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Most people stay in the balcony of the abortion debate, looking down on the drama from the crowded middle seats. Their feelings tip and tilt according to circumstance and conditions: Was there a waiting period, counseling? If it's a teenager, do her parents know? Surveys find that 65% of people accept first-trimester abortion, but 69% oppose anything later than that. The laws reflect the public ambivalence of a country that wants abortion to be available but not easy. And pro-life forces have done everything in their power to make it harder, by focusing on the unimaginably hard cases. How can you abort a fetus developed enough to have fingernails, they ask?
In fact, for all the moral and legal wrangling, science has been the pro-life camp's best ally over the past decade, as doctors steadily moved up the point of viability, saving premature babies as young as 25 weeks, 24, 23. Sonograms as clear as Christmas cards let parents see their babies suck their thumbs in utero. Better prenatal testing has built greater awareness of how, and how quickly, a fetus develops--all of which may have fueled the discomfort with abortions that occur when a pregnancy is well along.
You could argue that the most important thing that happened last week was that science changed sides and put its power to work for the pro-choice team as well. The abortion pill shifts the focus from the latest stage of pregnancy to the earliest, when the entire embryo is the size of a grain of rice. For abortion-rights activists scarred by five years of fighting over "partial birth" abortions, that is where they prefer the public debate to take place.
It was little wonder that Al Gore brought it up every chance he got, wouldn't let it go in his chat with Larry King last week, even as George W. Bush called the FDA ruling "wrong" and promised to build a "culture of life." The next President, Gore warns, could appoint as many as four Supreme Court Justices, enough to bury Roe v. Wade forever. Just in case any swing-voting women out there are taking abortion rights for granted, Gore noted that "I support a woman's right to choose; my opponent does not."
It has been years since a Democrat could promise anything more than to hold his ground on the abortion issue. In the meantime, abortion has become steadily less available in the U.S. There are no providers at all in 86% of U.S. counties; 91% of abortions occur in easily targeted clinics, and 1 in 4 women has to travel at least 50 miles for treatment. Doctors still see women who try to induce miscarriage by taking quinine pills, or provoke their boyfriends to jump on them, or come into emergency rooms with electrical cords hanging out of them.