Following Supreme Court ruling, what challenges await Washington's abortion law?

Anti-abortion activists Wednesday said they expect renewed efforts to chip away at Washington state's abortion law, but health providers and abortion-rights advocates expressed doubts that such attempts will be successful.

Sister Sharon Park, a lobbyist for the Washington State Catholic Conference, said Wednesday's Supreme Court ruling "will certainly provide an impetus to seek legislation in our state."

While Sister Park said polls show most state residents want some limitations on abortion, Washington lawmakers and voters repeatedly have been unwilling to support most attempts to restrict women's reproductive freedom. A 1998 initiative that would have created a law similar to the current federal ban was rejected by 59 percent of voters.

"I think their confidence is misplaced," said Lisa Stone, executive director of the Northwest Women's Law Center in Seattle. "They have tried and tried and failed to change our state's reproductive-choice laws."

In 1970, Washington became the first state to legalize abortion by popular vote, three years before Roe v. Wade. Voters in 1984 rejected a ban on state-funded abortions for poor women, and in 1991 approved the Reproductive Privacy Act, which preserves a woman's right to an abortion.

By all accounts, the current federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortions will affect few women in Washington. The outlawed procedures are relatively rare, although the state's Health Department doesn't specifically record the banned procedure.

Of more than 24,000 abortions performed in Washington in 2005, the vast majority were done early in pregnancy. The outlawed procedure typically is done late in a pregnancy.

"The effect of the ban in terms of numbers is not huge," said Dr. Deborah Oyer, medical director of Aurora Medical Services, a Seattle abortion clinic. "The effect of the ban for a particular woman, if you need [the procedure], will be enormous. It could be literally the difference between life and death, or whether she could have a child in the future."

Oyer also complained that the "nebulous" wording of the federal law makes it difficult to tell exactly which procedures are banned.

Dr. Sarah Prager, who directs a family-planning training school for residents at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said the university hasn't been routinely using the practices specified in the act, which notes that a fetus must be alive when "partially delivered" from the woman's body.

"But what it does do is tie our hands in those rare instances of an urgent situation where this no longer would be available," she said. "So we might have to compromise patient care to act within the law."

Anti-abortion activists generally dismiss that argument. "I think people in this nation are beginning to see through the lie that brutally taking the life of another being while devastating women in the process can even remotely be considered health care," said Dan Kennedy, chief executive for the Washington state affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee.

He called the high court's ruling "the first step in dismantling the charade of Roe v. Wade."

Carol M. Ostrom: 206-464-2249 or costrom@seattletimes.com.

Times staff reporter Sharon Pian Chan contributed to this report.