New abortion bills expected

DENVER — Both sides of the abortion debate expect a new push for legislation as state lawmakers around the country digest the implications of the Supreme Court decision Wednesday upholding a federal ban on a type of abortion.

The ruling is expected to revive the push for more limits for women who want to end pregnancies. But such legislation could face headwinds in states where voters in the last election sent large numbers of new Democrats — many of them abortion-rights advocates — into office for the first time.

Seventeen state houses or senates shifted position on abortion following the November election — 15 toward more abortion rights and two toward greater restrictions — according to an analysis by NARAL Pro-Choice America. The group said six new governors supporting abortion rights were elected, compared with one who had voiced strong antiabortion views.

‘‘Something this drastic is going to energize both sides,’’ said Katherine Grainger, the director of the state program at the Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York-based abortion-rights legal advocacy group. The organization represented some of the doctors involved in the Supreme Court case decided Wednesday.

The language used both in the court’s majority opinion upholding the restrictions and its minority dissent gave encouragement to antiabortion advocates. The ruling, they said, will bolster their argument that the issues raised by abortion — among them defining fully informed consent by a pregnant woman and the question of when a fetus feels pain — are legitimate topics for state legislation.

‘‘The case does not give us a new issue, it reinforces the issue and gives us an opportunity to use it,’’ said Mary S. Balch, the director for state legislation at the National Right to Life Committee.

Balch and other legislative specialists said that North Dakota, Missouri, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, and Alabama, where legislators are still meeting and antiabortion legislation is on the table, are probably the places to watch for now. A lawmaker in Alabama introduced a measure on Wednesday, only hours after the court’s decision, that would ban all abortions in the state. Most states have adjourned their legislatures for the year or passed the deadline for introducing new bills.

Some people who study the abortion debate say that all the tilting and jousting of politics and the technical legal issues raised by the high court in upholding, by a 5-to-4 vote, the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Act, which was passed by Congress in 2003, are beside the point.

What the court really did, said Anne Hendershott, a professor of sociology at the University of San Diego who published a book last year on America’s fixation with abortion, ‘‘The Politics of Abortion,’’ was reframe the debate about how abortion should be discussed.

The court didn’t talk about big concepts and grand issues like privacy, but about the small and gripping details of how abortion works.

Talking about the details, she said, is how so-called incrementalists, are trying to chip away at the availability of abortion — through efforts to make women and doctors and health professionals talk more, in some cases a lot more, about its actual consequences and mechanics.

With the court’s ruling and the new fuel it gives to minute discussions of pain and the definitions of informed consent, Hendershott said, the incrementalists have won the debate — if not over abortion, then at least over how to fight it.

‘‘This case changes the conversation,’’ she said. ‘‘The battle between the incrementalists and those who wanted a constitutional amendment was won by the incrementalists.’’

Some lawmakers who are backing antiabortion bills in their states said the court’s ruling helps them by declaring that some specific restrictions are legal in the eyes of the nation’s highest judges.

The Supreme Court had never before upheld a ban on a specific kind of abortion.

The emphasis in the court’s ruling was also much less on the health or well-being of the mother from an unwanted pregnancy, but rather on the risks and consequences to her and her unborn baby, which makes discussion of an abortion’s potentially negative consequences easier, they said.

‘‘It certainly doesn’t hurt,’’ said Representative James Mills, a Republican from Gainesville, Ga., and chief sponsor of a bill in the Legislature that would require doctors to offer patients seeking abortions the choice of viewing an ultrasound image of the fetus.

In South Carolina, lawmakers are debating two different ultrasound bills, one of which required a woman to view the ultrasound image of her fetus before the abortion could be performed — the requirement language was subsequently dropped and made simply an option that the woman must be offered by her physician. State Senator Kevin Bryant, a Republican and a sponsor of one of the bills, said that abortions of the sort addressed by the Supreme Court are already illegal in South Carolina, but that the court ruling could provide some momentum to other restrictions.

‘‘We may also look down the road and end up seeing some other procedures that should be restricted, too,’’ he said. ‘‘We don’t want to do too much at one time.’’

Legislators in North Dakota are looking at legislation that would immediately ban abortion statewide if Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that made abortion legal, is overturned.