Even more devastating has been Bush's reinstatement of the Global Gag Rule, which denies American aid to family planning agencies that even mention to pregnant women that abortion is an option. A recent study by Planned Parenthood, Population Action International, and Ipas, an organization that promotes safe abortion worldwide, documented health clinics throughout Africa that have been forced to shut down as a result of the rule. AIDS prevention has also been curtailed. For example, Lesotho, the nation in Southern Africa where a quarter of all women are HIV positive, no longer receives condoms from America because of its government's refusal to abide by the Gag Rule.

To many experts in abortion politics, the international impact of Bush's abortion policy may foreshadow what's to come in the U.S. But thus far, most women in the U.S. haven't really lost any of the abortion rights they had at the start of the Bush administration three years ago. "Most of the very clear hardships have been internationally," says Martinez, at Planned Parenthood. "In the United States, it's harder to document. I think that's intentional. They're working on the margins, trying not to play their full hand yet." If Bush is reelected, though, Martinez and others expect him to become much more aggressive.

Yet if Americans aren't rising up to oppose Bush's anti-abortion agenda, it isn't simply because they're unaware of it. Even if most Americans are pro-choice, studies show they remain morally conflicted about abortion. They support mandatory parental involvement and restrictions on late-term procedures and oppose government funding for abortion. The Center for the Advancement of Women poll shows that while only 17 percent of women want to ban abortion, half believe it should be more strictly limited. "The reason there's not a groundswell on the incremental stuff is that so far the incremental stuff is actually acceptable to most people," says Cynthia Gorney.

As Slate columnist William Saletan writes in his recent book "Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War," "The people who hold the balance of power in the abortion debate are those who favor tradition, family, and property. The philosophy that has prevailed -- in favor of legal abortion, in favor of parents' authority over their children's abortions, against the spending of tax money for abortions -- is their philosophy."

The Partial Birth Abortion Ban, after all, may have been part of a long-term right-wing strategy, but it garnered bipartisan support, passing the Senate 64-33. An alternate proposal that included exceptions for the health of the mother was voted down 60-38. "Partial-birth" abortion is a political, not medical, term, and describes abortions performed at any stage of gestation in which the live fetus is partly extracted and then killed outside the woman's body. The bill described the procedure as "gruesome and inhumane," a description that much of the public agrees with.

"Why is this not causing more uproar? Because most people who have read an account of what intact dilation and extraction or partial birth abortion actually is are too appalled by it to be able to articulate any kind of defense," says Gorney. "I'm sure they [pro-choice activists] are really grappling with the best way to address this ban. This is a very hard argument to take before the American people, because they know the American people can't stand this procedure."

Contrary to right-wing rhetoric, the ban doesn't just outlaw third-trimester abortions. It's worded so as to apply to second-trimester abortions, too. "If you look at the language of the bill, the term 'partial birth' refers not to the fact that it's a nine-month-old fetus. It refers to this method where sometimes part of the fetus is outside the woman's body," says Gorney. According to Heather Boonstra, a senior public policy associate at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights think tank, the law's language means it may encompass dilation and evacuation, or D&E, a common type of second-trimester abortion.

In one sense, all this might not matter, since most experts think the law is unlikely to pass Supreme Court muster -- unless Bush has a chance to replace a pro-choice justice with one who opposes abortion. In 2000's Stenberg vs. Carhart case, the court struck down a Nebraska Partial Birth Abortion Ban because it didn't provide exceptions for the health of the mother and didn't contain a precise definition of the procedure it purported to ban -- a crucial point because "partial birth abortion" is not a medical term. The law Bush just signed has identical flaws.

Judie Brown, president of the hard-line American Life League, didn't support the ban because she felt it didn't go far enough, and she doesn't expect it to ever take effect. "We predicted it would be held unconstitutional from the beginning because of vagueness," she says. "The court has already spoken on that."

Yet Gorney says that even if the law is never enforced, it still represents an anti-abortion victory. "They have been trying since before 1973" -- the year Roe vs. Wade was decided -- "to outlaw methods of abortion on the theory that, No. 1, it would at least limit the number that were done, and No. 2, if you could outlaw a nasty method of abortion, you had a public relations vehicle for confronting Americans with how abortion is actually done," she says. "It is the pro-life view that if you can force people to really look at and think about how abortions are performed, they won't be able to stomach it, no matter how much they think it should be legal."

In that, abortion opponents have succeeded. With the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, "what they've done is to get a public legislative body to say this is too disgusting," says Gorney. "The big secret about all this is if this thing stands up, it means there are certain forms of abortion that we think are too disgusting to be legal. If you buy that argument, you've basically gotten rid of abortion down to about 14 weeks. If you have a problem with pulling out an intact fetus that has been suctioned by the brain, you're going to have a bigger problem with pulling out arms and legs that aren't attached to anything," she says, noting that dismemberment is commonly used in second-trimester abortions.

Indeed, right now much of the pro-life strategy is focused on changing the way people think about abortion. Some of that happens largely outside the law, through things like clinics and pregnancy crisis centers, anti-abortion organizations that disguise themselves as health clinics. But within the law, opponents of legal abortion are using a variety of subtle measures to create legal and rhetorical recognition of fetal personhood, which they hope will in turn undermine Roe.

Attorney General John Ashcroft demonstrated this immediately after the Partial Birth Abortion Ban was passed. At 11:40 a.m. on the day Bush signed the law, the Justice Department's entire civil rights office was called into what a Justice Department source describes as a highly unusual meeting. There, civil rights attorneys -- who ordinarily prosecute offenses like hate crimes, racial harassment and anti-abortion terrorism -- were told they would be in charge of prosecuting the doctors thought to be in violation of the new abortion ban.

To an outsider, the question of which division prosecutes a law might seem like a minor bureaucratic detail, but it would have had two immediate consequences. First, it would have impeded the efforts of career civil rights lawyers to prosecute crimes against clinics and doctors by abortion opponents. According to the Justice Department source, merely by accusing those same doctors of violating the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, anti-abortion activists could force prosecutors to turn around and investigate the very victims they'd set out to protect.

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