Abortion Opponents

Ask Kathy Rogers why she started a fund to help women pay for abortions, and she will tell you stories of low-wage women with no health insurance who can't afford $25 a month for birth control. So Rogers, director of Seneca Women's Health Care in Baltimore, started asking friends for money to help low-income women pay for abortions. In 2001, the Seneca Women's Health Fund was created. Rogers will represent the fund at the March for Women's Lives in Washington on Sunday as part of a contingent from the National Network of Abortion Funds, an organization of 98 groups that, like Seneca, help low-income women pay for abortions.

A DECADE ago, shortly after Democrats last captured the White House along with both houses of Congress, the abortion rights movement hit its high water mark. President Bill Clinton revoked Republican executive orders that placed regulatory restrictions on the margins of abortion services. And advocates who had battled for 20 years to prevent Congress from unraveling rights extended by the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade sought to finally settle the issue by formally writing those protections into law. The tide has now turned almost completely.

WASHINGTON - Galvanized by the Republican takeover of the Senate, opponents of abortion are preparing a major push for new abortion restrictions in the next Congress, beginning with a ban on the type of medical procedure they call "partial-birth abortion." Abortion opponents say they will also push for several other measures already passed by the Republican-controlled House, including a bill making it a crime to evade parental notification laws by taking a minor across state lines for an abortion, and legislation making it a separate crime to harm a fetus during an attack on a pregnant woman.

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine - As President Bush inches closer to a decision about federal support for embryonic stem-cell research, he is surrounded by reminders - in Republican circles, in his White House and even in his family's past - of the lives diminished by afflictions that the research might help fight. A sister, Robin, died of leukemia at age 3. The Republican Party's most beloved living hero, former President Ronald Reagan, is wasting away with Alzheimer's disease. And the father of Andrew H. Card Jr., Bush's chief of staff, battled Parkinson's disease until his death in 1994.

WASHINGTON - With a new ally in the White House, the House approved a bill yesterday that would establish criminal penalties for harming a human fetus during the commission of a federal offense against a woman. The measure, sponsored by Rep. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, renewed the emotional debate over when life begins and sparked the year's first legislative confrontation in the House between advocates and opponents of abortion rights. Its supporters called it an anti-violence measure designed to ensure that criminals who attack a pregnant woman are charged with murder or manslaughter if the woman survives but her "unborn child" perishes.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- In an elegant federal courtroom 15 stories above the Willamette River, a jury will decide if posters and a Web site created by abortion opponents are protected by the First Amendment or are an invitation to violence.A civil suit by four doctors and two Portland women's clinics alleges that "wanted" posters and a Web site with the names, addresses and photographs of physicians who perform abortions amounted to a hit list that made them fear for their lives.The lawsuit seeks $200 million from 12 individuals and two anti-abortion groups.

WASHINGTON -- For years, the abortion fight has been waged with in-your-face protests in front of abortion clinics and with graphic pictures of bloody fetuses.Now, abortion foes are increasingly relying on a quieter strategy of carefully targeted political pressure. The goal isn't to fundamentally change abortion policy; it is to make gradual, but steady headway -- or make adversaries pay a price if they don't go along.Judging by the past week's events, the approach is working.Abortion opponents in Congress wanted to bar aid to international family-planning groups that promote, perform or support abortion with their own money.

WASHINGTON -- Still divided after an agonizing debate, the Senate soundly rejected a measure last night to ban all abortions after a fetus is able to survive outside the womb except those needed to save a woman's life or to prevent "grievous injury" to her health.Voting 64 to 36, an unusual combination of abortion opponents and abortion rights supporters joined to defeat the measure. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota had offered the proposal as an alternative to a measure by Sen. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican.

YOUR NOV. 19 editorial, ''Fetus versus mother,'' sounds like you are blaming ''abortion opponents'' for Kawana Ashley's desperate act of shooting herself in the abdomen to end six-month pregnancy (and her daughter's life).According to your editorial, instead of denying women access to abortion, abortion opponents should be doing more ''to prevent pregnancies women cannot responsibly carry to term."While it's true opponents of abortion typically don't push birth control to teen-agers, they do stand ready to provide practical help and support to girls like Kawana.

LAPORTE, Pa. -- The 13-year-old was pregnant and afraid to tell her mother. So Rosa Hartford, stepmother of the boy involved, drove the teen-ager 60 miles, to an abortion doctor in nearby New York state.Yesterday, in a small town high in central Pennsylvania's mountains, Hartford went on trial, charged with interfering with the custody of a minor. It is the first prosecution in the country of an adult who drove a girl to another state for an abortion. And the punishment could be severe: up to six years in jail.