WASHINGTON — After almost 19 years at its helm, Kate Michelman announced in mid-September she will retire as president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the organization formerly known as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.

Reacting to the announcement, pro-life leaders painted a portrait of a conflicted woman: One who suffered much and then, they say, compounded that suffering with a bad decision.

Next April, after the April 25 March for Freedom of Choice, she will step aside as president, becoming “president emeritus” of the organization.

As president of NARAL, Michelman has been an ardent opponent of restrictions on abortion. She has argued in favor of partial-birth abortion, against parental-notification requirements for minor girls seeking abortions and against penalties for the killing of unborn children in the commission of violent crimes.

In the past, her positions carried the day, said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee. But now they are rejected “by overwhelming majorities of the American people in polls,” he said, “and increasingly are rejected by the lawmakers whom they elect.”

Though she is retiring from the top slot at NARAL, Michelman is not expected to leave the scene. In a Sept. 22 statement she said, “My retirement from NARAL Pro-Choice America does not mean I am withdrawing from pro-choice activism. Quite the contrary. I will now be able to devote myself fully to the most-pressing challenge our movement faces today: electing a pro-choice president in 2004.”

Michelman struck a characteristic note of urgency. “The next four years will almost certainly see at least two Supreme Court vacancies,” she said. “If George W. Bush is allowed to fill those seats, it could mean the end of reproductive privacy and the end of Roe v. Wade. I intend to do everything I can to see that does not happen.”

Abortion has been a very personal issue to Michelman. As her official biography puts it, Michelman “became concerned about reproductive freedom after her own humiliating experience with a pre-Roe v. Wade abortion in 1970, which required her to obtain the consent of the husband who had deserted their family as well as a hospital panel comprised entirely of men.”

Michelman has said the abortion was “one of the hardest but also one of the most right and moral decisions I ever made.”

Michelman, said Helen Alvare, former spokeswoman for the U.S. Catholic bishops on pro-life issues and currently a professor at The Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law, “will be long remembered as capturing some of the signal strengths of the pro-legal-abortion movement. She was a shrewd and relentless planner who was able to turn America's weakness for subjective morality toward the cause of abortion with the messages ‘pro-choice’ and ‘who decides.’”

“She also had a compelling personal story that seemed to make the emotional case for abortion, the type of story that characterized many abortion advocates,” Alvare said.

It's a sentiment other abortion opponents, especially women, echo.

Donna Steichen, author of Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Tale of Catholic Feminism, said, “I can never read her bitter and patently defensive commentaries without a twinge of pity for the abandoned wife and mother she was once. How sad that she abandoned her integrity to fight for the right to kill babies.”

A Catholic Woman

Raised Catholic, Michelman has said she “challenged every religious, moral and ethical belief I had.” Her testimony has often been repeated over her years at NARAL. Michelman's husband left her when she was a young mother of three girls. She soon learned she was pregnant.

In 1991, she told the Senate Judiciary Committee during then Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings that, had she not had the abortion, “my family would not have survived intact. But in 1970, you know, the government did not allow me to make this decision for myself. I was forced to appear before a hospital-appointed panel of four men. These complete strangers cross-examined me about the most intimate and personal details of my life. It was humiliating. I was an adult woman, a mother of three, and yet I had to win their permission to make a decision about my family, my life and my future. And I alone would have to live with the consequences of their decision.”

Michelman continued: “But finally they granted me their permission. I was admitted to the hospital. Yet as I awaited the procedure I was told by a nurse that they had forgotten one more legal requirement. I would not be able to have the abortion without written permission from the man who had just deserted me and my children. I literally had to leave the hospital and find the man who had rejected me and to ask his permission.”

“It was a degrading, dehumanizing experience,” she said.

There is plenty blame in her story to go around, said Catholic author Charlotte Allen. “All four of those male doctors said it was perfectly fine by them for Kate to terminate the life of her unborn child. I'm sure that they were thinking things like: Aren't three enough? These Catholics breed like bunnies, you know. And the abortion was okay with Kate's ex. He wasn't supporting the other kids or even spending time with them, so what did he care about a fourth? Kate got that abortion, and she became the virulent pro-abortion fanatic that she remains today because she was angry at men.”

“And rightly so,” Allen continued. “Couldn't one of those five gallant gentlemen, or anyone else, for that matter, have stepped forward and said: ‘We can help you, Kate, because you need help. We can force that rat to pony up some child support.’ Or said: ‘You don't have to have that baby alone.’ A family member? A priest? A friend? A support group? It seems that no one did. I hate everything that Kate Michelman stands for and everything that she works for. But she is the woman she is today because her supposedly enlightened contemporaries of the 1970s sold her on the idea that abortion is the solution for a failure of love.”

Alvare said she has hope for Michelman.

“In debates with her, I always found her charming and even kind with me,” Alvare said. “I continue to believe that she had a desire to help women but completely misunderstood the awful costs of abortion. I also believe that she will come to understand that her career was the wrong way to pursue a right object — women's true freedom and happiness.”

Michelman once admitted she herself was conflicted about abortion.

In a 1994 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Michelman said, “We think abortion is a bad thing.”

Michelman later contested that she said it, but the reporter had the whole interview on tape.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.