Safe, Legal, and Never

Only a conscientious collector of abortion-related news clippings can fully appreciate just how much self-doubt pro-choice advocates have been expressing since November's presidential election.

The defeated Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry told a private audience of liberal activists that the party has to convince voters that it doesn't like abortion one bit. Democratic New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a likely 2008 presidential candidate, in a late January speech, stated that "abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women." Sen. Kerry declared on NBC's Meet the Press that "abortion should be the rarest thing in the world," and the immediate echo from NARAL Pro-Choice America, the venerable abortion rights interest group, was the announcement of a "new campaign to reduce the number of abortions."

Sen. Clinton even declared, "I, for one, respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available."

"No" circumstances includes cases where a woman's life is endangered by a pregnancy. That's an exception that many antiabortion crusaders willingly concede, though radicals like Randall Terry, once the leader of Operation Rescue, vociferously disagree. But did Clinton really intend to express "respect" for the most extreme opponents of abortion?

Yet Clinton seems not to be alone. Long-time Democratic operative Paul Begala echoed her remarks, saying, "It's about time a Democrat stood up and said there are too many abortions in America, we ought to restrict the number, and people who oppose abortions are good people."

What's more, a whole slew of usually liberal magazines – Harper's, The American Prospect, The Atlantic Monthly, and the New Republic – have featured prominent essays expressing either ambivalence or downright opposition to the Democratic Party's ongoing defense of abortion rights.

Some of this is not new. The New Republic's Andrew Sullivan has long denounced abortion, and The Atlantic also has previously published anti-abortion screeds. But there's more going on here than just a plethora of calls to bring back the "safe, legal, and rare" slogan that Bill Clinton successfully invoked during his presidency.

Sen. Clinton's recent speech altered her husband's prescription, but most journalists didn't notice. She called for a world in which "the choice guaranteed under our Constitution either does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances." Only Slate's William Saletan highlighted the difference. "Not safe, legal, and rare. Safe, legal, and never," he emphasized. "Is the press corps asleep?"

Maybe. Several major newspapers failed to report the resignation of Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the pro-choice movement's biggest organization. When Ms. Feldt told Newsweek that "the issues have become too polarized, too much about abortion ... abortion is just a tiny piece of it," the magazine posted her surprising comment only on its web site. Feldt, like Sen. Clinton and NARAL, would rather discuss birth control and how most anti-abortionists also oppose contraception. Yet that change of subject will be difficult to achieve.

But the most important statement of all has come in Conscience, the quarterly magazine of Catholics For a Free Choice. Frances Kissling, CFFC's president, is an abortion-rights veteran whose involvement reaches back to 1973, when Roe v. Wade first legalized abortion nationwide. "At the time Roe was decided," Ms. Kissling accurately writes, "people spent little if any time thinking about the fetus." But scientific advances have made the fetus far more visible and "present among us" in today's culture than it was then, and that development has fundamentally altered the cultural underpinnings of political battles over abortion. Yet pro-choicers, Kissling says, have failed to make any meaningful response to this major cultural change.