DOLE, CLINTON EXCHANGE BARBS ON LATE ABORTIONS.

Byline: Susan Feeney and Richard Whittle The Dallas Morning News

President Clinton and Sen. Bob Dole clashed long-distance Thursday over the propriety of certain late-term abortions, with each insisting that the other lacks moral vision.

The senator, speaking in Philadelphia, accused the president of pushing the ``limits of decency'' last month with his veto of a Republican-sponsored bill banning a little-used late-term procedure.

That prompted the president, appearing at a Milwaukee news conference with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, to retort: ``I am always a little skeptical when politicians piously proclaim their morality.''

The exchange had an intensity usually reserved for the heat of the fall presidential campaign. So far, Clinton has usually refrained from engaging with Dole, the presumed Republican presidential nominee.

Dole had sought to use his speech to the Catholic Press Association to soften his party's image and his own. The senator's 20-minute remarks centered on the moral challenges that he said lie beyond the reach of government. He also used the opportunity to propose a new charity tax credit.

Only near the end did he turn to abortion. An opponent of abortion rights, he chastised the Clinton administration for ``constantly exhorting itself and lecturing the public, but itself fundamentally adrift, without direction or moral vision.'' The ``saddest evidence'' of this, he said, is the veto of the controversial abortion procedure.

The procedure is very rare, used only when extreme abnormalities are discovered late in a pregnancy.

At Milwaukee's City Hall, Clinton and Kohl spoke about German-American relations, Cuba, the NATO partnership in Bosnia, European security and a host of other matters before a reporter sought the president's reaction to Dole's remarks.

The president referred to the five women who appeared with him April 10 at the White House when he announced the veto.

``What would Senator Dole say to those five women?'' asked Clinton. He noted that about 1,000 women each year have this rare type of abortion to protect their own health.

The president said the White House is ``the only place in this system of ours where there's one person who can stand up for people with no voice and no power who are going to be eviscerated.''

Of Dole, he said: ``I fail to see why his moral position is superior to the one I took.''

Dole's spokesman, Nelson Warfield, fired back, saying the president had ``hit a new low in hypocrisy'' and subverted ``truth for the sake of political points.''

Nelson told reporters that the president ``well knows'' that ``the bill he vetoed allowed an exception'' to the ban if the life of the mother was in danger.

With surveys showing as many as 70 percent of Americans in favor of banning the rare abortion procedure, Warfield said the president ``is part of the extreme abortion-on-demand fringe.''

Dole also accused Clinton of embracing a ban on same-sex marriages because it's an election year. ``It couldn't be for any other reason,'' the senator said.

Clinton, for his part, said he long has opposed gay marriage as well as discrimination ``against any group of Americans, including gay Americans.''

In his speech, Dole dealt with criticism, evident in national opinion polls, of Republicans philosophy about the less fortunate.

Dole promised, if elected president, to push for a tax credit of up to $500 for individuals and $1,000 for couples for donations made to private or religious charities that do at least 75 percent of their work battling poverty.

``Give your money to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or give it to the Habitat for Humanity,'' he said. ``Give it to the Department of Health and Human Services or to Mother Teresa and the Sisters of Charity . . ., (to) big government or to Big Brothers and Big Sisters.''

A Dole aide said the plan, patterned on one by Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., would cost $17 billion but other estimates were much higher. Overcoming the budget shortfall or deciding what programs to cut to finance the tax credit would need ``to be worked out,'' the aide said.

For Dole, it was a day to appeal to Roman Catholic voters - 30 percent of the electorate, especially concentrated in the November battleground states of the Midwest, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

In 1992, then-Gov. Bill Clinton won 44 percent of the Catholic vote to 35 percent for President Bush. While GOP congressional candidates had solid Catholic support in 1994, a recent poll by the independent Pew Research Center found Clinton with a 19-point edge over Dole among voters of that faith.