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Pro-life forces are gaining ground — how they're doing it

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) The instant that President Bush signs the law banning partial-birth abortion - a virtual certainty this year - opponents of abortion will celebrate a long-awaited victory: The federal government has never before criminalized a method to end pregnancy.

But behind the scenes, the eight-year campaign to outlaw this relatively uncommon surgical procedure has scored an even more profound triumph. It has shaken the underpinnings of abortion-rights advocacy and deeply altered the national debate about abortion.

Support for abortion rights dropped by a startling one-third in the two years after the ban was first proposed, in June 1995 - support the abortion-rights movement still has not recovered.

Although a majority of Americans still say abortion should be legal in at least some cases, only 23 percent today believe abortion should be legal "under any circumstances," according to Gallup polls. That's down from 33 percent in 1995. In that same period, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves to pollsters as "pro-life" has increased from 33 percent to 45 percent.

The relentless campaign "has been a public relations coup for the antiabortion movement and a public relations disaster for the pro-choice movement," says Ron Fitzsimmons, head of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers. "Their power was in the fight, pounding away year after year, not in the victory."

Even the terminology is a victory. Before abortion opponents began their campaign, the method had no formal name - it was a variation of the common second-trimester abortion procedure, called "dilation and evacuation," or D&E, in which the fetus is dismembered in the womb. When "partial birth" gained common usage, with its attendant emotional and political connotations, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists started referring to it as "dilation and extraction" or D&X.

The term that stuck was "partial birth."

Three times in the period from 1995 to 2000, Congress passed partial-birth abortion bans. Two were vetoed by President Bill Clinton, and the third never made it to his desk. This year, with Republicans controlling Congress and the White House, a new measure passed both houses easily, and Bush has promised to sign it.

Minor differences between the House and Senate versions will be worked out by a conference committee, whose members are expected to be named this week. The final bill could reach Bush's desk by summer's end.

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Uncertainties remain. Although its authors maintain the bill is intended to outlaw only one abortion technique, abortion-rights activists worry that it could curtail second-trimester abortions, saying its broad language could be applied at times to the dilation and evacuation method.

And opponents of the ban, who also believe the partial-birth campaign is merely a subterfuge to chip away at overall abortion rights, say they will go to court the moment it becomes law.

But even if abortion-rights activists keep the ban from taking effect, their movement has lost crucial ground because of a deftly crafted campaign strong on graphic details and gruesome illustrations.

Abortion foes used means as sophisticated as Web sites and as basic as postcards to describe a procedure in which a doctor delivers a live baby until only the head remains inside the womb, then stabs the back of the baby's skull and suctions out the brains so the skull can be collapsed and removed.

These tactics managed to do what noisy clinic blockades and posters of aborted fetuses never could: shake the convictions of even some ardent abortion-rights supporters. Self-proclaimed "pro-choice" legislators such as former Rep. Marge S. Roukema of New Jersey and the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan of New York defected, saying the procedure was too close to infanticide. Never before had the antiabortion movement so successfully redirected Americans' attention to the fetus, displacing the woman and her "right to choose." In a Gallup poll this year, 70 percent of respondents said they favored the ban.

The new measure defines the procedure as vaginally delivering "a living fetus" until "any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother" or, in the case of a head-first presentation, if the fetal head is outside the woman's body.

Partial-birth abortion bans passed in the states have repeatedly been ruled unconstitutional. Three years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such a ban in Nebraska by a 5-4 vote. The justices said the ban's language was so vague as to potentially criminalize other abortion methods. Moreover, they said, Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 ruling legalizing abortion, requires that any law restricting abortion make an exception for cases in which the woman's life or health is in danger.

The antiabortion forces wrote in an exemption into the current proposal allowing the procedure to save a woman's life, but acknowledge it was included only to satisfy the Roe requirement. The exception does not, however, cover threats to a woman's health.

Doug Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, who helped write the bill, defends the lack of a health exception. He says the bill clearly declares that partial-birth abortion is "never medically necessary" and poses "additional health risks to the mother." In truth, no study has ever examined the safety or efficacy of the procedure.

The ban's supporters say the newest version should satisfy the court because it more clearly defines the procedure.

"The legislators have done everything but clipped out the medical illustration and taped it to the bill," Johnson says.

Even if the new language might not pass muster with the current court, abortion foes have time on their side. Lawsuits move slowly, and by the time this one makes it to the Supreme Court, the nine justices may not be the ones who threw out the Nebraska law. Retirements from the bench are widely expected in coming years, and any replacements named during the Bush administration would be considered more likely to overturn Roe.

Dr. LeRoy Carhart, the plaintiff in the Nebraska case, says that if the law goes into effect, he will stop doing abortions, between 13 and 18 weeks of pregnancy, worrying he'll be vulnerable to prosecution even though he doesn't use the D&X method.

After 18 weeks, Carhart doesn't fear prosecution, he says, because he and doctors use a procedure that chemically kills the fetus before removing it from the womb. Doing that before 18 weeks, he says, is difficult and risky.

Carhart says he will file a lawsuit the day Bush signs the ban, contending that like its predecessors, it is vague and deceptive.

"It's meant to be a two-faced bill: to polarize the community against this thing they describe in horrific terms, but when it comes down to the specifics of what's prohibited, it's very, very broad," Carhart says. "The way it's written, it covers almost every second-trimester abortion I do."

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© 2003, The Record (Bergen County, N.J.) Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services