pd03jy95 The President's Radio Address...

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he has delivered thousands of babies, when the law permitted it, the 
patient requested it, and after appropriate counseling, he did perform 
an average of about one abortion per year.
    Now, I know it is easy to condemn abortion. It's easy to put on 
divisive television ads or pass out inflammatory materials. But it is 
very hard to actually work with children and look at them face to face, 
kids that nobody pays any attention to, and look at them and tell them 
they ought not to have sex, they ought not to get pregnant, they ought 
not to do drugs. That's hard. That's why most of us don't do it. But 
Henry Foster did.
    Unfortunately, in Washington today, pure political correctness and 
raw political power count a whole lot more than actually doing something 
to reduce the tragedies of teen pregnancy and the high number of 
abortions.
    You know, I believe it is clear what the law of the land is, and I 
believe that abortion should be rare but it should be legal and safe. 
The extreme right wing in our country wants to impose its views on all 
the rest of Americans. They killed this nomination with the help of the 
Republican leadership who did as they were told. And they're just 
getting started.
    This week, the House passed a bill which would prevent women who 
serve in our military or who are on military bases with their servicemen 
husbands from getting abortions at base hospitals, even if they pay for 
it and no matter what the circumstances. Imagine a servicewoman in a 
foreign country, a remote location without good medical facilities or 
even a safe blood supply. This House bill would say, ``If you can spend 
thousands of dollars to fly back to the United States for a safe and 
legal procedure, you're all right; otherwise you may have to risk your 
life in a hospital far from home.'' Why? Because she voluntarily 
enlisted to serve her country. So that a woman who's willing to risk her 
life for her country should also have to risk her life for a legal 
medical procedure. This seems to me to be too extreme.

[[Page 1123]]

    In a few days, the House will actually try to cut off Federal funds 
for abortions for poor women that arise from rape or incest. Even those 
with strong antiabortion feelings know this is a tough issue, and most 
people think it ought to be left to individual citizens. It's one thing 
to say that the taxpayers should not pay for a legal abortion that 
arises from a poor woman's own decision. That's one thing. Quite another 
to say that the same rules apply to rape and incest.
    This is a big, diverse country. We are deeply divided over many 
issues, none more than the painful and difficult issue of abortion. The 
law now is that the woman, not the Government, makes a decision until 
the third trimester when a baby can live independently of his mother and 
therefore the Government can prohibit abortions.
    There are some who believe that America now must toe their line and 
that every woman must live by their rules, even though the Constitution, 
as interpreted by the Supreme Court, says exactly the reverse. They'll 
stop at nothing to get their way. And this week it looks like the 
Republican leaders in Congress have given them the keys to the store. 
Looks like they'll vote for any bill, oppose any nomination, allow any 
intrusion into people's lives if they get orders to do so from these 
groups.
    Many, many Americans oppose abortion. And everyone agrees it's a 
tragedy. I believe we should all work to reduce the number of abortions 
through vigorous campaigns to promote abstinence among young people; 
reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancy, especially among teenagers; and promote 
more adoptions. I believe, in short, that we ought to all do more of the 
kind of things that Henry Foster has been doing for decades.
    If people in Washington spent less time using abortion to divide the 
country for their own political ends and more time following Dr. 
Foster's example of fighting these problems, there would be a lot fewer 
abortions in America and we'd be a lot stronger as a country.
    We need more citizens like Henry Foster willing to commit their 
time, their energy, and love to fighting for our children, our families, 
and our future.
    Thanks for listening.

Note: The President spoke at 9:06 a.m. from the Pine Bluff Convention 
Center in Pine Bluff, AR.


<DOC>
[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents]
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[Page 1123-1127]
 
Monday, July 3, 1995
 
Volume 31--Number 26
Pages 1113-1179
 
Week Ending Friday, June 30, 1995
 
Interview With Susan Yoachum of the San Francisco Chronicle in Pine 
Bluff, Arkansas

June 24, 1995

    The President. Hello.
    Ms. Yoachum. Hello, Mr. President.
    The President. How are you?
    Ms. Yoachum. I'm fine. It's very good of you to call, so I'll get 
right to it.
    The President. Where are you?
    Ms. Yoachum. I'm in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
    The President. It's a great town.

