A time to choose: how Democrats started losing the abortion debate.

• Author: Sullivan, Amy

On Oct. 21 of this year, the Senate passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and sent it to President Bush for his signature, thus enacting the first ever federal prohibition of a specific abortion procedure. Anti-abortion activists rejoiced that the legislation, first introduced in Congress eight years ago and vetoed twice by President Bill Clinton, was now law. Abortion rights groups were dispirited, but not surprised by their defeat and took solace in the belief that the legislation would be declared unconstitutional (and, in fact, three federal judges have since issued separate decisions blocking the ban). Most Americans were no doubt simply relieved that the gruesome and controversial debate was going away.

Democrats were left asking themselves--or should have been asking themselves--what went wrong. After all, Democrats (and pro-choice Republicans) are generally where the public is on abortion. Fully 77 percent of Americans, according to a January 2003 Gallup poll, support the right to choose in some of all circumstances. And yet, Republicans (and pro-life Democrats) successfully passed a "partial-birth" abortion ban that won 80 percent public support. There's a simple explanation for this apparent contradiction. Most Americans support a woman's right to choose. But they also have a general moral discomfort with "late-term" abortions, performed during the last few months of pregnancy. Anti- abortion activists and legislators played on that moral unease and achieved broad support for the bill largely by focusing their public campaigns on the vivid pictures and descriptions of "partial-birth" abortions performed late-term.

Of course, their public campaign was misleading. If doctors can't use this particular procedure, they will substitute another--so the "partial-birth" prohibition will not reduce the number of abortions at all. Anti-abortion groups know this perfectly well, but the bill is still more than a symbolic victory. Having won this fight, they will go on to legislate bans against other abortion procedures, eventually making abortions almost impossible to obtain."That procedure isn't what we care most about," admits John Jakubczyk, the general counsel for Arizona Right to Life. "Our goal is to stop the killing of unborn children at any stage of development."

Those who support a woman's right to choose need to find a way to expose this dishonesty while affirming their alignment with the public's general pro-choice outlook. To do that, they must grapple with the average voters' real discomfort with late-term abortions--a discomfort that only increases as advances in science make it possible for younger and younger fetuses to survive outside the womb. The obvious solution is a law that would preserve the right to early-term abortions while prohibiting late-term ones except in cases where a mother's health is threatened.

Such a law would largely put an end to the decades-old trench warfare over abortion, marginalizing conservatives who favor a total ban. It would be consistent with the underlying concept, fetal viability, that the Supreme Court used to determine the stages of pregnancy during which government regulation or prohibition of abortion would or would not be constitutional. It would reduce the number of abortions performed--itself a goal most voters agree is important, so long as it doesn't come at the expense of women's health and safety. And it would have the support of the overwhelming majority of the American public.

With luck, such a bill may some day pass. But it won't be easy. I know, because six years ago, I tried. As a Senate staffer, I worked with a group of senators from both parties for such a compromise. We failed, and the story of that failure illustrates the power of organized extremists on both sides to thwart a great idea.

Stabbing baby dolls

In the spring of 1995, during a lull in the abortion war, Rep. Charles Canady (R-Fla.), a conservative anti-abortion politician, came across a disturbing but fascinating paper written a few years earlier by an Ohio doctor named Martin Haskell. The paper outlined an abortion procedure that sounded horrific. As Haskell described it, the procedure involved moving a fetus to the birth canal, depressing its skull, and then removing the entire body from the patient. The aspect that struck Canady--and other anti-abortion advocates--was this: The fetus was still alive until only its head still remained inside the patient.

Haskell called the procedure "dilation and extraction" (also known as D&X) and advocated it as faster, cleaner, and safer than removing the fetus by pieces--the other common method for second-trimester abortions. The "why" of the procedure did not matter to Canady--he recognized that the "how" was immensely important. He now had a weapon with which to restart the abortion wars, which had lost steam in previous years following several abortion rights victories. The clunky medical term "dilation and extraction" wouldn't do, however. So a staffer suggested "partial-birth" abortion. A new phrase entered the political lexicon.

Canady, then chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution (he is a Jeb Bush-appointed district court judge in Florida), now introduced the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 1995, and held a hearing on the bill in his subcommittee the very next day. Using very few words, the bill made it a crime for any doctor to perform the procedure he called "partial-birth" abortion.

In one swift, brilliant move, Canady had taken the...