PERSPECTIVE ON ABORTION : The Fight Is For Transformed Lives : Women’s battle is really about completing the revolution that freed half the world from endless childbearing.

The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Federal Drug Administration’s ban on RU486, the so-called abortion pill, is only another round in the protracted worldwide struggle over abortion. That women will prevail I no longer doubt. The question is how many female casualties will occur before the abortion wars have subsided.

Outside the United States, too, abortion has emerged as one of the most contentious and charged issues in national politics.

In Ireland, for example, the pubs buzz with debates over this fall’s referendum on abortion. Some Irish supporters of integration with Europe voted against the Maastricht treaty solely because they feared that Europe would force Ireland to allow abortion. But with half the population under 30 years of age, there is a growing sentiment for liberalized abortion reform.

In Germany, where the East used to allow abortion on demand and the West prohibited it, the reunified country compromised on an abortion law that pleases no one. In Hungary and Poland, campaigns to abolish abortion polarize former political allies and mold bizarre new coalitions.

In what was formerly Yugoslavia, Croats wage a public campaign to associate Serbian cruelties with legal abortion. In Czechoslovakia, Slovakian nationalists play the abortion card to persuade the public to separate from the more liberal, Western-oriented Czechs.

Why have the abortion wars spread so widely? One obvious reason is that the collapse of communism permits many nations to debate what was suppressed for decades. But the deeper explanation is that the abortion wars everywhere amount to a referendum on the unprecedented and irreversible revolution that has severed women’s sexuality from their reproductive capacity.

Many people mistakenly think that the sexual revolution was about liberalized sexual behavior. But changing sexual mores were the consequence of a much greater and historic transformation in women’s lives.

Throughout most of history, women’s traditional role has been yoked to ceaseless childbearing. The birth-control pill threw off the yoke. The historic rupture between sexuality and reproduction is only three decades old. First birth control and then legalized abortion gave women--educated women in developed countries, that is--the choice to delay childbearing, to plan children or even to remain childless. For good or ill, women were released from relentless childbearing and allowed, for the first time in history, to imagine and shape their own destinies.

This is the real sexual revolution that has ignited political firestorms over abortion. At stake are the losses and gains women face as they shed centuries of burdens and protections for new opportunities fraught with dangers. With new sexual freedom, after all, comes new forms of sexual exploitation. With new economic independence, women lose the economic security formerly provided by their families or by men.

For many people, to be sure, opposition to abortion is about the sanctity of life. But for many others, abortion is a symbolic debate over the loss of women’s traditional role and the uncertainties and confusion society faces as a result.

In the United States, there is a growing passion to protect women’s choice; young women who grew up believing that they had all the rights they needed, thank you, have discovered that Roe vs. Wade was merely a truce--not the end of the struggle. Recognizing this change, the Democrats have practically adopted “pro-choice” as their campaign mantra.

George Bush is checkmated on this controversy. When the Democrats put the Freedom of Choice Act--legislation that would make abortion legal--on his desk in the fall, Bush will veto it. The political fallout may boost Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign more than anything else the Democratic candidate says or does between now and November.

As developing nations industrialize and improve their standards of living, the abortion wars will spread even further. Millions of women, leaving behind a traditional agricultural life and entering the paid labor force, will seek ways to limit the number of children they bear. British and French women may take RU486 when they need to terminate a pregnancy, but for most of the world, the abortion wars have just begun.