Washington ? In sometimes subtle ways, Democratic party leaders and political professionals are grappling with how to address abortion, an internal debate that turns on questions of emphasis, political positioning and how far to go in accepting as a public policy goal the view that abortion is a moral tragedy to be avoided.

While there is no serious discussion of moving away from the party’s long-standing support of abortion rights, some moderates have pressed the party to more aggressively press a message that Democrats would work to reduce the number of abortions. But the party’s pro-abortion rights constituency is wary of too strong an identification of abortion as a social ill, fearing that would provide political momentum for legal restrictions.

“Where is the Democratic Party on abortion?” asks Rachel Laser, an abortion policy expert for Third Way, a moderate Democratic group. “I think they are still heavily in a phase of rethinking it.”

And as the 2008 general election approaches, Democrats also will have to decide how much emphasis to place on rallying their base on the core issue of abortion rights. After the replacement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor by Justice Samuel Alito, the abortion-rights majority on the Supreme Court appears to have narrowed to a one-vote margin, with two of those votes supplied by 87-year Justice John Paul Stevens and 74-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That offers the opportunity to raise an alarm over the survival of a constitutional guarantee of abortion rights, though pressing that point too hard risks intensifying public identification of Democrats as the party of abortion.

While paying homage to the party’s strong pro-abortion rights constituency, the leading Democratic presidential candidates have been at pains to put the abortion issue in a broader context including an effort to strengthen families, prevent unwanted pregnancies and improve family planning.

This was in evidence during a forum last week before Planned Parenthood, a group that strongly supports abortion rights. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., stressed contraception and sex education, delivering a blistering attack on the Bush administration and congressional Republicans for policies she said limited access to both.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., offered a vision of equal opportunity for women through an “updated social contract” that tied together better access to contraception and sex education with initiatives that could help two-income families, such as paid maternity leave and longer school days.

“If the argument is narrow, then often times we lose,” he said. “If you ask the most conservative person, do they want their daughters to have the same chances as men, most will answer in the affirmative. … We can win that argument.”

The Democrats’ public positioning on abortion has been evolving for many years beyond a pure rights-based philosophy to a more nuanced view that takes greater account of many Americans’ deeply conflicted feelings while still solidly supporting the principle that women should have the choice of aborting a pregnancy. Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992 with promises he would seek to make abortion “safe, legal and rare.”