Even more important, though, Ashcroft's move was meant to frame partial-birth abortion as a violation of a fetus' civil rights. And if a fetus is endowed with civil rights, abortion itself becomes legally and philosophically untenable.

This is also the logic behind measures like Laci and Conner's Law. Abortion opponents, says Martinez, are "trying piece by piece to create fetal personhood that they can use to argue that Roe was wrongly decided because a fetus is a person entitled to all the rights of a person."

The genius of some of these measures is that they actually benefit individual pregnant women. Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services amended the State Children's Health Insurance Program to cover fetuses, but not the women who carry them. It was a fairly transparent attempt to give fetuses rights independent of their mothers, but it left pro-choice advocates in the uncomfortable position of advocating against a law that would at least indirectly provide prenatal care to women who might not otherwise have it.

"Each individual item is hard to deal with," Martinez says of these initiatives. "They don't lend themselves to being seen as part of an overarching agenda, but in each case there is always a better way to do what they're trying to do."

For example, with the government health insurance program, "the easy solution would have been to declare pregnant women eligible," says Martinez. "By making it just the fetus, it left women out. They actually debated whether pain medication during delivery would be covered, because it would benefit the woman, not the fetus. In the end they said it would be allowed because if labor was prolonged because of pain to the women, the fetus might be injured. This is treating the woman like she was a vessel."

Similarly, she says, when the Laci Peterson law was being debated, pro-choice lawmakers offered legislation to increase penalties for injury to a pregnant women. "They rejected that," says Martinez. "They're not interested in protecting a woman who is beaten and killed. They're only interested in elevating the fetus."

Anti-abortion activists don't wholly disagree. "From our perspective, until the majority of Americans see abortion as the killing of a child, we are not going to substantively change things," says Brown.

Indeed, very few people believe that there is a national abortion ban in America's immediate future. That doesn't mean, though, that Roe vs. Wade is secure. If Bush is reelected and has the opportunity to appoint a new Supreme Court justice, the court will have an anti-abortion majority, and the precedent will likely be doomed.

If Roe vs. Wade is overturned, abortion won't become illegal everywhere -- it will be up to individual states. Middle-class women on the coast will continue to have access to reproductive care, much as they did before Roe. Women in conservative states who can afford to travel will also be able to get abortions. Other women with unwanted pregnancies will be out of luck.

In many ways, though, they already are. The combined threats of terrorism, harassment and onerous government regulation has driven many clinics out of business. According to the National Abortion Federation, 97 percent of non-urban counties don't have an abortion provider. In Texas, there's no abortion clinic north of Dallas. Nor are reproductive health clinics welcome in other parts of the state. David Morris reported in AlterNet that when Planned Parenthood hired a construction company to build a clinic in Austin, a right-wing coalition organized the Austin Area Pro-Life Concrete Contractors and Suppliers Association, which boycotted the builder. "The Association's boycott of the project achieved complete success," Morris wrote. "Every concrete supplier within 60 miles of Austin refused to supply materials. Construction stopped."

Are abortion rights imperiled, then? "If you live in [a conservative] state and you regard having to drive a very long way to get to the nearest provider as a threat to your health, then yes," says Gorney. "But that's been true for a long time."

Yet it's also clear that the architects of these policies have in mind much more than the perpetuation of the status quo, or even a return to the pre-Roe days when abortion legislation was left to the states.

In 1996, 45 leading conservatives signed a document called "The America We Seek: A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and concern." Among the signatories were Michael McConnell, one of Bush's federal appeals court nominees, former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed, and neoconservative intellectual William Kristol. The statement laid out their hope of eventually amending the Constitution to outlaw abortion, but acknowledged that in the immediate future, only incremental measures were feasible.

"In its 1992 Casey decision, the Supreme Court agreed that the State of Pennsylvania could regulate the abortion industry in a number of ways," the document says. "These regulations do not afford any direct legal protection to the unborn child. Yet experience has shown that such regulations -- genuine informed consent, waiting periods, parental notification -- reduce abortions in a locality, especially when coupled with positive efforts to promote alternatives to abortion and service to women in crisis. A national effort to enact Pennsylvania-type regulations in all fifty states would be a modest but important step toward the America we seek.

"Congress also has the opportunity to contribute to legal reform of the abortion license," the statement continued. "A number of proposals are now being debated in the Congress, including bans on certain methods of abortion and restrictions on federal funding of abortions. We believe that Congress should adopt these measures and that the President should sign them into law. Any criminal sanctions considered in such legislation should fall upon abortionists, not upon women in crisis. We further urge the discussion of means by which Congress could recognize the unborn child as a human person entitled to the protection of the Constitution."

All of this is being fulfilled. "I don't think Bush will be shy about signing pro-life legislation," says the Christian Coalition's Backlin. "He's proved his courage in so many areas, and that will continue in the pro-life legislation field."

Pro-choice activists can only hope that those who seek a different America begin to notice, and to care.

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