WASHINGTON (By Howard Fineman and Evan Thomas, Newsweek) March 15, 2006 — When South Dakota approved a law sharply restricting abortion last week, many pro-life Republicans around the country sounded a loud hallelujah. But at least one very senior Republican did not seem at all eager to join in the chorus. As Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, flew to Memphis to attend the first gathering of potential GOP presidential candidates for 2008, a NEWSWEEK reporter asked him if he had anything to say about the South Dakota law. "No," he said. Did he plan to make a statement on that topic at the Republican gathering in Memphis? "No" was the answer. Would he ever be willing to comment on the topic, other than to say that it's up to the states to make their own choices on abortion? Again, the answer was "no." The look on his face was more expressive. It appeared to ask, "Are you kidding?"

Why such reticence to embrace glad tidings? After all, the abortion issue has been good to the Republican Party. It has energized Roman Catholic and evangelical grass-roots activists and allowed the GOP to paint pro-choice Democrats as cultural extremists, out of step with Main Street and the heartland. But a recent flurry of activity on abortion is making Republican politicians nervous. With states moving to restrict abortion and the Supreme Court drawing closer to the day when it might actually reverse Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision guaranteeing a woman's right to an abortion, GOP leaders see big political risks.

They may be in the awkward position of getting more than they asked for. The South Dakota law, for instance, would allow abortions only to save the life of the mother, not in cases of rape or incest. That is further than most Americans want to go. By a roughly two-to-one margin, polls show, people want to uphold the basic abortion right enshrined in Roe v. Wade, even if they approve of some restrictions, like parental notification. "I'm pro-life, but you can't wear the thing out," says Clarke Reed, the legendary architect of the GOP in Mississippi. "I'm worried about it." With reason: his own state legislature is moving in a direction similar to South Dakota's.

"Republicans are going to be the ones who look like extremists," says former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who lost his seat in 2004 after being beaten up on the abortion issue for years. That does not mean, however, that Democrats are rushing to call attention to the Republicans' dilemma. In the upcoming midterm elections, the Democrats don't plan to spend a dime on ads highlighting the abortion issue, according to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the savvy Chicago pol who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He wouldn't spell out the reasons, but a top party staffer (who declined to be quoted out of deference to his bosses) told NEWSWEEK: "These guys are gun-shy because they're used to getting clobbered on the issue."

Indeed, the Democrats are going through some soul-searching of their own over abortion. Four years ago, says Kristen Day, the executive director of Democrats for Life, she couldn't get other Democrats to return her phone calls. But today, a prominent pro-lifer, Bob Casey, is running for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania. The Democrats' rising star, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, prefers to cast abortion in terms of parental responsibility. "Even as we defend this right," he says, "it's important for us to acknowledge the moral dimension to the choice that's made."

Some of the Republicans' most ardent right-to-lifers are not embracing the South Dakota law. "It could backfire," says Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, if the courts strike it down—a near certainty, since the Supreme Court still lacks the votes to reverse Roe (and Justice John Paul Stevens, widely viewed as the vote that would maintain a 5-4 majority in Roe's favor, does not show signs of slowing down, despite being 85 years old). Virginia Sen. George Allen, a former governor, is firmly anti-abortion. But he told NEWSWEEK that if a similar bill had come through his own state's legislature, he would have vetoed it.

Other presidential hopefuls are squirming a bit. Asked whether he supported the South Dakota law, Sen. John McCain riffled through his mental notecards and said he didn't know the "technical" details of the law. But he said he would support the measure if it were consistent with his long-held view that abortion should be banned except in cases of rape or incest—or to protect, as he put it, the "health" of the mother. His aides had to scramble to correct the record: he meant, they said, the life of the mother.

McCain was uncharacteristically muted when he was asked at the Memphis gathering whether the South Dakota abortion law could cause problems for the party. "I just don't know," he said. McCain is not going to be able to duck the issue. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, who is vying for the evangelical vote, strongly backed the South Dakota law. "I'd have signed it," he told NEWSWEEK. "Rape and incest are horrible crimes, but why punish the innocent child?"

Getting specific about restricting abortion can be a slippery slope. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has always carefully straddled the issue, saying that he was pro-life but would not overturn his own state's laws, which protect abortion. When aides let it be known that he would have signed the South Dakota law, the Boston press jumped all over him for lurching to the right on abortion. Romney has always tried to avoid easy labels, but sometimes labels stick. After the Democrats enforced pro-choice orthodoxy at their 1984 convention in San Francisco, they were branded as "San Francisco Democrats," code for culturally out of step with the mainstream. Republicans may not want to be called "South Dakota Republicans."

With Martha Brant