Abortion under fire.

• Position: Editorial

Abortion Under Fire

The Republicans are waging an all-out assault on women's reproductive rights.

First it was Henry Foster, President Clinton's nominee for Surgeon General-defeated by Republican maneuvering because, in the course of practicing obstetrics and gynecology, he performed legal abortions.

Now the Republicans are challenging the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, saying that it cannot require medical students who specialize in obstetrics and gynecology to learn abortion procedures.

Women's reproductive health care is too "controversial" for the nation's top doctor, according to the Republicans. It's so controversial, they say, that medical schools should not provide adequate training to gynecologists.

It's a bad time to be a woman seeking reproductive health care-particularly if you are young or poor. The Christian Coalition is winning its anti-choice crusade by fighting a dozen different battles against women's reproductive rights.

The array of anti-abortion bills now before Congress, many of them drafted by the Christian Coalition, will diminish access to birth control and family-planning information as well as abortion.

One measure would gut Title X of the Public Health Service Act, which provides family-planning services to the poor. Another bill would rescind Medicaid funding for abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Yet another would bring back the gag rule, forbidding doctors at federally funded clinics from mentioning abortion to their patients.

Prodded by Robert Dornan, Republican of California, the House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would make it illegal for an American service-woman to get an abortion on a U.S. military base overseas.

And the House is considering a measure that would criminalize a rare form of late-term...