Adele M. Stan is a contributing editor to Ms. magazine and a contributing writer to Mother Jones.

With its graphic illustrations and stellar placement in the opinion section of Sunday's Washington Post, the full-page advertisement by an outfit called the Changing Hearts Campaign was hard to miss. The illustrations purported to show four steps in the abortion procedure known in the medical community as an intact dilation and extraction, or D&E, but vilified by abortion opponents as "partial-birth" abortion.

As followers of our national abortion wars know, D&E is a rarely used abortion procedure generally applied in the second trimester of pregnancy, whereby the fertility and health of a pregnant woman is preserved by partially removing the fetus from the womb, and then collapsing its skull so that it may pass through the woman's cervix without causing harm to her. It is, without doubt, a gruesome procedure. That is why it is so rarely used -- mostly by women and girls who find themselves in the most desperate of circumstances, and particularly by women who find themselves carrying fetuses that stand little or no chance of surviving much beyond delivery if carried to term.

But you would not know this from the Changing Hearts ad. What the ad's illustrations depicted was a perfectly formed, apparently viable infant, with a cute little face and all of its fingers and toes, being pulled from a disembodied womb by a disembodied hand. The final and largest illustration shows the hand slicing into the back of the infant-like fetus's head with a surgical knife. The casual observer would be hard put to find the woman in these illustrations; she is depicted only in a cross-sectional view of her pelvis -- splitopen, as it were, much like the sliced cow featured in the Brooklyn Museum's famed "Sensations" exhibition, which has New York's righties whipped into a tizzy.

Women ignored

In their copy, the writers of the ad resort to manipulative rhetoric -- most egregiously when they contend that the procedure is "most often used for convenience and genetic selection." Genetic selection? I supposed you could say that Tammy Watts, whose fetus suffered from a chromosomal disorder that meant virtually certain death for the infant it would become if she chose to continue the pregnancy, resorted to genetic selection when she had her D&E abortion.

Convenience? I suppose you could say that Vikki Stella, a diabetic whose body has trouble healing, chose convenience when she chose to have a D&E rather than have her womb cut open, an operation that might preclude the possibility of her having children in the future. Her fetus had developed despite the absence of any brain tissue at all in its cranium.

But these people, who faced awful choices, are nowhere to be found in either the ad or the push for the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act soon to be taken up again by the Senate. Perhaps it is because they are mere women. In fact, at the bottom of the ad, are the faces of five Democratic senators and one congressman who are said to favor the bill. All are men.

A war on all abortion

Santorum leads the war on abortion

Were the bill, sponsored by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), simply a ban on a controversial abortion procedure, that would be bad enough. But like most such legislation, the language of the bill is deliberately vague, so as to invite a challenge to the 1972 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal in the first place.

The text of Santorum's bill reads that any physician who "knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion and thereby kills a human fetus shall be fined ... or imprisoned not more than two years, or both." The key here is the phrase "thereby kills a human fetus," which could expand the ban beyond the D&E procedure to all abortions in which the fertilized egg has developed beyond the embryonic stage -- a direct challenge to the broader limits of Roe.

Since the opponents introduced the term "partial-birth" abortion into the debate several years ago, nearly two dozen states have passed their own bans. Most have been enjoined by the courts, pending appeals. One of the most chilling is Missouri's "Infant's Protection Act," which categorizes the D&E procedure as infanticide, thereby allowing a justifiable homicide defense to anyone who cares to take deadly aim at a doctor or patient who are party to the procedure.

The Missouri statute, crafted by a lobbyist for the Missouri Catholic Conference, also uses deceptive definitions of such terms as "living infant" and "born." Some assessments of the bill assert that the term "living infant" as employed in the bill could apply to embryos as early as five-and-a-half weeks into a pregnancy.

It is just a matter of time before one of these bans makes its way to the nation's highest court -- and our abortion laws could very well be rewritten. The next president may have the opportunity to appoint as many as three Supreme Court justices. If that president is an abortion opponent, Roe may well be overturned.

Abortion is a difficult enough issue when simply argued on its merits. Having failed to win the debate honestly, abortion opponents have resorted to deception in their creation of the term "partial-birth" abortion. As its tagline, the Changing Hearts Campaign uses the slogan "Help Through Hope in Christ." One would hope that Christians everywhere would take umbrage at the group's use of misogyny and prevarication in the name of the Savior.

As for the five Democratic senators the group presents as ready to sign onto its lies -- John Breaux (LA), Ernest Hollings (SC), Daniel Patrick Moynihan (NY), Tom Daschle (SD) and Patrick Leahy (VT) -- one would hope they find the spine to vote against Santorum's war on desperate women. If they do not, they have no right to say they believe in women's rights.