style of passionate rationalism and measured indignation.

Wattleton, the only child of a woman who was a Fundamentalist minister in St. Louis, was appointed head of Planned Parenthood eleven years ago, at age 34. She was a plucky choice for an institution traditionally headed by button- down white men, an organization that had become as all-American as the Girl Scouts and debutante parties. Within her first three years, Wattleton, a former nurse and midwife whose primary bureaucratic experience had been running the Dayton affiliate, shifted the organization's structure to a crisply corporate one, reshuffling more than half of the national office's employees.

Slowly, cautiously, she also began to mold Planned Parenthood in her own image. As the political climate turned hostile to abortion rights during the Reagan years, she became more outraged and outspoken. Under Wattleton, Planned Parenthood took off the white gloves and became one of the nation's most vocal and aggressive advocates of abortion rights. The organization will soon launch a political action fund headed by Wattleton that will allow it to endorse political candidates. Today the public image of Planned Parenthood is Faye Wattleton.

Her natural reserve is in contrast to the effusiveness of the dozens of newspaper and magazine articles about her. Publicity is a principal part of her brief; Wattleton's main job as president of Planned Parenthood is to be the organization's spokeswoman. Thus promoting herself is advancing Planned Parenthood. Even when she is being interviewed by Vogue or Ms., she rarely neglects to mention Planned Parenthood's 177 affiliates and 850 clinics in 46 states, which served 3.8 million people last year, offering everything from infertility counseling to prenatal care. But it is abortion that is at the very top of her agenda these days and, like a presidential candidate, she travels the hustings campaigning for choice.

On a single day in Washington recently, Wattleton testified before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee (she tangled with Representative Christopher Smith of New Jersey, a zealous pro-life advocate), planned pro-choice strategy with Representatives Don Edwards of Florida and Pat Schroeder of Colorado (she urged them to introduce a federal pro-choice statute), had a get-acquainted session with Democratic National Committee head Ronald Brown (she told him that Webster backlash will help the Democrats) and then capped off the day by conferring with Republican Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon (she pressed him about a pro-choice constitutional amendment, a dream of hers that other pro- choice groups privately consider a waste of time).

At each appearance during her long day, Wattleton looked immaculate, as though she had just emerged from a beauty salon. In effect she had, for she spends a good 25 minutes before most public occasions "freshening up," as one of her aides calls it. Wattleton has a healthy dose of vanity. Her nails, makeup and hair are always just so. She maintains that grooming is part of her job, "as people make judgments about youbased on your appearance." Nearly 6 ft. tall, imperially slim and sleekly dressed, she is usually the cynosure of attention at any gathering. Harper's Bazaar named her one of their eight "Over-40 and Sensational" women last summer, and she is a stunning refutation of the cliche of the dowdy feminist. In an era when nonprofit organizations seek out celebrity spokespeople to get their message across, she is the public relations ideal, a spokeswoman who has become a celebrity.

Wattleton can be imperious. She travels first-class while her aides ride coach. Recently in Chicago, she retired to a hotel suite for a solitary lunch. As she bit into her sandwich, she asked an aide to get her a Coke. The young woman returned with a can of Pepsi. "Is this all right?" she asked. "No," Wattleton replied. "I said Coke, not Pepsi. There is a difference."

Wattleton's high visibility does not bring out only admirers. She has had death threats from pro-life extremists, and is often accompanied by a bodyguard. When she arrived at the Capitol Hilton in Washington this past fall to receive a humanitarian award from the Congressional Black Caucus, she was greeted by a small band of pro-life protesters. FAYE WATTLETON MURDERS BABIES' BLOOD, read one placard; FAYE WATTLETON: PRINCESS OF DEATH, read another. Wattleton was accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter Felicia, her only child. Felicia was upset by the signs, which Wattleton has grown used to. At least they consider me royalty, she told Felicia by way of consolation.

