Under The Radar

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

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As Bauer noted, the White House strategy seems to be to push many of its abortion actions under the radar, where they will not be noticed by moderate women voters. True, Bush made headlines with his nomination of the staunchly evangelical, antiabortion John Ashcroft for Attorney General and the decision not to provide taxpayer funds to develop additional fetal-stem-cell lines for medical research. But other moves barely made a ripple by comparison. A year ago, the Administration filed a brief supporting Ohio's partial-birth-abortion ban in an appellate court (not waiting, as it normally would, for the case to hit the Supreme Court). A few months later, it quietly removed from a government website information saying that abortions do not increase the risk of breast cancer. (A replacement fact sheet suggests a possible link, though major studies turn up no evidence for one.) Last March the Administration made fetuses eligible for the Children's Health Insurance Program, keying off the antiabortion groups' strategy of establishing "fetal rights" as a way of eventually undermining Roe. And just three weeks ago, the State Department sent a cable to its Agency for International Development (AID) offices worldwide urging them to ensure that U.S. funds weren't going to groups that provide abortion services and suggesting that the AID offices surf the websites of funded groups as a way of checking.

Bush has also issued avowals that he will veto appropriations bills when the Senate has threatened to repeal existing restrictions on abortions. As recently as last Friday, he warned Congress that if a catchall spending bill under consideration omits even one existing curtailment of federal funds for abortion, his advisers would recommend a veto. "It's a mistake to underrate his focus," says Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, an abortion-rights advocate who has found herself on the losing side of the abortion wars. "They are persistent, and they are insistent."

The partial-birth ban, if enacted, would be the biggest federal antiabortion initiative since the mid-1970s, when the government banned use of federal funds to provide abortions for poor women. But it is certain to face a legal challenge, and has lost in the courts before. In 2000 the Supreme Court knocked down all state partial-birth bans because they defined the procedure in ways that also included the most common type of second-trimester abortion and offered no exception to preserve a woman's health or life.

Court rulings like that have raised the stakes in what promises to be the real test of Bush's antiabortion agenda: his Supreme Court nominations. What keeps Roe standing is the razor-thin five-vote majority that has stood by the decision. If Bush replaces anti-Roe Chief Justice William Rehnquist (rumored to be retiring this year) with another like him, it won't change the calculus, though abortion will still loom huge in confirmation hearings. But when it's Sandra Day O'Connor's turn to go or that of any of the others who have upheld Roe, the stakes will be enormous. If Roe is overturned, naral predicts that 12 states are likely to ban abortion in all or most circumstances, and five others might.

With so much at stake, naral is spending $2.5 million this year on print and television ads, unprecedented for the group in a year with no presidential elections. On Tuesday night, every contender for the 2004 Democratic nomination is expected to appear at a naral dinner in Washington. And to make sure that abortion foes are not the only ones making a show of force in Washington, a big march is planned for before the presidential election.

So for now, 30 years after Roe, abortion has become a war of small skirmishes but with both sides on high alert. "I think that this Administration and Congress are weaving a pernicious web of anti-choice initiatives that taken together strangle reproductive rights," says Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. And that's one point on which the two sides can agree. "God willing, the human-life amendment [which would ban abortion in all cases except to save the mother's life] will someday become the law of the land," says Congressman Smith. "But meanwhile we are using every modest and incremental approach possible."