THE EROSION STRATEGY

By Karen Tumulty/Washington

Only an hour was left in the debate over Henry Foster's doomed nomination as Surgeon General last week when Senator Bob Smith, a beefy New Hampshire Republican, lumbered into the almost empty Senate chamber with a plastic fetus, an easel and six huge posters. For the next 30 minutes, he unnerved his colleagues--and the summer tourists who packed the galleries--with an excruciatingly detailed description of a medical procedure that abortion opponents call partial-birth abortion. "In illustration No. 4," Smith said calmly, "the abortionist takes a pair of scissors and inserts the scissors into the back of the skull and then opens up the scissors to make a gap in the back of the skull in order to insert a catheter to literally suck the brains from the back of that child's head."

Foster's allies were livid and rushed back to the chamber. Though the Tennessee obstetrician and gynecologist had acknowledged performing 39 abortions during his 38-year career, no one had accused him of doing or even of condoning the grisly procedure described by Smith. "It's outrageous to bring something like that on the Senate floor," Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley-Braun complained.

While Foster would go down to defeat in the final vote last Thursday, Smith's presentation will not be the last such display in Congress over the next few months. Abortion, an issue that simmered in the background during the Republicans' first months in power, is about to become the focal point of at least a dozen pieces of legislation, carefully drafted by abortion foes. Their strategy, at least for now, is not to make an all-out assault on the basic abortion right but rather to redirect the debate and whittle away at the gains the other side has made. This week alone could bring several initiatives. A House subcommittee is expected to approve legislation effectively barring insurers from offering abortion coverage to federal employees. Michigan Congressman Peter Hoekstra will also introduce a bill aimed at undermining new standards that require obstetrics/gynecology residents to learn abortion techniques.

Foster's nomination was the opening skirmish in what California Republican Bob Dornan promises will be Congress's "summer of life." Though apparently supported by a majority in the Senate, Foster was ultimately dragged under by the politics of the presidential campaign. Majority leader Bob Dole, fending off a play by rival Phil Gramm to curry favor with the right by staging a filibuster, deftly engineered a procedural vote under which Foster's supporters would have needed 60 votes even to debate the nomination; they fell three short, thus rejecting the nominee and robbing Gramm of all but a few minutes in the spotlight. But the real issue, as President Clinton put it, "was not about the right of the President to choose a Surgeon General. This was really a vote about every American woman's right to choose." To choose to have an abortion, that is.

The 1994 election that put the Republicans back in power on Capitol Hill also brought big gains for the antiabortion movement--at least 35 seats in the House and five in the Senate. They can now claim a majority in each house on many abortion-related questions. And at least five of the most ardent of the newly elected abortion foes are women, blurring the battle lines of gender for the first time. "Their agenda is very clear. First, Newt Gingrich's hundred days; now, it's Pat Robertson's hundred days," said Democrat Nita Lowey of New York, who heads the House women's caucus. "We don't have the votes to stop any of this in the House."

Even so, the antiabortion forces are picking their shots carefully and, the other side concedes, shrewdly. Rather than trying to overturn Roe v. Wade entirely, they are focusing on more narrow questions that tap into the nation's deep ambivalence about abortion. "We are not trying to come in and suddenly make radical changes," said freshman Republican Enid Greene Waldholtz of Utah. "We're trying to address the legitimate concerns of people who think the pendulum has swung too far." Says Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, whose Contract with the American Family is the blueprint for much of the legislation: "We don't want to overplay our hand with a pro-life Congress the way the pro-abortion people overplayed their hand."

Abortion foes expect a string of relatively easy victories this summer on the question of taxpayer-subsidized abortions. Not only do they have public opinion on their side, but they can also insert these provisions into major spending bills that are less likely to face either a filibuster in the Senate or a veto by President Clinton.

Two weeks ago, the House approved appropriations legislation that prevents women in the armed forces and their dependents from obtaining abortions at military hospitals overseas, even if they pay for them. In jeopardy too are Medicaid funds that now may be used to provide abortions to poor women who suffer rape and incest, as well as the use of federal family-planning money to provide abortion counseling. Antiabortion legislators will also attempt to restore a series of prohibitions that Clinton overturned in his first week in office--among them, bans on fetal-tissue research and importation of RU-486, the French abortion-inducing drug. Clinton vetoes are expected, but, says Reed, some of the legislation is meant to be "veto bait," couched in relatively reasonable terms to give the impression that Clinton's abortion stance is radical.

As always on abortion, victory will go to the side that has the edge in framing the debate. Says Reed: "Anytime we can talk about the child, we win. Anytime we get off the child and start talking about technical issues or constitutional issues, we lose." It was with that in mind that Smith trundled his charts onto the Senate floor to describe the abortion method that, though rare, is exceedingly gruesome. Before the doctor kills the fetus, the trunk of the body has already been extracted from the birth canal. "The difference between the partial-birth abortion procedure and homicide is a mere three inches," said Charles Canady, the chairman of a House Judiciary subcommittee that held hearings on the subject. Abortion-rights advocates insist the method should remain an option for women in the later stages of pregnancy, often because the fetus is deformed and has no chance of survival. Tammy Watts, 30, a California woman who underwent the procedure earlier this year, tearfully told the eight male Republicans who sit on Canady's subcommittee, "Until you've walked a mile in my shoes, don't pretend to know what this is like for me." The subcommittee voted last week to ban that type of abortion.

Such incremental steps do not please everyone in the antiabortion movement. The more restive among them point out that none of these moves is likely to make much of a dent in the 1.5 million abortions that occur annually in this country. But Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee, the nation's largest anti-abortion group, insists that even small victories are worthwhile. "We are out not just to make a statement but to make a difference," he said. Not surprisingly, Kate Michelman of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League sees these relatively small steps differently. She calls them "the cobblestones on the way to the back alleys."