Even before the GOP regained control of the Senate, Christian conservatives were exerting their influence under the sponsorship of the Bush White House. Since taking office in January 2001, the administration has appointed staunch abortion opponents to positions where they could limit reproductive freedom. Other initiatives are more obscure, but the message is just as clear: In its 2003 budget, which Congress has not yet approved, the administration proposes eliminating the requirement that health insurance plans for federal employees provide coverage for prescription contraceptives.

Bush angered Christian conservatives in August 2001, when he decided not to ban stem-cell research outright. Such research may lead to cures for Alzheimer's, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other diseases. Instead, Bush tried to reach a compromise with the scientific community by allowing federally funded research on existing stem-cell cultures, or "lines." Religious-right groups oppose this stance because microscopic human embryos are destroyed to harvest stem cells, a procedure opponents equate with abortion. Yet even the right is divided on this issue. Nancy Reagan, whose husband, Ronald, suffers from Alzheimer's, has been quietly lobbying for an overhaul of Bush's restrictive policy.

But many analysts see Bush's affront to the religious right as an exception. "Before this election the Bush administration had taken every opportunity to give the extreme right-wing of his party what they've wanted on social issues, but they were doing it quietly," says Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "Now they'll be more out front. I think there will be steamroller in January that will attempt to crush reproductive freedom. We're talking about sending women back to a time when they were barefoot and pregnant."

Not surprisingly, most of the policy changes have been made in the Department of Health and Human Services. Under former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, a longtime abortion opponent, the department has steadily made policy changes that promote sexual abstinence, reduce access to information about contraception and, most importantly, establish rights for fetuses. The department even removed reports from its Web sites on sex education, the use of condom to protect against AIDS and other diseases, and information undermining suggestions of a link between abortions and breast cancer.

But one of the key strategies of the new conservative Christian campaign is to establish -- in policy and legal precedent -- that fetuses have rights under the law, separate from the rights of the mother. The initiatives to achieve that goal are often innocent-seeming bureaucratic subtleties that have no more than limited practical impact and so receive little public attention But they appear to be part of a broader plan for an incremental religious revolution.

Last summer, for example, one of the quieter changes that Thompson's department made was promoting "embryo adoption." The administration set aside about $1 million for a worthy program that encouraged people who were unable to have children of their own to use embryos left over from fertility procedures. Pro-choice advocates worried that the decision to call the process "adoption" rather than "donation" would be a step toward giving fetuses -- or in this case embryos -- rights as people. Their concerns were realized soon enough.

In October, Health and Human Services included fetuses under the State Children's Health Insurance Program, even though that was unnecessary, according to sources in the department. Medicaid covers low-income pregnant women. And if states wanted the insurance program to cover prenatal care, they could have asked for permission. Rhode Island, for example, uses the funds for parents. Pro-choice advocates saw this as another underhanded attempt to attack Roe vs. Wade. The Family Research Council, a conservative Washington-based religious group that believes "God is the author of life, liberty, and the family," sees it as a simple act of recognizing fetuses' rights. Pro-choice critics are "obsessed with abortion," the group said in a news release, and they "simply do not want people to think of the unborn child as a member of the family, even in the context of health care."

That same month, the department created the Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections, after letting a similar committee dissolve during the summer. The new panel's charter focuses on how research "specifically" affects humans, with an emphasis on "special populations, such as neonates (premature babies), children, prisoners, the decisionally impaired, pregnant women, embryos and fetuses," as well as other less defined groups, such as "individuals and populations in international studies." The department won't say if the committee's charter changes the legal status of embryos or fetuses, but conservative religious groups applauded the move as another extension of rights to the unborn.

The administration also appointed religious conservatives to influential, but less visible, positions that are below the public's radar. Dr. Thomas A. Coburn, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, is co-chair of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS. While in Congress, Coburn challenged the effectiveness of condom use to prevent AIDS and advocated abstinence. When he left the House, he joined the board of directors of Family Research Council. Washington political observers say Coburn's name came up for other positions, including Thompson's job and that of U.S. Surgeon General.

Months later, in October, the administration named Dr. Alma Golden, a former medical director of Strategies for Adolescent Guidance Education Advice Council, an abstinence-advocacy group, as the department's deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. The Office of Population Affairs oversees Title X, which provides federal funds for family planning and reproductive health services, and Title XX, which funds research and projects on teens' sexual issues. In Bush's 2003 fiscal budget, the administration requested a 33 percent increase, or a total of $135 million, for the office's community-based abstinence-until-marriage programs. As one lobbyist for a women's health group put it: "It's the fox guarding the chicken coop."

Religious right-wing groups can push the administration to name their candidates to key policy positions because they wield considerable power within the GOP. "The Christian right has become closely associated with the Republican party," says Michael Lienesch, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of "Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right." "In many places, it's difficult to tell one from the other. In the last couple of years, the Christian-right advocates have learned how to work inside the system much better than before. In the '80s, they were outsiders, knocking on doors trying to get in. Today, they're in."

Indeed, in a controversial article in Esquire's January issue, John DiIulio, the first head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, criticized the Bush administration for accommodating the far-right Republicans' agenda at the expense of forming more practical social policies. DiIulio is quoted saying that Karl Rove, the president's senior advisor, asked him to make amends with the evangelical wing of the GOP. "I'm not taking any shit off of Jerry Falwell," DiIulio reportedly told Rove. "The souls of my dead Italian grandparents are crying out to me, 'That guy's not on the side of the angels.'" DiIulio, a professor of politics and religion at the University of Pennsylvania, has since tried to distance himself from his comments in Esquire. DiIulio didn't return calls to Salon.

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