ABORTION METHOD BACK IN FOCUS.

Byline: Katherine Seelye The New York Times

After two years of acrimonious debate in which both sides were intransigent, pressure is mounting for Congress again to pass and President Clinton to sign a ban on what critics call ``partial-birth'' abortions.

With a bill banning the procedure to be re-introduced in the House this week, and with the Senate to start hearings within two weeks, abortion opponents say that recent recantations by an abortion-rights advocate about the frequency of the procedure may give them the edge to succeed this time. Last year, Congress passed the ban, but the Senate failed to override a presidential veto.

The White House says Clinton's position is unchanged - that he will sign a ban only if it makes an exception for women who need to have the procedure for health reasons, a provision abortion opponents will not accept.

But as lawmakers supporting abortion rights reconsider their positions and whether they went out on a limb with the misinformation by the advocate, pressure is building on Clinton to reassess his position as well. Public-opinion polls last year showed that three-fourths of Americans favored banning the procedure.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., who supports abortion rights and voted to impose the ban, said on the NBC News program ``Meet the Press'' on Sunday that Clinton should sign the ban.

``There's no hiding behind numbers at this point, and I think this bill will pass and will be signed,'' he said.

And on Tuesday, Steve Forbes, the former presidential candidate, is to begin airing radio advertisements urging Clinton to have ``a change of heart and conscience'' and sign the ban.

Rep. Charles Canady, R-Fla., who is to re-introduce the House bill this week, said in an interview, ``The president is getting in more and more of a box on this, defending something which fewer and fewer people are going to be willing to defend.''

The renewed hope for abortion opponents came last week in the unlikely form of Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, a lobbying group based in Alexandria, Va., that represents 200 abortion clinics.

He told American Medical News that he had ``lied through my teeth'' when he said earlier, in an effort to bolster the abortion-rights movement, that the

``partial-birth'' procedure was performed rarely, no more than 450 times a year.

Now he says it is performed more frequently, perhaps as often as 5,000 times per year, and in the late second trimester, not only in the third, as he and other abortion-rights advocates had led the public to believe. He also says it is performed on healthy women carrying healthy fetuses, not just on those in medical emergencies, as Clinton has contended. Neither side is disputing the facts that Fitzsimmons presented.

Fitzsimmons' statements managed to reopen a seemingly intractable debate, heartening those who oppose abortion and sending abortion-rights advocates scrambling to try to salvage their credibility on Capitol Hill.

The House and Senate voted last year to ban the procedure at any time except to save the life of the woman. Clinton vetoed the measure, saying he also wanted an exception for a woman's health. He called the procedure ``a potentially life-saving, certainly health-saving'' measure for ``a small but extremely vulnerable group of women,'' which he put at ``a few hundred a year.'' The House overrode the veto with four votes to spare; the Senate fell nine votes short.

Abortion opponents adamantly oppose Clinton's health exception, saying it is so elastic as to be meaningless. A spokesman for the Right to Life Committee, Douglas Johnson, calls the president's insistence on such an exception a public-relations ploy to tug at people's heartstrings while diverting attention from another of the president's conditions - that the ban be in place only for the third trimester.