Pro-Choicers Gird for Battle

By Steven Holmes/Washington

After completing their medical-history forms, patients at the Hope Clinic for Women in Granite City, Ill., are asked an unusual question: Would they be willing to write a letter thanking the nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices for the right to have an abortion? Few refuse. Says Lori, 30, a businesswoman who terminated her pregnancy there earlier this month: "It really makes me mad that they are trying to outlaw it."

For months, proabortion advocates have been desperately trying to harness the anger of women like Lori. The reason: they fear that the high court, with its newly conservative majority, may tamper with the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. Last week the court seemed to take a tentative step in that direction by announcing that it will hear Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. The case involves a 1986 Missouri abortion law that would have put a number of obstacles in the way of a woman seeking abortion.

Defenders of abortion rights have good reason to be concerned. Says Duke University Law Professor Walter Dellinger: "This is not a case that needs to be heard unless the court wants to review Roe v. Wade." Since the court's last major abortion ruling in 1986, Justice Lewis Powell, who was part of the pro-choice majority, has been replaced by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Choice advocates feel Kennedy would not have been appointed unless President Reagan believed he was willing to strike down Roe. The increasingly vocal right-to- life supporters, smelling possible victory for their cause, were delighted by the court's decision to hear the Missouri case.

Galvanized by the threat to Roe, pro-choice groups have embarked on an all- out lobbying effort. The National Organization for Women is planning a huge march in Washington on April 9. The National Abortion Rights Action League is organizing a drive to send a million postcards to the high court. Another tactic is to elicit a large outpouring of friend-of-court briefs from groups like bar associations, civil rights organizations, Senators and Congressmen, and population-control organizations.

The choice forces also hope to persuade the American Medical Association to file a brief on the medical advantages of legal abortions. Advocates of such operations see them as the only safe alternative to often fatal clandestine methods, symbolized by the coat-hanger emblems on many pro-choice posters. The view that abortion at least does not harm women got a boost last week from a surprising source: Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who, after a year of study, found no proof that women obtaining legal abortions suffered a greater incidence of physical or psychological harm than women who brought their pregnancies to term.

Some critics of the pro-choice strategy argue that efforts to lobby the court may do more harm than good. "A letter-writing campaign is a wonderful thing to do if you're trying to persuade Congress or the Missouri legislature," says an experienced Supreme Court lawyer. "It's not what you do to the Supreme Court of the United States." But NOW President Molly Yard counters that "the court is influenced by public opinion, as is every other political institution in this country." The truth of that claim, like the future of abortion rights, may be put to a decisive test this term.