GOP Anti-Abortion Agenda Drafts Clinton : Legislation: Budget constraints pressure him to permit some restrictive bills to become law, despite longtime stance. Women’s groups protest.

Even as a controversial bill to make a late-term abortion procedure a criminal offense resurfaced Monday in the Senate, where its fate remains uncertain, the GOP majority in Congress already has made significant progress on multiple fronts in its drive to curtail abortions.

Along the way, Republicans have picked up a surprising, if reluctant, accomplice: President Clinton, a longtime abortion-rights backer.

Clinton, influenced to go along with some anti-abortion measures because of budgetary and other extraneous considerations, including the U.S. troop deployment in Bosnia, has infuriated women’s groups, whose support he can ill afford to lose in his 1996 reelection bid. In 1992, women supported Clinton in far greater numbers than they did former President George Bush.

“We urge President Clinton not to make deals with this right-wing Congress at the expense of women’s health needs,” said Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.

Last week, Clinton allowed the defense appropriations bill to become law without his signature to enable the Bosnia deployment to proceed smoothly--although the measure also bans U.S. servicewomen abroad from getting abortions at military hospitals, even with their own money.

Another appropriations bill, which Clinton signed, bans insurers from providing abortion coverage to federal employees. In the midst of a budget stalemate with the GOP, the president signed the Treasury-Postal Service spending bill in part to keep vital government functions from stopping.

Both measures allow for exceptions for rape and incest and to save a woman’s life. Several other pending appropriations bills also contain provisions that limit access to abortion, and women’s groups are fearful that Clinton may sign some of them.

Representatives of more than a dozen such groups met with Clinton aides at the White House Monday to express their concern.

“We reiterated the importance of the White House vetoing the partial birth bill,” said one source. “Our message, basically, was, ‘Enough!’ ”

The reemergence of the controversial “partial birth” abortion bill also points up the increasing degree to which almost every major public policy issue is becoming embroiled in the politics of the 1996 presidential campaign.

After alienating GOP conservatives by backing Clinton on Bosnia, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) moved quickly to bring back the anti-abortion measure as fresh proof of his affinity with the party’s right wing.

Among the anti-abortion provisions in other appropriations bills are:

* A ban on the District of Columbia using public funds for abortions for indigent women.

* A ban on the use of federal funds for abortions in federal prisons.

* A ban on U.S. funding to international organizations that provide abortion-related services.

To abortion-rights advocates, some of the most objectionable provisions are in the appropriation bill for the departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services. The bill has been adopted by the House but is awaiting Senate action.

The language would allow states to bar funding Medicaid payments for abortions even in cases of rape or incest, would bar federal funding of embryo research and would prohibit medical oversight organizations from requiring residency programs in obstetrics and gynecology to provide abortion training.

The bill to ban “partial-birth” abortions was approved by the House on Nov. 1 by a vote of 288 to 139, with 73 Democrats joining 215 Republicans in a move that would create federal authority for the first time to regulate a specific, established medical procedure.

The measure’s backers called the procedure inhumane, tantamount to infanticide and used by women who change their mind late in pregnancy about giving birth.

But the bill’s critics said that women have few, if any, feasible alternatives in some life-threatening situations, especially in late pregnancies that involve a severely deformed fetus that is unlikely to survive after birth. They also argued that a woman’s right to choose should not be deprived by Congress, which is ill-equipped to make medical decisions.

The controversial procedure requires a physician to extract a fetus, feet first, from the womb and through the birth canal until all but its head is exposed. Then the base of the fetus’ skull is punctured, a suction catheter is inserted through the opening and the brain is removed.

In the Senate, the bill appeared in serious trouble on the floor earlier this month, and Dole and its sponsor, Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.), agreed to send it to the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing.

That panel conducted a daylong hearing on Nov. 17, but returned the measure to the Senate without taking any other action.

Debate on the bill began Monday afternoon. A vote is expected later this week, although its opponents, including Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), plan to offer amendments that would, among other things, exempt physicians from criminal prosecution if they had acted in the belief that the woman’s life was in danger.

Attempts also are expected in the Senate to create a similar protection for doctors who perform the procedure in the belief that a woman’s health was in jeopardy.

Hours after the House approved the bill, Clinton issued a statement saying that he “cannot support” the measure “because it fails to provide for consideration of the need to preserve the life and health of the mother.”