For many years, reproductive-rights activists in the US have predicted a series of events that would lead to the toppling of abortion rights. Currently, we have pas-sed many of those benchmarks. The anti-abortion movement has become a powerful bully on the national political stage. Now, it plans to flex its muscle internationally.

In the US, those concerned that abortion should remain safe and legal — and two-thirds of Americans claim to be pro-choice — were most recently delivered a body blow by South Dakota, which last month brazenly outlawed all abortions including those involving rape and incest, or to protect a woman’s health. That law is heading into the courts, which will decide if the federal right to abortion established in the case of Roe v Wade should remain.

Many fear that recent appointments by the Bush administration may tilt the Supreme Court against abortion. But, for those who study the reproductive-rights landscape, the overturning of Roe would in many ways just formalise the situation. It seems that anti-abortionists have moved on to the next item on their agenda: banning contraception.

Under Bush, the anti-abortion movement has proposed nearly 2,700 bills to obstruct a women’s right to abortion. The restrictions include forcing physicians to read “pro-life’’ propaganda to patients complete with medically inaccurate information, and preventing doctors from providing abortions to minors without first obtaining the consent of a parent.

None of these restrictions has affected the US abortion rate. But, ironically, they have forced women to have abortions later in pregnancy — revealing the real cause of many of those so-called “partial-birth abortions” that anti-abortionists love to rail against.

Today, most of the international efforts against legal abortion and contraception are based in the US and US groups are directing the same campaigns that have been so successful domestically in countries throughout the world. For example, the US movement is using the UK Life League to carry out intimidation campaigns of British abortion providers. One tactic is to get members of US anti-abortion groups to send thousands of hostile e-mails to specific British clinics and doctors. Another US group, Human Life International, claims

to be “the international pro-life movement”; it has offices in 51 countries. The Abstinence Clearinghouse, another US organisation, has campaigns under way in the most AIDS-ravaged countries in Africa. Its mission? To discourage the use of the condom.

It remains to be seen if the pro-choice majority in the US will rise up to stop the growing crusade aga-inst safe abortion and access to co-ntraception. We await the mid-term elections in November for a sign. If not, the anti-abortion movement may well hit the jackpot, banning abortion and limiting access to contraception. Another thing is certain, to paraphrase President Bush: we need to fight them here, so you don’t have to fight them there. — The Guardian