Lawyers Urge Repeal of ABA’s Abortion Stand : Policy: Vote calls on governing body to reject its backing of Roe vs. Wade ruling and to adopt a neutral position. Action is due Wednesday.

A closely divided American Bar Assn. membership on Monday urged its governing body to repeal a six-month old policy that endorses a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion.

On a vote of 885 to 837, the lawyers recommended that the nation’s largest legal group drop its support for abortion rights and adopt instead a neutral position that is “neither pro-life nor pro-choice.”

On Wednesday, the 461-member House of Delegates will meet to vote on the ABA’s abortion policy.

In February, the delegates had decided by a narrow 20-vote margin in Los Angeles to adopt an official policy on the abortion issue. Then the delegates voted, 238 to 106, in favor of the right to choose abortion.

Women’s rights advocates saw the ABA stand as an important asset as lawmakers in many states were about to reconsider restrictions on abortion. Within the ABA, the new abortion rights policy was seen as evidence that women and younger lawyers were playing a greater role in a group long dominated by gray-haired men.

But many lawyers, women as well as men, branded the new policy as a mistake for the organization and a moral outrage to them as individuals. For months, they sought support to overturn the policy, and on Monday they took a major step.

“This vote demonstrates how divisive this issue is,” said Anthony Palermo, a Rochester, N. Y., attorney who sponsored the neutrality resolution. The 48-vote victory in the open assembly Monday showed that most lawyers favor a neutral stand on such a contentious and personal issue, he said, adding that he is “very optimistic” the abortion-rights policy will be overturned.

During debate at the convention, supporters of the current policy said that the ABA should not take a “vow of silence” on controversial legal questions, but rather should stand firm in behalf of individual and civil rights.

“We were not ‘neutral’ about race discrimination. We should not be ‘neutral’ now on women’s rights to reproductive freedom,” said Roberta Ramo, an attorney from Albuquerque.

Backers of the abortion-rights policy accused their opponents of having “packed the meeting” Monday afternoon and said that the outcome should not influence the delegates’ vote on Wednesday.

“This was a very close vote. It sends no real signal” about the thinking of most ABA members on the abortion issue, said Sally Determan, a Washington lawyer who sponsored the original abortion-rights policy. “We are still confident the House of Delegates is with us.”

Before Monday’s vote, Determan and other supporters of the abortion policy said that a reversal of it this week will be seen nationwide as a “repudiation” of the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling that made abortion legal.

If the House of Delegates fails to overturn the abortion-rights policy Wednesday, opponents can challenge it again in another open assembly. If they can muster a two-thirds vote against the policy then, the matter would be decided by ballots sent to all 360,000 ABA members.

Earlier Monday, Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh put in a plug for the proposed “neutral” policy on abortion. He noted that an ABA committee will meet privately and pass judgment on the qualifications of U.S. Judge David H. Souter, President Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court. Though conceding that he has “seen no evidence” of bias by the ABA, Thornburgh said that it “creates a perception problem” for the organization to have an official policy in support of abortion rights.