State GOP Defies Bush, Wilson on Abortion : Politics: Conservatives add condemnation of the procedure to the party platform. Moderates say the move will hurt all Republican candidates.

Conservative Republicans defied repeated appeals from President Bush’s reelection campaign and Gov. Pete Wilson on Sunday by writing strict abortion language into their state party platform for the first time.

Generally, the plank is not as restrictive on a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion as the national platform adopted in Houston last month. But moderates led by the governor’s political strategists argued that to insert any abortion language in the party’s credo would cost votes on Nov. 3.

“The point is we didn’t need a replay of what happened in Houston,” said Marty Wilson, a former Pete Wilson aide who is manager of the Bush effort in the state. “I think it hurts all Republicans up and down the ticket.”

Dan Schnur, the governor’s spokesman, said, “It’s a divisive move. It doesn’t do the party any good.”

Public opinion polls have indicated that virtually every voting group in California strongly supports abortion rights.

But overriding the importance of the issue--particularly because Bush is anti-abortion--was the intensity of the battle pitting the Wilson moderates against the ideological conservatives and the religious right.

Normally, parties do their infighting before the June primary in which the party candidates are nominated for the fall election. The fall convention usually serves as a big pep rally to energize GOP foot soldiers going into the final stretch of the campaign against the Democrats.

But moderates and conservatives have been embroiled in a fight for control of the state party apparatus. The fight has been fueled by sharp schisms over emotional litmus-test issues such as abortion and gay rights.

Conservatives declared the outcome of Sunday’s fractious session a major victory.

“Oh, absolutely!” said Michael Schroeder of Irvine, president of the conservative California Republican Assembly.

Schroeder predicted that Wilson will face a challenge in the GOP primary in 1994 when he is expected to seek a second term as governor.

Schroeder argued that Wilson helped precipitate the battle by urging delegates who favor abortion rights to scuttle the platform by boycotting the semiannual meeting of the Republican State Central Committee. This would have denied the body a quorum and prevented it from conducting business.

In fact, it is rare for the party to get a quorum for its fall convention because so many usual attendees are out campaigning. But Schroeder said the result of Wilson’s action was to motivate conservatives to turn out in force at the convention.

Wilson, the titular head of the party in California, did not attend. The official line from the governor’s office was that he thought it was more important for delegates to be out campaigning against the Democrats this past weekend.

At one point, the Bush-Wilson group thought they had agreement from party officials that there would be no quorum and thus no bitter convention floor fight. Party leaders denied that.

Whatever the reason, the fight was on. What ensued, beginning Friday, was a battle over credentials and proxies that was won--for a brief moment--by the conservatives when Chairman Jim Dignan of Modesto announced the presence of 697 voting delegates, just seven more than a quorum of the 1,380 central committee members.

Dignan ignored shouts of “Quorum! Quorum!” from conservatives, even though he is their ally. Dignan called for a series of non-binding, sense-of-the-party voice votes on the platform and resolutions, including one declaring unified support for all GOP nominees, including President Bush. The support resolution was one of many that passed on unanimous voice votes.

And then, almost without pause, Dignan said there no longer was a quorum because some delegates had left the hall. He declared the meeting adjourned.

That threw the business pending before the convention-that-wasn’t into the 100-member executive committee, which then proceeded to meet and shout approval of the platform without debate. Party leaders said the executive committee’s action is just as official and just as legal as if the votes had been taken on the convention floor.

If there was any solace for the Bush-Wilson faction, it was that a protracted convention floor fight on the abortion issue had been avoided. But that was not cause for much rejoicing.

Afterward, a glum Schnur, the governor’s spokesman, said: “It’s not a win for anybody.” Rather than presenting an image of unity from the weekend, the party merely got three days of news stories about division and internal bickering, he said.

The abortion plank of the platform follows a family values section that says the party supports “the traditional model of monogamous heterosexual marriage as the only stable relationship upon which to build a society.”

The preamble to the seven-point sanctity-of-life plank says the party recognizes that “the pre-born deserve full protection under the law and should not be subjected to our mistakes or our negligence.”

It then proposes the overturning of the U. S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision that declares a woman’s right to choose an abortion is protected under her right to privacy. However, unlike the national platform, it does not call for a constitutional amendment banning virtually all abortions.

Even if Roe vs. Wade were overturned, California’s generally liberal abortion law signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1967 would remain in force.

Other points propose a ban on Medi-Cal funding for abortion for poor women and a cutoff of state aid to any family planning clinics that advocate or support abortion. Wilson, who favors abortion rights, has been a leading advocate of state support for family planning clinics.

The platform also opposes any special civil rights legislation in behalf of any minority group, including gays, and calls for mandatory reporting of cases of the human immunodeficiency virus and AIDS.

The platform proposes periodic mandatory testing of food service workers for AIDS because “AIDS-infected individuals serve as reservoirs for a variety of . . . highly contagious and dangerous infections (that) represent a severe threat to the general population.”