A national organization you may not have heard much about is Democrats for Life. Pete Comstock, an information technology consultant from Cross Lanes, has been trying to change that. At present, Comstock is the group's sole representative in West Virginia.

More than 40 other states have active chapters. Comstock, however, will be working with others at the Democratic convention in Denver to promote the pro-life side of the abortion debate, and he says he's encouraged that the Democratic Party today is more open to initiatives to reduce abortion in America than it has been in decades.

"I think Democrats are finally going to see the light on this issue," Carol Crossed, vice president for development of state chapters, told me over the phone. "Being a Democrat means being on the side of the oppressed, the marginalized and the defenseless, and the unborn child fits right in with that."

Crossed is a retired school teacher in Rochester, N.Y., and has been active in Democrats for Life for nine years. She is the source of my information about Pete Comstock.

The toll of abortions in the United States actually went down during the eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency, and some speculate that economic progress and opportunity for good jobs was part of the reason. Women who have trouble making a rent payment may, understandably, be much more fearful of the economic challenges of raising a child.

Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have used the mantra that "abortion needs to be legal but rare."

Pro-lifers would like it to be so rare that it never occurred at all, as even a single abortion equates to the taking of a human life, which is homicide. However even if Roe v. Wade were undone tomorrow, realists understand that abortions would continue, though they would be more the prerogative of the well-off than the poor.

Interestingly, too, Sen. Bob Casey, a pro-life Democrat from Pennsylvania, will have a speaking role in the 2008 convention, though his father, also a Robert and a former governor of the Keystone State, was denied a chance at the podium in 1992 because of his anti-abortion stance.

As he has in siding with the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the rights of citizens to own handguns, presidential candidate Barack Obama has been moving a bit toward the right on abortion. At a campaign stop in Wisconsin this spring, he began his answer to a question about whether he would uphold women's abortion rights by saying, "When we speak of abortion, we're always talking about something that is, in one sense, a tragedy."

Earlier this summer, he volunteered that the "mental health of the mother" was too broad a category to justify the procedure known as "partial-birth abortion" (which even a number of abortion-rights proponents have voted against).

On the other side of the political spectrum, the Republican Party, which has been consistent in keeping a pro-life plank in its platform, began the presidential race this year with pro-abortion-rights figure Rudy Giuliani as its leading candidate. And Sen. John McCain, the GOP's presumptive nominee, has defended the possibility of naming a pro-choice running mate for vice president in the person of another former Pennsylvania governor, Tom Ridge.

Are the two parties in the process of a historic shift on the question of abortion? We'll see how it shakes out soon enough.

In my column of Aug. 13, my reference to "insider sources" in the alleged White House-initiated forgery of Iranian documents to justify the Iraq war apparently led some readers to believe the sources were anonymous. They were not. In "The Way of the World," Ron Suskind names his sources as Rob Richer and John Maguire, both retired from the CIA.

John Patrick Grace is a book editor and publisher. He lives in Huntington.