Our view on reproductive rights: Abortion foes take new tack
By seeking common ground, they can make procedure less common.

Realism seems to have struck some ardent foes of abortion. After 35 years of trying to outlaw the procedure nationally while chipping away at abortion rights state by state, they have decided to add a new and sensible initiative. They’ll work with the other side to reduce the number of abortions.

It’s not that the opponents changed their minds or that they’re any less committed to their cause. It’s just that they have done the new math. And the numbers don’t add up to more anti-abortion justices on the U.S. Supreme Court or a sea change on the issue among most Americans.

Barack Obama, who supports abortion rights, won the election. The House and Senate will be overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats come January. And even in two conservative states, Colorado and South Dakota, voters rejected initiatives that would have, in effect, banned abortion.

Even before Election Day, a loose coalition of conservative academics, prominent anti-abortion pastors, lay Catholics and other activists began working with old enemies in the pro-abortion rights camp to push a new agenda passage of measures to provide low-income, pregnant women with the kind of services and education that could discourage them from seeking abortions. They are on the right track.

In fact, the abortion rate has fallen steadily for nearly three decades: In 2004, the latest year for which statistics are available, it was down 33% from its 1980 peak, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. The wider use of contraceptives and more effective birth control are major reasons.

Yet, in 2000, the abortion rate among poor women was still four times higher than for women making $30,000 a year or more, Guttmacher found. This argues for giving more support to low-income women to help prevent unintended pregnancies and to help those who want to have a child. The new coalition is working on the latter goal.

Unfortunately, this fresh approach has drawn anger from some in the anti-abortion movement, who see any compromise as selling out and continue to see outlawing abortion as the only answer.

No one is asking them to abandon their belief that abortion is murder, but the purists ignore a basic truth. Decades of debate since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision have barely moved public opinion. Abortion is legal, and four in five Americans want to keep it that way in some or all circumstances. No matter how sincere the beliefs of abortion foes, banning or severely curtailing access to abortions would impose one group’s religious beliefs on others.

Finding common ground on such a personal and intractable issue had seemed impossible. But a diverse group of longtime abortion foes from conservative Catholic law professor Douglas Kmiec to Florida evangelical pastor Joel Hunter has done it in recent months.

We hope they can do even more, particularly in finding ways to make contraceptives more widely obtainable and in improving sex education. Meanwhile, if this first sign of détente in the abortion wars helps make the procedure less common but still available, it will be a notable accomplishment.

Posted at 12:21 AM/ET, November 21, 2008 in USA TODAY editorial. Find this article at: http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/11/our-view-on-rep.html