In one recent debate with a pro-life advocate who looked barely out of cheerleading togs, Wattleton seemed the soul of reasonableness. Afterward, she let her irritation show. "You know, I felt like saying, 'Honey, live a little, then come back and talk. People out there have lives that are living death.' "

Pro-life advocates talk about women's babies; pro-choice advocates talk $ about women's rights. In the wake of polling data that show a majority of pro- choice voters supporting certain restrictions on abortion, such as parental-notification provisions, Wattleton and other women leaders have been shifting the terms of the debate. Wattleton refuses to engage in discussions of issues like when life begins or whether a fetus is a human being. That, she implies, is merely sophistry and irrelevant. The most she will say is, "Look, abortion is never a great thing."

Wattleton functions as an ambassador between the mostly middle-class pro- choice movement and the women who disproportionately avail themselves of that choice: poor black females. "She plays a unique role in bridging white and black," says Kathy Bonk, a longtime pro-choice activist who is a director of a nonprofit communications firm. "She moves between the two worlds. None of the other pro-choice leaders can really do that."

Wattleton tailors her appeal to her audience, and when she is speaking before a group of black women she unwinds a bit. Her speech turns more colloquial. If you listen very closely, you can just make out some of the revivalist rhythms of her mother's preaching. "The stakes are higher for us as African-American women," she tells a Chicago group. "It will be African- American women who will die first. We suffer disproportionately from poverty. We suffer disproportionately from despair."

Nonwhite women, she says, are more than twice as likely to seek abortions as white women, and are far and away poorer than their white counterparts. She notes that the percentage of fertile nonwhite women who do not use any form of contraception is double that of fertile white women. The Webster decision, she says, in allowing states to restrict funding for abortion, will make life even harder for black women by further widening the disparity in access to abortion for rich and poor. Black women are her special audience, and she knows she must speak for them as well as to them. She is well aware of the historical ambivalence that black women have felt about abortion. She does not deny that black women are underrepresented in the pro-choice movement. The explanation, she says, is simple.

"Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised," she says. "The middle class creates social revolutions. When a group of people are disproportionately concerned with daily survival, it's not likely that they have the resources to go to Washington and march. African-American women are marching with their feet to get abortions."

Politics is not an intellectual pursuit for her; her political education was her own experience as a black woman. She never marched in the civil rights movement; her parents were her political models. "I can't separate myself from the fact that I grew up as a black child. My parents were quietly defiant of racism. I was born and raised in the North, but my roots are solidly in the South. In the summers we drove south to Canton, Miss., where my mother was from. My father would always ask, whenever we stopped for gas, if they had toilets for colored. If they said yes, then he would say, 'Fill up the tank.' If they said no, he would say thank you and drive on. Once we were outside New Orleans, and this day they said yes, so I jumped out of the car and went around back, and I found nothing except a hole in the ground. I told my father, and he spoke sharply to the attendant. 'What else do you expect?' the attendant replied. 'Stop pumping the gas,' my father said."

Quiet defiance. Like father, like daughter. Self-possessed, imperturbable, smoothly articulate, Wattleton is often hard to read. But not to Trish Arredondo, the director of an Indiana Planned Parenthood affiliate. One day, after a speech at a fund raiser in Munster, Ind., Wattleton stretched out her legs in the back of a white limousine cruising along Route 20 toward Chicago. Arredondo reached for Wattleton's note pad and stared at it intently. Arredondo is a family-planning specialist by training, a graphologist by avocation. Without taking her eyes off Wattleton's handwriting, she began to speak. You're idealistic and self-controlled, she told Wattleton. You're a bit possessive. You can keep a secret. Wattleton's face was a mask. You dwell a great deal on the past, Arredondo continued. You are easily wounded, but you hide it well. When Arredondo finished, Wattleton was silent. Well, how much of it was true? Wattleton paused, and then said, very softly, "All of it." Then she smiled. "Does it say I'm late?" Wattleton asked. "I'm always late."