Abortion Activists Put Aside Rivalry : Protests: Allies and foes are trying to turn civil war into civil discourse. They have formed a national organization called the Common Ground Network for Life and Choice.

Loretto Wagner remembered the lines of angry people on both sides of the street confronting her as she turned the corner onto Constitution Avenue during a March for Life in Washington.

“I just got to thinking, I don’t want this to turn into a civil war. We’re all human beings,” she said.

For Peggy Green, an activist for abortion rights, the “stereotypes fell to pieces” when she heard a woman who was a victim of incest and child abuse speak of abortion as another instance of violence against a women’s body.

“I can’t just look at this woman and degrade this woman’s experience,” she said.

Today, Wagner and Green are among a growing number of staunch advocates on the abortion issue around the country who are putting aside old hatreds to find a shared faith in humanity.

Buoyed by dialogues in cities such as Buffalo, N.Y., Cleveland, Milwaukee, San Francisco and Denver, advocates for turning the abortion debate from civil war into civil discourse have formed a national organization called the Common Ground Network for Life and Choice.

Away from the often angry rhetoric of abortion politics, many Common Ground participants have turned to the spiritual realm for a way to talk to one another as human beings.

The co-directors of the Washington headquarters of the network are Mary Jacksteit, a Presbyterian laywoman, and Sister Adrienne Kaufmann, a Benedictine nun.

If you believe in the biblical principle to love one’s neighbor as oneself, Jacksteit said, “You have sort of a responsibility to respect the humanness of individuals, and not dehumanize the individual.”

Kaufmann said her participation is based on her belief that every person is created in God’s image.

“When we treat another person as if they were a reflection of the devil almost . . . theologically, I think, we are denying part of God’s creation.”

High ideals come at a price. A willingness to engage in dialogue makes participants traitors to the cause in the eyes of some hardened allies. And though a 1993 Gallup Poll showed a majority of Americans characterize abortion activists on both sides as intolerant, the peacemakers are criticized for deflating stereotypes of their opponents as “baby killers” or people who have no concern for children after they are born.

“Somehow, I became the great credibility giver in the sky,” said Wagner, former president of Missouri Citizens for Life.

“Many of my friends were outraged and appalled. It was very, very painful for me,” said B.J. Isaacson-Jones, head of one of the nation’s largest abortion clinics.

“The most common thing I heard is, ‘You’re painting these people as reasonable people, B.J.’ I would say, ‘Yes, they are reasonable people.”’

Like others in the dialogue, Isaacson-Jones, who four years ago added an adoption agency to her St. Louis clinic, said she believes the two sides “can concentrate on the real enemies” such as ignorance, violence and discrimination.

Once you sit down and talk with people from the other side, you can no longer look at yourself in the mirror and hate that other person, said Green, a member of San Francisco Common Ground.

“All the tools that you have for furthering your ideals out of hatred go away,” Green said. “I have to be willing to see the love in the other people.”

In Missouri, when legislation to aid crack-addicted mothers was held hostage by people on both sides of the abortion debate who feared additional riders, she and Andrew Puzder, the attorney who wrote Missouri’s restrictive abortion law that was upheld by the Supreme Court, helped work through such fears and lobbied for its passage.

In Buffalo, where a dialogue was started in response to two weeks of mass demonstrations last spring, the Rev. Stan Bratton discovered both sides shared a concern for reducing unwanted pregnancies.

“What I have come to see is that we set up these immense conflicts that we get into and focus on each other and ignore the problem,” said Bratton, executive director of the Buffalo Council of Churches. “For many of the activists, 90% of the things people can work on together.”

The problem, Bratton said, is “Right in the middle, we have this kind of huge mountain.”

“We need to combine our resources and our energy to benefit women and their children,” Wagner said. “I don’t think we can stand back and deprive ourselves of the opportunity to at least better some of the human condition.”