Republican Stance on Abortion Protested : Politics: Activists disrupt GOP convention, criticizing call for U.S. constitutional ban. But lack of a quorum may keep similar language off state platform.

Democrats and Republican women who support abortion rights staged guerrilla raids Saturday on the Republican State Convention to stir up the abortion issue that the GOP hierarchy tried to keep mute.

Gov. Pete Wilson, the titular head of the party, managed to avoid the issue by not attending the pre-election convention, saying that his time was better spent by stumping in the field for Republican legislative candidates. Wilson has supported abortion rights in the past.

GOP State Chairman Jim Dignan of Modesto insisted that the economy is the issue that Californians are interested in. But Democratic State Chairman Phil Angelides invaded the convention hotel, the Marriott at Los Angeles International Airport, to deliver an abortion rights message, accompanied by actresses Ali MacGraw, Dana Delany and Shelley Hack.

“This weekend, while hundreds more of Californians are getting laid off in the Bush recession, the Republican team of Bush, Herschensohn and Seymour are debating even stricter abortion language for California,” Angelides said.

Of the two Republican U.S. Senate nominees, Bruce Herschensohn is opposed to abortion rights while Sen. John Seymour supports them. Women’s groups are angry with Seymour, however, because he voted to confirm the Supreme Court nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Earlier Saturday, 11 GOP members of the California Abortion Rights Action League held a news conference at the nearby Hilton Hotel, bound their hands with red, white and blue ribbons and marched to the Marriott to deliver a statement in favor of abortion rights to convention manager Don Willits.

Addressed to “our fellow Republicans,” it said in part: “The Republican Party’s extremist position against the right to choose shows that it has abandoned the basic tenets upon which it was founded.”

A small crowd gathered as the the group, led by Laguna Beach real estate developer Anita Mangels, gave the statement to Willits. There were no incidents and the 11 people left.

Mangels said she had been spit on, kicked and pushed by “zealots and the people who expound the politics of hatred and bigotry” at other Republican events.

“I, for one, am getting really sick and tired of hearing about the (Republicans’) big tent and the party of diversity,” she added. “The Republican Party practices the politics of intimidation.”

She said women have “grown weary of begging for rights which should be held inviolate by our government.”

After all the fuss, the abortion issue may be moot. Unlike the national platform, the draft state platform does not propose a U.S. constitutional ban on abortions. It calls for the overturning of the Roe vs. Wade decision, but that by itself would not alter California’s relatively liberal abortion law.

Conservatives want to insert a constitutional ban. But it appeared that there would not be enough delegates on hand today to form a convention quorum. If that happens, the party’s executive committee was expected to adopt the draft platform without change.

Abortion rights league members said that the governor had urged abortion-rights delegates to stay away from the convention to avoid a floor fight on the issue.

To invade the GOP convention, Angelides had to break a usual Democratic ban on entering a non-union hotel. But he said “the labor unions are with us” and would not begrudge the action because the issues are so important.