New Push Likely for Restrictions Over Abortions

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/us/20states.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

New Push Likely for Restrictions Over Abortions
Carmel Zucker for The New York Times

By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: April 20, 2007

DENVER, April 19 — Both sides of the abortion debate expect a new push for restrictions as state lawmakers around the country digest the implications of the Supreme Court decision Wednesday upholding a federal ban on a type of abortion.

But such legislation could face headwinds in states where voters in the last election sent large numbers of Democrats — many of them abortion rights advocates — into office for the first time.

Seventeen houses or senates in the states shifted position on abortion after the November elections — 15 toward more abortion rights and 2 toward greater restrictions — according to an analysis by Naral Pro-Choice America. The group says six new governors supporting abortion rights were elected, compared with one who had voiced strong views against abortion.

“Something this drastic is going to energize both sides,” said Katherine Grainger, the director of the state program at the Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion rights legal advocacy group based in New York. The organization represented some of the doctors involved in the Supreme Court case decided Wednesday.

The reasoning of both the court’s majority opinion upholding the restrictions and the dissent gave encouragement to opponents of abortion. The ruling, they said, will bolster their argument that the issues raised by abortion — among them defining fully informed consent by women who want to end pregnancies and the question of when a fetus feels pain — are legitimate topics for state legislation.

“The case does not give us a new issue, it reinforces the issue and gives us an opportunity to use it,” said Mary S. Balch, the director of for state legislation at the National Right to Life Committee.

Ms. Balch and other legislative experts said that North Dakota, Missouri, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and Alabama, where legislators are still meeting and anti-abortion legislation is on the table, were probably the places to watch for now.

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