Under The Radar

DIANA WALKER/TIMEPIX
Pro-choice and pro-life advocates clash outside the Supreme Court in '92

George W. Bush's first workday was also the day that tens of thousands of antiabortion activists gathered in Washington for their annual protest against the landmark Supreme Court decision guaranteeing a woman's right to abortion. So new was the Bush team on Jan. 22, 2001, that most officials hadn't yet been issued their White House telephone extensions. Kansas Senator Sam Brownback frantically dialed cell-phone numbers from the rally's stage beneath the Washington Monument. When he finally reached Tim Goeglein of the Office of Public Liaison, Brownback put his request for a show of support bluntly: "If you're going to take this position, now's the time to announce." Less than an hour later, it was Brownback's cell phone that rang. In his first reversal of Clinton Administration policy, the new President who had downplayed abortion during his campaign said he would block federal money from international family-planning organizations that offer or counsel abortion. The crowd roared when Brownback delivered the news.

Two years later, as the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade is marked this week, the antiabortion movement finds itself at a moment of both possibility and tension. Some think Bush has lived up to the promise of that early victory. "He's been a star," says Republican Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, one of the House's leading abortion foes. But others say the President is in danger of squandering what they see as the biggest opportunity abortion opponents have had since Roe to severely restrict maybe even ban abortion. "He has tremendous political capital, and I wish he had said more to America and not just to us," says Gary Bauer, a conservative activist who ran against Bush for the G.O.P. nomination. "They've made a calculation: take action, but with the least discomfort to other portions of the coalition some of the more moderate suburban women who don't react to this with the same enthusiasm I might."

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Abortion is on the decline in this country, no matter how you measure it: in total numbers, the rate at which women choose abortion or the percentage of pregnancies that end in abortion. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of abortions dropped 18%, from an estimated 1.6 million a year to 1.3 million, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research organization that both sides of the debate rely on for data. Twelve years ago, about 27 women out of every 1,000 of childbearing age had had an abortion; by 2000, the number fell to just over 21. And whereas 28% of those who found themselves pregnant in 1990 had an abortion, the number dropped below 25% two years ago.

Meanwhile, there are fewer and fewer doctors willing to perform the procedure. The number of physicians providing abortion is down to 1,800 nationally, from nearly 2,400 in 1992, and 87% of U.S. counties have none at all, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Another indicator: this month the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, the abortion-rights movement's leading organization, officially changed its name for the fourth time, to NARAL Pro-Choice America, dropping the word abortion and adopting the acronym instead.

With Congress and the White House in G.O.P. hands, abortion foes will push this year to get a ban on the late-term procedure they call partial-birth abortion passed (as it has been twice already) and signed into law (President Bill Clinton vetoed it both times). But G.O.P. strategists concede it is unlikely that other measures like a bill to make it a separate crime to injure a fetus during an attack on a pregnant woman or legislation making it illegal to evade state parent-notification laws by taking a minor across state lines will become priorities for the President or get through the closely divided Senate. "If all they can muster is the elimination of one abortion method, that's a loss," says former antiabortion lobbyist Teresa Wagner, editor of a new book of essays about the movement. "It's a catastrophic loss."

For its broader goals, the antiabortion movement still can't make the political math work. The Senate has a Republican majority, but at least 53 Senators are on record as favoring Roe. And the public is not prepared to see it overturned. In the latest TIME/CNN poll, 55% of respondents said they support a woman's right to have an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy.

At the same time, 60% of those polled said it has become too easy to obtain an abortion, which helps explain why opponents have been so effective in nibbling at the edges of the abortion question. Ever since a 1992 Supreme Court decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, opened the door for states to impose greater limits on the right to an abortion, activists have taken up the fight state by state, measure by measure. In the past seven years, 335 new restrictions have been put on the books around the country, according to NARAL. Most common are parent-notification laws, required waiting periods, and state-mandated lectures and literature about fetal development and alternatives to abortion such as adoption. In Alabama, women have to get sonograms before they can end their pregnancies. While a few states such as California have liberalized their laws, the trend is very much in the other direction.