As president of the Texas State Bar in 1993, Harriet Miers urged the national American Bar Association to put the abortion issue to a referendum of the group's full membership. She questioned at the time whether the ABA should "be trying to speak for the entire legal community" on an issue that she said "has brought on tremendous divisiveness" within the ABA....
Miers was among a group of lawyers from the Texas bar and elsewhere who had argued that the ABA should have a neutral stance on abortion.
The ABA's policy-making body overwhelmingly rejected the Texas lawyers' group's 1993 proposal to put the issue to a referendum by mail of the ABA's then-roster of about 360,000 members.
What does this mean about whether Miers would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade? Almost nothing. It doesn't even tell us whether she's opposed to abortion rights. She took part in an effort to move the ABA out of endorsing a position that many of its members strongly opposed. At most, it tells us that she had some sensitivity for the concerns of ABA members who were pro-life, though not necessarily that much, since she only sought a majority vote in the referendum. A stronger position would be that the ABA shouldn't take a position contrary to the deep moral beliefs of a significant portion of their members. Her position seems to have been moderate, concerned about the functioning of the ABA as an institution and considerate about diverse opinions within the group.
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