The Shifting Politics of Abortion

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In Washington, where they rarely think of anything else, enough Congressmen read the political winds to hand right-to-lifers another reversal on the very day the Florida session ended. After voting for eight straight years to ban Medicaid funding for abortions except when the mother's life is in danger, the House voted 216 to 206 to allow payments for poor women who become pregnant through rape or incest. Twenty-six House members who opposed such funding in 1988 changed sides.

The proposed change in the law would affect few women. Rape and incest accounted for less than 1% of the 1.6 million pregnancies that ended in abortion last year. Only about one-quarter of those women -- roughly 4,000 -- were poor enough to qualify for Medicaid payments. Though Bush is hinting that his position is negotiable, he is on record as promising to veto the measure, a gesture to the pro-life groups he has been courting since he switched to their camp after joining the Reagan ticket in 1980.

Democratic leaders in Congress acknowledge that they do not have the votes to override a presidential veto. But Senate majority leader George Mitchell urged Bush to reconsider, pointedly recalling his vacillating stands on the issue. "The President has already changed his position on abortion once, in 1980," Mitchell observed dryly. "He can do so again." Democrats might even prefer a veto. After being outmaneuvered in recent weeks on tax cuts and the American flag, they relish the prospect of watching Bush explain why he rejected federal help for poor women facing a horrible predicament. "This isn't about teenagers getting pregnant in a car at the drive-in movie," says a top aide to the House Democratic leadership. "This is about rape and incest and poor women."

Republican strategists have long feared that abortion could be the issue that divides the affluent, younger suburbanites from the hordes of fundamentalists and right-to-lifers who jointly swelled the G.O.P.'s ranks in the 1980s. Excited Democrats are testing out pro-choice positions to see whether they can lure away pro-choice Republicans and independents. Such strategies could prove especially damaging if they lead to the defeat of Republicans in state legislatures, which next year will begin reapportioning congressional districts on the basis of the 1990 census.

Perhaps to signal right-to-life groups that the Administration is not backing away from them, the Justice Department last week filed a brief in one of the three abortion cases facing the Supreme Court this term. It calls for the court to uphold a Minnesota law that would require a teenage girl to obtain the permission of both parents before having an abortion -- even if they have never lived together.