Adele M. Stan is a regular contributor to IntellectualCapital.com. She is the Washington correspondent for Working Woman magazine.

Women of America, wake up! In the 2000 presidential election, your right to control your own reproductive lives is on the line, and you are asleep at the wheel.

The next president will get to appoint as many as three Supreme Court justices. With the resignation of only one who sits on the current court -- the elderly, pro-choice John Paul Stevens -- the 1973 decision that made abortion legal easily could be overturned.

The election will affect reproductive rights more than voters know

Today, there are no abortion providers in 86% of U.S. counties, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Yet few people appear to be particularly alarmed at this state of affairs. We are a nation in denial, I fear, lulled into a stupor of complacency and weariness as the seemingly endless rhetorical war over reproductive rights continues unchanged, despite the fact that the landscape has mutated dramatically since those rights were first conferred upon women some 27 years ago.

Splitting hairs

With all of this week's squabbles among the presidential candidates on the subject of abortion, you would think it was in issue on which there were appreciable differences between Sen. John McCain (AZ) and Texas Gov. George W. Bush on the Republican side and between Democrats Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley (NJ). But it is just not so.

While the positions of each party on this hot-button issue remain diametrically opposed, the sniping between the candidates of each party exhibits a semantical symmetry, as insurgent candidates McCain and Bradley accuse their parties' frontrunners of fudging their respective positions on abortion rights.

In Tuesday night's debate in South Carolina, McCain essentially accused Bush of doubletalk when the frontrunner claimed to support the Republican Party platform, which calls for a constitutional amendment that would outlaw all abortions without exception. On the campaign trail, McCain pointed out, Bush has claimed, like McCain, to support exceptions from the ban for victims of rape and incest, and for women whose life would be threatened by a pregnancy carried to term.

Meanwhile, Bradley has been taking Gore to task for a less-than-consistent record on reproductive rights. Bradley dug up a 1982 letter written by the frontrunner in which he called abortion "arguably the taking of a human life," and shedding light on the vice president's congressional voting record on abortion issues. (In the 1980s, when Gore served as a congressman from Tennessee, he voted against federal funding for poor women's abortions.)

Upping the ante, each of the frontrunners recently have received the backing of the standard-bearing organizations that advance their respective parties' abortion positions in the legislative arena. Last week, Bush received the endorsement of the National Right-to-Life Committee's political action committee; this week Gore welcomed the embrace of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

But for all the rancor among these candidates over abortion, there really is no true difference between Bradley and Gore or McCain and Bush on the issue. With either Gore or Bradley in the White House, voters get an unabashedly pro-choice president. If either McCain or Bush win, it is almost certain that anti-abortion justices will be seated on the Supreme Court, setting the stage for a reversal of the 1973 decision that made abortion legal.

Voter apathy

So what gives? Abortion must be a really high priority for voters, right? A real litmus-test issue? Would that it were so. Despite the fact that the fate of a woman's right to choose will rest in the hands of the next president, voters generally rank it low on their list of priorities.

Take, for instance, the support McCain has found among independent voters (a generally pro-choice category of the electorate) and moderate Republicans. In the New Hampshire primary, a Voter News Service exit poll found that the Arizona senator won 63% of the vote of those participating in the GOP primary who believe that abortion should "always be legal."

OK, you say, those are the voters of the Republican Party, which relies on a male base for which abortion is a more distant issue than it is for women, who tend to vote Democrat. Were that scenario correct, one would assume that the jockeying between the Democratic contenders over who is the most pro-choice was an indication of the issue's importance to women voters.

But in a survey of female voters released earlier this year by Good Housekeeping magazine and Women.com, abortion did not even rank among the top five issues that captured the attention of female respondents, who ranked it overall as No. 10 in a list of 17 issues. (Health care won as the top issue among women; only 4% of female respondents rated abortion as their top issue.)

However, when broken down by party affiliation, one group of women did show itself to see abortion as a high priority: Republican women. Alas, the survey gives us no insight as to whether or not the majority of Republican women in its sample are pro- or anti-choice.

Going, going ... gone?

For those who believe that legal abortion is fundamental to gender equality, the news is not good.

In 1996, just four months before the last presidential election, a Gallup poll found that only 16% of voters regarded a candidate's position on abortion as a primary factor in determining whether or not to vote for him or her. A mere 19% of women surveyed said they would only vote for a candidate who shared their views on abortion, while even fewer men (13%) made that claim. And yet most Americans continue to say that abortion is a decision that should be left to a woman and her doctor.

If current trends continue, a woman's right to abortion soon could disappear, and the public at large will be shocked, shocked! As Joni Mitchell wrote in a long-ago, libertarian age, "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?"