United Nations

    Ms. Yoachum. Actually, it is. I'm following around one of your 
newest--well, not your newest rivals but one of the newest candidates 
for President on the Republican side, Pete Wilson.
    So let me begin by asking you about your speech on Monday concerning 
the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. How do you plan to outline 
ways for the U.N. to reconstitute itself for the next 50 years?
    The President. Well, I think we have to, first of all, recognize 
that--I think there are two fundamental realities we have to recognize. 
Number one is that the end of the cold war gives the U.N. the 
possibility of living up to the dreams of its founders in ways that were 
simply impossible when the world was divided into two large blocs. And 
so I think there should be a lot of hope about the U.N.
    The second thing I think we have to recognize is that in order for 
that hope to be realized, the U.N. has got to be properly run and, in 
particular, the peacekeeping operations have to be properly run. And the 
United States has spent a lot of time, because we pay a lot of the costs 
of the U.N., analyzing how the overall operations can be more efficient 
and cost-effective and inspire more confidence in the countries that are 
paying the bills and, in particular, looking at the peacekeeping 
operations and setting up systems to make sure that we use peacekeeping 
when it will work, that we restrain it when the situation is not right, 
and that the com- 

[[Page 1124]]

mand-and-control operations are absolutely clear, that we don't have any 
kind of mixed signals and crossed lines that have sometimes happened in 
the past.
    I think those are the two fundamental realities you start with. And 
then when you look ahead into the future, I think it's clear that the 
new problems of the 21st century are likely to be rooted in ethnic, 
religious, and other internal problems within countries and across 
borders; dealing with or helping to avoid natural disasters that are 
brought on by a combination of population explosion and natural problems 
like the inability to produce food; and the rise of terrorism and the 
danger of proliferation of biological, chemical, and small-scale nuclear 
weapons.
    I think--and so I want to talk about kind of the threats to the 
future security of the members of the United Nations and how we have a 
new set of threats, an unprecedented opportunity, and we have to clean 
up our--operate--clean up implies--that has the wrong implication. I 
don't want to imply that there's anything unsavory about it, but it's 
just that the operation, I think, really needs to be streamlined and 
reformed in order to inspire confidence in all the member nations.
    As you know, both our--the last two Congresses, one was a Democratic 
Congress and this Republican Congress, expressed varying levels of 
opposition to some of the U.N. operations. But the last Congress was far 
more focused on getting the U.N. to work right, not having America walk 
away from its responsibilities and became more isolationist.
    So--and therefore, the message--that will be the message. But I will 
also say back to my fellow Americans and to the Congress that we should 
continue to support the United Nations, that they do a lot of work in 
the world that the United States might have to do alone or might 
eventually be pulled into doing, because they keep problems from 
becoming as bad as they would otherwise be.
    Ms. Yoachum. Mr. President, given the difficulties--the highly 
publicized difficulties, of course, with the U.N. peacekeeping forces in 
Bosnia and other U.N. difficulties, doesn't it make more difficult for 
you to try to sell this to Americans, and don't you run some political 
risk in trying to do so?
    The President. Well, I suppose there's--in a time like this, when a 
lot of people are bewildered almost by all the things that are going on 
in the world and the apparent conflicts of all the good forces and the 
troubling forces rising up at once, there's some political risk in 
everything. But you have to do what you think is right.
    I think the--I think it's important not to define the--first of all, 
I think it's important not to define the U.N. solely in terms of Bosnia. 
I mean, there was also--I'd ask the United States to remember that we 
went into Haiti with a multinational force that restored the Aristide 
government and democracy, but we were able to hand it off to a U.N. 
force with even more nations involved, where there were more countries 
paying for it.
    I think most Americans know that there are going to be problems all 
around the world that affect United States interests and that can affect 
United States citizens, and it's better to have a larger number of 
nations working on those problems and a larger number of nations paying 
for the solutions to those problems.
    Bosnia is a unique circumstance because it's in the heart of Europe, 
but there's a war that's been going on there for 4 years. But if you 
look at it, the people in Northern Ireland fought for 25 years, the 
people in the Middle East fought for more than four decades before there 
was any peace progress there. And for all the frustration people in our 
country have with the problems in Bosnia, the casualty rates have gone 
way, way down since the U.N. forces went on the ground there and since 
the United States began to support them with massive humanitarian 
airlifts and with our operation to keep the war from going into the air. 
That's what Captain O'Grady was doing when he was shot down; he was 
enforcing the no-fly zone. And I think it's important never to forget 
that. Before the United Nations became involved and before we became as 
aggressive as we were in trying to provide air help, in 1992, there were 
about 130,000 people killed in that civil war. In 1994, the death rate 
was down to under--about 3,500. So I think that it's important, even in 
Bosnia, to keep this in perspective.

