Roberts Ad Highlights Volatility of Abortion Issue

The controversy over a botched television commercial by a leading abortion rights group attacking Supreme Court nominee Judge John G. Roberts Jr. once again demonstrated the power of abortion to inflame the political debate -- while illuminating the often difficult relationships between political parties and their most passionate activists.

For the moment, it is Democrats who are facing most acutely the challenge of satisfying an important constituency without offending the political center. NARAL Pro-Choice America's decision Thursday to take off the air an ad that had been roundly denounced as misleading vividly underscored the dilemma.

Abortion rights groups and their allies, who are providing money and energy in the campaign to defeat the nomination, want to use the Roberts nomination to raise alarms about the future of legal abortion. While opposed to Roberts, they also hope to boost public consciousness on the issue at a time when they have seen erosion in activism, particularly among younger women who female strategists say are less committed to the fight than their mothers' generation.

But even if Roberts were an easier target -- which Democrats concede privately he is not -- the Supreme Court battle comes at a moment when some Democrats have sought to soft-pedal their rhetoric on abortion. They are looking for ways to appeal to more conservative voters in rural and other areas who might be attracted to Democrats on economic issues, but feel unable to cross what they see as a yawning divide on cultural issues.

In a private meeting late last year with some of his party's leading organizers and strategists, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) pointedly blamed abortion and gay rights for his loss to President Bush in last year's election -- stunning and angering his audience. But Kerry also has said repeatedly that he would not support someone for the Supreme Court who would vote to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision creating a legal right to abortion. All by himself, Kerry seemed to encompass the party's conflicting sentiments about the issue.

Other Democrats have suggested the party needs a new strategy for talking about abortion. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have all signaled this year that Democrats have cast the abortion debate too strongly in terms of legal rights and have not spoken enough about the moral issues and responsibilities that also infuse the topic.

Talk of a new approach to abortion by Democratic officials has frustrated activists, who see it as a retreat on an issue that has been central to the party's core coalition. "When you say this to Democratic leaders, they deny this is happening," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. "So in a way we feel like we're fighting a mirage."

Some Democrats fear that the NARAL ad controversy, because it has damaged the group's credibility on the eve of the hearings, could make it more difficult for Democratic senators to question Roberts closely on abortion and the right to privacy and still avoid appearing to be captives of their own constituencies. But they also risk offending their own base if they are not aggressive.

For the past three decades, no issue -- with the possible exception of race -- has more consistently roiled American politics. Public opinion on abortion has been remarkably stable over that period, with majorities favoring both abortion rights and some restrictions on the availability of the procedure. But the political potency of the issue has ebbed and flowed in reaction to events, often those dictated by the high court.

Currently the status quo favors Republicans, according to analysts in both parties, with the debate now focused on the enactment of restrictions that often have broad support in public opinion surveys, rather than on abortion's basic legality. But many of those same analysts agree that any prospect of a reversal of Roe v. Wade or of significantly greater intrusion by the courts into the deeply personal moral issues could dramatically change the equation to the benefit of the Democrats.

"There's a lot of centrism among the public about abortion," said Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. "It's very easy for the activists to scare most Americans, who have a nuanced view of abortion, either from the pro-life or the pro-choice perspective."

Passion has long defined activists on both sides of the abortion wars, but they are true believers in a sea of conflicted Americans. "Public opinion has been remarkably stable for 30 years and at one and the same time deeply contradictory," said Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute.