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Abortion rates have been falling for 25 years. As the pro-abortion movement loses some its religious zeal, activists are finding less fuel with which to oppose the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Roberts. As abortions fall, activism wanes
But the issue may be key for high court confirmation panels.
WASHINGTON - Abortion may flare up as the most emotional issue for senators and activists when confirmation hearings begin in September for President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts. But statistically, it is becoming less and less of a factor for American women.
The national abortion rate has been declining for more than two decades. It is now at its lowest since 1974, the year after the court's Roe v. Wade decision overturned states' abortion bans by ruling that a woman's decision to terminate pregnancy through surgery is a matter of privacy protected by the Constitution.
Activists on both sides of the fight say abortion rights supporters have been less passionate about their beliefs in recent years than abortion opponents - perhaps partly because women who are now of peak childbearing age were born after Roe. Some may take legal abortion for granted. Others may be influenced by mothers, siblings or friends who had negative experiences with abortion, or who had regrets years later.
"It's a very different way that 20-and 30-year-olds are seeing this (nowadays)," said Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life of America, an anti-abortion group for which Roberts' wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, serves as legal counsel. "It's not about criminalizing it. They just don't want to see it happen."
To an extent, abortion rights advocates agree.
"The major thing you're seeing is the increased intensity around prevention," said Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist and pollster for NARAL Pro-Choice America. "People want to reduce the need for abortions."
But Lake said past court fights have shown that women who support abortion rights will snap to attention when they feel their right to choose is vulnerable. "People worry about things when they need to," she said.
Over the years, religious conservatives who believe life begins at conception have sought justices who would chip away at or throw out the Roe decision. While Roberts has given them nothing concrete to go on, some are hopeful he would tip a divided court in that direction.
Meanwhile, data released last month by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, reported that fewer than 21 of every 1,000 women between 15 and 44 had an abortion in 2002, the most recent year for which data was available. That compares with a rate of more than 29 per 1,000 at abortion's peak in the United States, in 1980 and 1981. If the trend continues, abortion could soon recede to its 1974 rate, about 19 per 1,000 per women of childbearing age.
A decline in the number of abortions has coincided with a number of trends. Over the past three decades, birth-control methods have become more widely available, socially acceptable and finely tuned, including longer-acting hormonal contraceptives, such as implants and patches.
In 1995, just 0.8 percent of women said they had used so-called emergency contraception such as the "morning-after pill," or a concentrated dose of birth-control pills, to increase the chance of blocking pregnancy after unprotected intercourse; by 2002, 4.2 percent of women said they had used emergency contraception.
Other trends coinciding with the decline in abortions include:
♣ More women attend college and pursue careers, achievements that researchers say correlate with lower rates of unintended pregnancy.
♣ The number of abortion providers has been declining, and providers are scarce in many areas of the country.
♣ Teen pregnancy is down, and the number of states that require parental notification for teen abortions is up. Abstinence programs in schools and involvement in organized religion are more prevalent in some parts of the country, since religious conservatism has found a greater voice over the past decade in Congress, and, more recently, the White House.
Some Democratic lawmakers, assessing last year's election losses, are urging their party to recast its image to attract more voters who are religious, and who are ambivalent about or opposed to abortion.
The overall decline in the abortion rate, however, obscures a socioeconomic dichotomy that could be politically telling as Democrats plot how strongly to press Roberts for his views.
While abortions have plummeted among wealthier women, they actually rose among poor women during the second half of the 1990s. This pattern played out as the U.S. economy flourished, and as welfare reform legislation ushered poor, single mothers out of the home and into generally low-paying work.
Comparing demographic subsets from 1994 and 2000, researchers found that the abortion rate among middle-and upper-income women dropped in those years, from 16 per 1,000 to 10 per 1,000. Poor women, who tend to vote less, turned more often to abortion - from 36 per 1,000 in 1994 to 44 per 1,000 in 2000.
Overall, Americans still strongly support the Roe decision, even if they wouldn't favor abortion for themselves or their sexual partners.
In a CBS News poll this month, 59 percent saw the ruling as a "good thing," while 32 percent felt it was a "bad thing." A Gallup poll in late June found 65 percent of respondents want the next Supreme Court justice to be someone who would uphold Roe, while 29 percent would want the justice to side with overturning it.
The only justice on the court at the time of Roe who is still seated is Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who has undergone treatment for thyroid cancer. The National Right to Life Committee, an anti-abortion group, has said the current court would uphold Roe 6-3. Under that assessment, even if Roberts, nominated to replace a retiring swing vote, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, were to favor striking down part or all of Roe, an additional change on the bench would be needed to undo the court's own landmark decision. But on narrower issues, including late-term procedures known as "partial-birth abortions" and parental notification cases, the court appears divided 5-4, and the legal interpretations of Roberts could be decisive.
Roberts took positions against the Roe decision and federally funded abortion services on behalf of his client when he worked for the federal government, under the administration of President Bush's father. But the nominee, who is Catholic, has not divulged his own feelings about the validity of Roe, whose legal reasoning is considered shaky by many scholars.
Roberts' supporters are advising him not to reveal more once the hearings begin after Labor Day.
"We talked about the abortion issue," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a lawyer, who sat down recently with Roberts to talk about the coming hearings. "He kind of said there's two camps when it comes to Roe v. Wade's legal reasoning," Graham said, "and he went through how each camp viewed the decision, but was adamant that it would not be proper or appropriate for him as a potential sitting judge to comment on fact patterns or to comment on how he might decide a particular issue in the future."
(Origional story requires registration)The Sacramento Bee ~ Margaret Talev ** As abortions fall, activism wanes
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