ABA Revokes Support for Right to Abortion : Law: Several bar leaders had moved to cancel the 6-month-old policy. The attorneys’ group now holds a neutral position.

The American Bar Assn., bitterly split over the issue of abortion, voted Wednesday to revoke a 6-month-old policy of support for a woman’s right to end a pregnancy.

By a vote of 200 to 188, the organization’s House of Delegates instead adopted a neutral stand on abortion. Under the new policy, the abortion issue is termed “extremely divisive” and “for the good of the association, (the ABA) will not adopt a policy supportive of a particular viewpoint with respect to . . . a decision to terminate pregnancy.”

Abortion rights advocates acknowledged that the ABA decision is a major setback for them.

With support for the right to abortion on the wane in the Supreme Court and in some legislatures, women’s rights advocates had hoped that the ABA would send a message that most of the nation’s lawyers support the constitutional right to choose abortion.

In February, they had pushed the ABA’s policy-making body to adopt, for the first time, an official statement of support for the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling that had made abortion legal. At the ABA’s midwinter meeting in Los Angeles, they won passage of an abortion rights resolution that endorsed the ruling.

But their strategy backfired this week.

Offended by the strong abortion rights stand, several prominent bar leaders, led by ABA Secretary Anthony Palermo of Rochester, N.Y., and incoming President John Curtin Jr. of Boston, organized a campaign to revoke the policy. The two worked closely with the Chicago-based Americans United for Life, which opposes abortion, and sent letters to nearly 50,000 lawyers calling for the policy to be reversed.

Wednesday’s vote “could be a great setback for us” if it is seen as evidence that the legal community no longer supports the right to abortion, Estelle Rogers, a Washington lawyer and a leader of the abortion rights coalition, said after the vote.

But leaders of the repeal movement repeatedly said they were not advocating an anti-abortion stand. Rather, their banner this week was “neutrality now.”

In a mass meeting Monday, they won passage of a resolution, by an 885-837 vote, urging a neutral policy. On Wednesday morning, the ABA’s policy-making body, the House of Delegates, endorsed the idea.

Charles Weiss, a St. Louis attorney, said the ABA “is not a political organization” and “should not be dragged into the political debate on this issue.” Because lawyers, like most Americans, have “deeply held moral and religious feelings” about abortion, “neutrality is the proper position” for the association, he said.

Other lawyers noted that the ABA plays a nonpartisan role in the legal system, which includes accrediting law schools and passing judgment on the qualifications of nominees to the Supreme Court. This role could be jeopardized, they said, if the ABA took sides on contentious social and political issues such as abortion.

Supporters of the abortion rights stand blamed Wednesday’s setback on “pressure from a vociferous minority” within the ABA. They contended that most lawyers and most ABA members favor the right to seek an abortion. But they said that abortion opponents had undertaken “a well-funded, well-orchestrated effort” to reverse the previous vote.

“For the first time, this house is being asked to recede from a position in favor of individual rights,” said Sally Determan, a Washington, D.C., attorney who sponsored the abortion rights policy.

“Make no mistake about it: A vote for this resolution is a vote against a woman’s right to choose. It says we have no objection to a minority of citizens using state laws to impose their views on women who don’t share them,” she said.

Obviously exhausted by the weeklong squabble over abortion, delegates called off debate after less than two hours and narrowly approved the neutral policy.

Afterward, ABA officials pointed out that only about two dozen votes were changed after the Los Angeles meeting. There, a procedural motion on whether to adopt an official policy passed by only 14 votes. On Wednesday, the delegates decided by a 12-vote margin that the organization would have no official position on abortion.

However, the 26-member California delegation did not support the move.