[[Page 1125]]

    The United Nations did not succeed in ending the war in Bosnia. The 
United Nations did not go in there to militarily defeat the Bosnian 
Serbs, and they're not capable of doing that, and that was never what 
they were established--that's not what they were sent there to do. But 
the war has become less violent and has been at least contained to 
Bosnia and has not spread beyond its borders. So with all of our 
frustrations, I think it's important to remember that.
    Ms. Yoachum. You'll be doing a number of things in your speech on 
Monday, which has been, I think, widely anticipated around the world. 
And certainly, the patron saint of the U.N. 50 celebration, Walter 
Shorenstein, says that it's a real opportunity for you to give a world-
class speech. Having said that, and you having said that you're going to 
outline your hope for the U.N. given the changing circumstances of the 
world, what part of your speech--what will you say in your speech to 
address some of the criticisms, particularly by key Republicans, of the 
United States' involvement in 1995 in the U.N.?
    The President. Well, I will--consider the alternatives. I mean, here 
the United States is, the world's only superpower militarily, with other 
countries becoming increasingly wealthy, where there are other countries 
willing to put their troops on the ground in their own trouble spots and 
not asking us to do it, like Bosnia, and willing to pay an increasingly 
large share of running the United Nations. And now we have people in our 
country and, most importantly, people in our Congress, who want to walk 
away from our global responsibilities and walk away from the opportunity 
to cooperate with people in ways that permit others to carry some share 
of the load.
    You know, sometimes I get the feeling that some of the critics of 
our cooperation with other countries want it both ways. They want to be 
able to run the world and tell everybody exactly how to behave, and then 
not have to cooperate with anybody when they have a slight difference of 
opinion from us or even if they're willing to put their troops on the 
ground and put their money up.
    That's the case in Bosnia, where the Europeans said, ``We'll take 
the lead. We'll put our troops on the ground. This will be paid for 
through the United Nations, so you won't have to pay for any more than 
your regular assessment. We ask you for your air power and the support 
of the NATO, but we're going to follow the prescribed United Nations 
policy. We're not going to let the U.S. dictate policy, especially when 
it's our troops and our lives that are at risk.''
    And I think we cannot have it both ways. We can't become an 
isolationist country, and we can't dictate every other country's course. 
We can't become the world's policemen. And it's better for us to be a 
leader within the framework of the United Nations, which means that from 
time to time we will have to cooperate with people and agree on a policy 
that may reflect more of a consensus than our absolute best desires. But 
that's what the United Nations was set up to do.
    The U.S. is still clearly the dominant country in the United 
Nations. We still are able to do the things we need to do to be--for 
example, to keep a firm hand with Serbia; we've been able to keep other 
countries from lifting the sanctions off Iraq; we've been able to get a 
tougher line--in many ways, we were able to have our policy in Haiti 
prevail. But the United Nations is about working with other countries 
and shared sacrifice, shared contribution, shared decisionmaking, where 
the U.S. leads but can't control everything. And I think that's the way 
the world ought to be going forward.
    Ms. Yoachum. And so in your speech on Monday, despite the criticism 
of the U.S. involvement in the U.N., you'll not be backing away from the 
U.N., but at the same time, you'll also be offering suggestions for 
reforming it?
    The President. Absolutely. I don't intend to back away at all. But I 
do intend to say that this is going to be a 21st century organization, 
that it's more than a debating forum and--that involves a collective 
decision by the community of free nations to deploy people all across 
the world, not just in military situations, like peacekeeping, but in 
other ways, where it's going to have to be run very well and it's going 
to have to be able to inspire the confidence of taxpaying citizens not 
only in the United States but throughout the world.

[[Page 1126]]

    But I think--I still think the fundamental fact is that the end of 
the cold war permits the U.N. to live up to its full potential; that we 
ought to become--we ought to stay involved, we ought to pay our fair 
share, and we ought to be very grateful that there are other countries 
that are willing to spend their money and actually put their people at 
risk in places where either we wouldn't do it or we don't now have to do 
it all, we don't have to carry the whole load; and that we ought to be 
willing to lead in an atmosphere in which we also have to cooperate from 
time to time, especially when others are making a greater sacrifice and 
when the problem's in their backyard. And that is--that's the sort of 
future we ought to want.
    And we also ought to be mature enough to recognize that as long as 
human beings are alive on the Earth, bad things will happen, problems 
will exist, and that there will never be a complete and easy solution to 
all the problems in the world. This is not--the world will never be 
problem-free. But far better this course into the future than either 
having the nuclear cloud hang over the world, as it did in the cold war, 
or having the U.S. become an isolationist power, as we did between the 
wars, and run the risk of other terrible things happening all around the 
world which would drag us back into another war in the future.
    In other words, the course that I advocate is not problem-free 
because as long as there are people and as long as bad people can get 
political power in various places, there will always be problems in the 
world. But it is far better than the alternative, better than what we 
went through in the cold war and better than having an American 
isolationism.

Military Base Closings

    Ms. Yoachum. Sir, one question away from the U.N., and that is the 

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