For reproductive rights advocates, these weeks after the election have been a little like looking into a snow globe: after the shakeup there's a lot of important issues floating about ready to calmly settle in a new place.

One of the major changes a foot is the common ground movement that has emerged from the election. It has caused new alliances full of goodwill and potential. It has also caused lots of grief on the part of the "pro-life" establishment which appears to have a greater stake in keeping the culture wars in full swing than coming up with solutions to the high rates of unwanted pregnancy and abortion in the United States. The new movement for common ground is being touted by editorial boards and leaders, like Doug Kmiec and Richard Land, President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, are emerging and calling for a new national approach. A USA Today editorial posited,

"Realism seems to have struck some ardent foes of abortion. After 35 years of trying to outlaw the procedure nationally while chipping away at abortion rights state by state, they have decided to add a new and sensible initiative. They'll work with the other side to reduce the number of abortions...In fact, the abortion rate has fallen steadily for nearly three decades: In 2004, the latest year for which statistics are available, it was down 33% from its 1980 peak, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. The wider use of contraceptives and more effective birth control are major reasons."

But there are those who put the flake in snowflake in this snowglobe. It's the usual pro-life suspects who are eager to shut down these efforts before they gain any momentum. Joseph Schiedler, president of the Pro-Life Action League, took the opposing view to USA Today's common ground endorsement writing,

"There is no evidence that increasing social programs — such as low-cost health care and day care, college grants and maternity homes — will impact a woman's abortion decision. It is rare in our experience to find a woman who says the reason she is choosing abortion is that she doesn't have day care, or that she'd rather go to college...We see the effort to combine pro-life and pro-choice forces as a betrayal on the part of the pro-lifers. Besides, it has been tried, several times. And it always fails."

Doug Johnson of National Right to Life had nothing nice to say about efforts to unite as a country and find a better way to address this national conflict. He called it an "Abortion Reduction Scam." The pro-life movement seems most invested in high abortion rates, that's what the take away is from their repulsion by the talk of real solutions. We will continue to watch and report on the common ground movement, and efforts to stop it, closely. So stay posted.

President-elect Obama has pledged to reinstate funding to UNFPA and it efforts to provide family planning services to people living in the most desperate regions of the earth. This has placed it again in the cross-hairs of the Population Research Institute which has gotten its slander machine humming. They've dusted off their playbook from 2002 and are out with the same misinformation campaigns attempting to characterize the agency's efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancy as "pro-abortion." President Steven Mosher's most recent work of fiction was published in the Catholic Exchange and reads:

"By signing a series of pro-abortion Executive Orders, President Obama will be perceived as governing from the Left. The die will be cast, and pro-lifers will rally against him from that moment. They will start looking towards 2010 to restore some checks and balances on this man they will rightly perceive as a pro-abortion zealot.

Clinton’s pollster argued strongly against acting on abortion policy as one of the new administration’s first pieces of business, but he went ahead regardless. The debacle of the 1994 House elections for the Democrats began at that moment.

Let us see if Barack makes the same mistake."

There's lots of other flurries in the snowglobe, including President-elect Obama's choice of a communications director, Ellen Moran of Emily's List. It is a comfort to know that the messenger he has chosen speaks the language of prevention and choices. We'll continue to peer in this mesmerizing globe of change and report on all the flurries and where they settle.