US: South Dakota's ban on nearly all abortions, signed into law on Monday, has opened deep rifts in the US within both the anti-abortion and the abortion rights movements as the two camps struggle to frame the issue to their political advantage.
Some opponents of abortion, fearful that South Dakota has moved too far too fast, now find themselves reluctantly opposing efforts to protect all foetal life from the moment of conception. For their part, some abortion rights activists feel they must acknowledge the sentiment behind the South Dakota ban by assuring America that they too regard abortion as a grave moral concern. But such language outrages others in their movement, especially abortion doctors, who feel it stigmatises and alienates their patients.
The turmoil in both camps underscores the significance of South Dakota's law. It bans all abortions in the state, including the few performed each year in cases of rape and incest - and the hundreds carried out in the earliest weeks of pregnancy. The only exception is if doctors deem an abortion necessary to save the mother's life. Doctors who violate the ban would be subject to up to five years in prison.
In signing the bill, Republican governor Mike Rounds acknowledged that it was, for now, a symbolic gesture. The law is due to take effect on July 1st, but will almost certainly be blocked because it directly, and deliberately, challenges the US Supreme Court's 1973 ruling in Roe vs Wade, which established abortion as a constitutional right.
An anonymous donor has already pledged $1 million to help South Dakota defend the ban in court. Anti-abortion activists hope the ban will give the Supreme Court an opportunity to reverse Roe vs Wade, in much the same way as Brown vs Board of Education was used in 1954 to overturn a decades-old precedent allowing racial segregation in public schools.
But analysts on both sides say Roe is secure for now. Even if President Bush's new Supreme Court appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, prove to be reliably anti-abortion, a bare majority of five justices is still on record as backing Roe.
Promoters of South Dakota's ban are calculating that one of the liberal justices will retire and be replaced by a conservative.
But Daniel McConchie, vice-president of Americans United for Life, warns that if the public knows an all-out ban on abortion is in prospect in the Supreme Court, "getting a [ conservative] justice through the confirmation process will be like World War III".
Many states ban abortions of viable foetuses, but the Supreme Court has so far insisted that such laws exempt women whose health is endangered by the pregnancy - and health is defined broadly to include not just the woman's physical condition, but also her emotional state and even her family circumstances.
So, in practice women can obtain abortions virtually until their due date. McConchie says he thinks there's a good chance the present court will "narrow that loophole" .
Such incremental steps would save many more foetuses than South Dakota's ban, says Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life. She and others argue that their movement needs more time to turn society firmly against abortion. They want to hold public hearings to investigate the alleged (and hotly disputed) risks of abortion.
They plan to promote ultrasounds to fix an image in the public mind of the embryo as a beautiful, fragile human life. They aim to use more women who had abortions and now regret it as spokeswomen for their cause.
Until then, they're reluctantly advising legislators in Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee not to pass the bans under consideration in those states. Instead, they urge them to pass provisions such as requiring women to attend counselling and to wait a day or more before their abortion.
Legislatures are also continuing to drive abortion clinics out of business with laws regulating everything from the width of the hallways to whether out-of-state doctors can come in to perform abortions.
But Missouri state senator Jason Crowell, like his colleagues in South Dakota, refuses to be satisfied with making abortions harder to obtain. He views the procedure as an unambiguous evil and says now is the time to act, no matter who is sitting on the Supreme Court.
In Mississippi, that philosophy propelled a ban on abortion (except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother's life) to an overwhelming victory in the Mississippi House last week. On Monday though, anti-abortion activists called off their drive to pass the bill through the Senate and asked for time to rethink the strategy.
"We're trying to get a consensus," says Terri Herring, president of Pro-Life Mississippi. "What we don't want is five different pro-life voices out there."
The abortion rights side has had even more trouble finding a unified voice. The liberal think tank Third Way is circulating a memo on Capitol Hill advising politicians who support abortion rights to recalibrate their message. Instead of stressing a woman's right to choose, they should tell voters that they support "personal liberty" but accept a "moral responsibility" to reduce the number of abortions. (That number has declined steadily from a peak of 1.43 million in 1990 to 1.29 million in 2002, the latest year for which statistics are available.)
Such tactical positioning infuriates Dr Warren Hern, who runs an abortion clinic in Boulder, Colorado. He, too, would like to see fewer women with unwanted pregnancies; he counsels all his patients on contraception.
But in his view, the availability of safe, legal abortions should be a cause for national pride not shame. "Before 1973, women were dying like flies from illegal abortions. That has stopped, and it's one of the great public health success stories of the 20th century."
Susan Hill agrees. She's president of the National Women's Health Organisation, which runs abortion clinics in five states, and she has been flooded with calls and e-mails from supporters outraged at South Dakota's ban.
"We have to stop apologising" for the abortion rate, she argues, and start mobilising the millions of women "who believe it was the best choice for them". If her side can do that, "this might be the best thing that ever happened to the pro-choice movement", Hill says.