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12 février, 2008 15:01

By Jerry Zremski

Updated: 01/23/08 9:18 AM

WASHINGTON — On the 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that started a national political battle over abortion, opponents Tuesday declared partial victory.

And the head of the nation’s main abortion rights group agreed that her side has been losing.

Both sides agreed that a shift in opinion about abortion along with the laws that followed have played roles in the 25 percent drop in abortions nationwide from 1990 to 2005 that was reported last week by the Guttmacher Institute. State Health Department records show that the drop in abortions in Erie and Niagara counties in that time frame was even more steep: 42 percent.

In light of those figures, Tuesday’s annual March for Life took on a different tone than the defiance of years past.

"It’s good that everybody knows that the people involved in the pro-life movement are directly responsible for the decline in abortions," said Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee.

Meanwhile, Nancy Keenan, president of the nation’s largest abortion rights group, said the declining abortion rate was tied to changes nationwide that made abortions more difficult to obtain.

"Yes, we won 35 years ago — but women have been losing ground, losing rights, losing options, losing access, losing availability and just plain losing nearly every day since," Keenan, who heads NARAL Pro-Choice America, said in a recent speech.

The Guttmacher Institute study seemed to be on the minds of many at the march, in which tens of thousands trekked to the Supreme Court on a chilly winter day.

"Today we’re heartened — we’re heartened by the news that the number of abortions is declining," President Bush said to march organizers at the White House before the event. "But the most recent data reports that more than 1 in 5 pregnancies end in an abortion."

Indeed, the Guttmacher figures show that the abortion ratio — the rate of abortions per 1,000 pregnancies — stood at 224 in 2005, down by 20 percent from its 1990 peak of 280.

The New York State Health Department calculates the abortion ratio differently, meaning the rate itself is not comparable to national figures. Nevertheless, state figures show that the abortion ratio has dropped by 17 percent in Erie County since 1990 — and by 21 percent since its peak in 1991.

That means the 42 percent decline in abortions locally is not just a matter of fewer pregnancies. There has been an attitudinal shift that Melinda C. DuBois, clinic director at Buffalo GYN Womenservices, has noted as the number of abortions at that clinic has steadily fallen.

"I work with women every single day who come into our clinic and don’t consider themselves pro-choice — and yet they’re having an abortion," Du- Bois said. "They come up with very valid reasons [for the abortion], but for some reason, there’s this missing link."

Further proof in the attitudinal shift can be found in polling data.

While clear majorities continue to favor the Supreme Court’s Jan. 22, 1973, ruling in Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion, there are signs that public support for abortion is not as strong as it once was.

Gallup polling shows that the percentage of Americans who think abortion should be legal under any circumstances fell from 33 percent in 1994 to 26 percent in 2007. And the percentage that wanted to see Roe v. Wade overturned increased from 28 percent to 35 percent between 2005 and 2007.

"People are starting to get the definite picture that this is really the killing of an unborn child," said Bishop Edward U. Kmiec of the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, who led a Mass at a Washington hotel for upwards of half of the 400 Buffalo-area residents who attended the march.

Stasia Zoladz Vogel, president of the Buffalo Regional Right to Life Committee, said there are concrete reasons why attitudes have shifted.

For one thing, she said, the political battle over what opponents call "partial-birth abortions" — which were banned under a law upheld by the Supreme Court last year — brought the reality of abortion home to Americans who had not thought about it in such concrete terms before.

For another, the increasing popularity of sonograms has probably persuaded some people that a fetus is a human life, she said.

While abortion rights advocates such as DuBois disagree with that assessment, Keenan, of NARAL, said the pro-choice movement must begin to address the fact that for many people, abortion is not the black-or-white issue that it is to the activists.

In response, Keenan said, the abortion rights movement must reclaim the moral high ground. "Let us remember: This movement was begun by a group of ministers who were tired of seeing women mained and killed by unsafe procedures," she said in her speech.

She acknowledged that the decline in abortions is tied to the political victories that the anti-abortion forces have won. About 550 laws restricting abortion rights have been passed nationwide since 1995, and 90 percent of the counties across the country do not have any abortion providers.

As if to prove that access to abortion makes a big difference, the state figures show that the abortion ratio has increased in Niagara County since 2002, when Planned Parenthood opened an office that performs abortions in Wheatfield.

Laura Meyers, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Western New York, stressed, however, that abortion is by no means the central part of her organization’s agenda.

"My hope is that the number of abortions will continue to go down as we build more awareness about emergency contraception," she said. "Planned Parenthood’s agenda is prevention. Ninety-eight percent of our work is to prevent unwanted pregnancies."

Of course, abortion opponents have another, bigger goal: the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

David Masci, a senior research fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said it’s widely believed that with Bush’s two appointments to the Supreme Court, Roe’s opponents still appear to be one vote short of a majority to repeal the landmark opinion.

In other words, Roe’s future depends largely on the future of Justice John Paul Stevens, 87, a staunch supporter of abortion rights. Masci said that if a Democrat is elected president this fall, Stevens’ eventual successor would be a Roe supporter — but just the opposite would likely happen if a Republican wins.

In the meantime, though, abortion opponents are taking cold comfort in the fact that the abortion rate is declining.

The decline in abortions "sounds like a great achievement, but we still have a lot of work to do," said Dawn Iacono, director of pro-life activities at the Diocese of Buffalo, who noted that there are still 1.2 million abortions per year nationwide. Kmiec agreed.

"We need patience and perseverance," he said. "Sometimes God works in longer and different ways."