c. 1998 Religion News Service

(David Sarasohn is an associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.) UNDATED _ If there were a poster girl for this week’s 25th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision, it would be the woman interviewed by The New York Times who declared firmly that she was pro-life and anti-abortion.

She was interviewed, of course, in a clinic waiting for her second abortion.

This is where we are after a quarter-century of the abortion wars: Americans declare their horror at abortion and count on it being available to them. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll, half of those sampled said they thought abortion was murder _ but a third of those said sometimes it was the best answer.

If that poll is accurate, then the United States has a bigger problem than abortion ambivalence: It has millions of citizens with a truly scary attitude toward murder.

In several ways, abortion’s position as a legal option seems entrenched. It has been declared an American constitutional right in not only Roe vs. Wade, but in later decisions by a Supreme Court largely named by Ronald Reagan and George Bush. A constitutional amendment to override the Supreme Court is now actively urged by few, and expected by fewer. Candidates seeking to limit abortion, as in the recent Virginia elections, now often begin by conceding the endurance of Roe vs. Wade.

An entire generation has now grown up with legal abortion as a given and with back alleys a vanished image. At one recent abortion rights march, a leader wearing a T-shirt bearing a red slash over a coat hanger was asked by a youthful marcher what she had against dry cleaners.

As former Oregon senator Bob Packwood often said, there is no U.S. example of a constitutional right, once given, later being taken away. Americans prefer to pile up more of them.

But however fixed the right to an abortion seems, its public position is embattled. Substantial majorities in both houses of Congress are anti-abortion, although the term means different things depending on who’s using it. State legislatures keep enacting their own ever more imaginative laws, often tossed out or cut back by federal courts, specifying what hoops must be jumped through for abortions.

The cultural battle against abortion has had more success than the constitutional one.

In the 1970s, on the situation comedy “Maude,” the leading character found herself unexpectedly pregnant at an older age and decided to have an abortion. It’s hard to imagine sitcom characters doing that today _ although they’re having way more sex.

Medically, the process is ever more isolated. As Jack Hitt wrote in The New York Times Magazine, abortion is the nation’s most common surgical procedure, and there is virtually no current medical research or publication on it. Under pressure, many medical schools don’t teach it, and most medical students don’t learn it. A survey by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League Foundation found that 45 states had fewer abortion providers in 1992 than 1982. The average doctor performing abortions today is in his 60s _ old enough to remember the pre-Roe world, and maybe too old to intimidate.

Intimidation, of course, is a key issue here. After hundreds and hundreds of bombings and shootings, the news has become almost commonplace; if any other kind of operation faced one-tenth the terror, it would be stunning. The assault has been sporadic, but cost-effective; for every one doctor or office attacked, a hundred others are alarmed.

For millions of Americans, especially those above a certain income level, the right to a discreet abortion seems secure. But for millions of others, abortion may be headed down a particularly dangerous path _ a constitutional right, but facing local limits, reduced access and violent discouragement.

There may never have been, as Packwood says, a constitutional right taken away. But there have been constitutional rights citizens found difficult or dangerous to exercise. That may reflect public ambivalence, but it’s not healthy for the citizens, or the Constitution.

And now, the patient waiting in the abortion clinic, asked by The New York Times reporter if she thinks abortion should be illegal, seeks desperately for a way out and says, “I wouldn’t make it legal or illegal.”

The word for that situation, of course _ the word that’s becoming more and more entrenched but harder and harder to say publicly _ is legal.

DEA END SARASOHN