COLUMN RIGHT / GEORGE WEIGEL : Who Are the True Fanatics? : The court’s decision clearly delineates the absolutists in the abortion debate.

Monday’s Supreme Court abortion de cision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey--which upheld Pennsylvania’s informed-consent and parental-consent regulations while striking down the state’s requirement for spousal notification--was symptomatic of a court in deep intellectual crisis. Because of that, the future of the court’s tortured approach to abortion law is as uncertain today as it was last week.

But at least something got clarified amid the jurisprudential confusion. For the arguments before the Casey decision, and the initial commentary on it afterward, made it clear who the absolutists are in the continuing national debate over abortion policy.

The right-to-life movement generally welcomed the Pennsylvania regulations. As modest as they were, they did provide some protection for women against pressures to abort, and they recognized the special character of the relationships between wives and husbands and between minor children and their parents.

Had the court simply upheld the Pennsylvania regulations in their entirety, the right-to-life movement would have been grateful; but it would have been under no illusions about what such a decision meant. For the Pennsylvania regulations did not provide one iota of legal protection for the unborn children of that state. The right-to-life movement, in other words, saw the Pennsylvania regulations as one (exceedingly modest) step in an incremental strategy aimed at providing, over time, maximum feasible legal protection for the unborn and maximum feasible care for women caught in crisis pregnancies.

The plaintiffs in Casey, on the other hand, saw the case as a kind of Armageddon for their concept of women’s rights, which included unrestricted access to legal abortion on demand. Time and again, the Pennsylvania law was dubbed “restrictive” or “highly restrictive” (language picked up and repeated at length by the national media, alas). Planned Parenthood’s attorney, in oral argument before the court this past April, claimed that anything short of a complete rejection of the Pennsylvania regulations would amount to reversing Roe vs. Wade. Representatives of the National Organization for Women and the National Abortion Rights Action League took a similar line after Monday’s decision; the court, they argued, had placed severe restrictions on women’s “right to abortion.” And they recommitted themselves to congressional passage of a “freedom of choice act,” which would go beyond even Roe in its legalization of abortion throughout pregnancy.

There are 1.6 million abortions in the United States every year; 40% of those are performed on women who have already had at least one prior abortion. Less than 5% of abortions today are performed because of rape, incest, grave fetal deformity or threat to the mother’s physical health. In the overwhelming majority of cases, abortion in America today is a matter of contraception after the fact.

And yet, according to NARAL, NOW and Planned Parenthood, anything other than that permissive regime of abortion-on-demand (for which there is no analogue in any other developed democracy) would be a drastic, even lethal, violation of American liberties.

Who is the absolutist here?

Three recent, comprehensive and detailed studies of public opinion on the abortion issue have demonstrated that the majority of the American people reject abortion as birth control: Which means that a majority of the American people reject abortion in the overwhelming majority of instances in which it is obtained today. We also know that about 75% of the American people support the kind of modest regulations mandated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. To characterize those regulations as “highly restrictive” is to portray oneself as the extremist in the debate.

Both camps in the abortion controversy were disappointed by Monday’s decision. But by its support for the Pennsylvania regulations, the right-to-life movement made clear that it was committed to advancing its goals incrementally through the arts of persuasion and through the democratic process. The plaintiffs in Casey, on the other hand, amply demonstrated, by their argument before the decision and in their reactions to it, that they are the true radicals, the real absolutists, in this continuing American drama.

Those used to depicting some prominent right-to-life spokesmen as “fanatics” might take another look at NARAL’s Kate Michelman and NOW’s Patricia Ireland.