Abortion Backers Shift Tactics - WSJ

[question everything]

WASHINGTON -- Backers of abortion rights, losing ground since the Republican Revolution of the mid-1990s, are turning to new strategies to awaken their base and fight back. President Bush has signed into law a ban on so-called "partial-birth" late-term abortions, while state legislatures have passed nearly 400 laws intended to restrict access to abortions and some contraceptive devices in recent years. Job one, say leaders of the abortion-rights movement, is instilling urgency in young Americans who have spent their entire lives under the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal across the nation.

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Conservative activists counter that public opinion has shifted against the pro-choice movement not because of ideology, but because of technological advances. "Everyone who's seen a sonogram has an inherent problem with abortion," says Keith Appell, a Republican consultant, whose clients include Concerned Women for America, a conservative group that has denounced the march. Younger women, he says, skew even more toward the pro-life position -- in part because religious groups have promoted the issue so effectively. Christian teens sing songs, for instance, lamenting that while they survived under Roe v. Wade, millions of their brothers and sisters did not -- because they were aborted.

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NARAL has even begun publishing a tabloid newspaper for student distribution. Recently, Ms. Michelman teamed up with former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, a physician and strong supporter of abortion rights, to galvanize his cadre of supporters using the Internet.

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They believe they hit a public-relations jackpot when Attorney General John Ashcroft sought abortion-clinic records as part of a Department of Justice effort to defend the partial-birth abortion ban, which is being challenged by abortion-rights advocates in three federal courts. Susanne Martinez, public policy vice president for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, called Mr. Ashcroft's effort to subpoena 900 medical records at six Planned Parenthood affiliates "a calculated fishing expedition" and an "attempted sweeping invasion of medical privacy." In one of the trials, a federal judge in California ruled last month that Mr. Ashcroft couldn't view the records.

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Addressing the National Right to Life Committee this week, Vice President Cheney cited the administration's recent "crucial victory" in enactment of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, a law making it a separate federal crime to harm a pregnant woman's fetus from the time of conception.

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Write to Shailagh Murray at [e-mail]

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108266524080790980,00.html

[displacedtexan]

1. Rich women have always had access to birth control and safe abortions.

Back in the 19th century, rich women were schooled in "the precautionary arts."

Sperm is not sacred.