New York ? At 21, Jelena Woehr describes herself as a feminist, focusing on issues such as domestic violence and improved career opportunities for women.

Yes, she also supports abortion rights. But that wasn’t her emphasis until Congress began considering potential restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion. Now, she’s joined many other young feminists in mobilizing to protect a right they thought had been settled long ago.

“People of my generation do not remember when abortion wasn’t safe, legal and available and it’s been a shock to think we might not have that right,” said the Colorado resident, a part-time student and Internet content developer.

Other young activists, though, are sitting out the fight, as the latest skirmish over abortion has exposed a proxy battle over the issue and its place on the contemporary feminist agenda.

Among many younger feminists, the matter of abortion rights, so central to the women’s movement of the 1970s, does not confer the urgency it once did. For them, abortion is now part of a “reproductive justice” portfolio that also includes access to birth control and improving health care for poor and minority women.

Newcomers to the women’s movement, secure in the knowledge that abortion is legal, have embraced a broader range of goals under the feminist umbrella, from body image awareness and gay marriage to the raping and genocide in Darfur. They largely are eschewing the national women’s groups and mass marches on Washington that their mothers eagerly may have joined, in favor of online social networks and local organizing.

Then there’s the ambivalence around abortion that’s crept into the debate, as medical care has been able to save extremely premature infants and ultrasounds now can reveal a fetal heartbeat at the earliest stages of gestation.

While most young feminists firmly believe in abortion rights, they’re also confronting the mixed feelings many women have about a procedure older activists fought to make safe and legally available.

“Everyone, if they step back from the hotness of the political environment, can acknowledge that nobody really knows when life begins,” Woehr said, adding many young feminists seek “a little more agreement that everyone wants fewer abortions.”

Such expressions of ambivalence were less common during the 1970s, when supporters and opponents of abortion rights framed the matter in stark terms of legal versus illegal, choice versus life. The 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling shifted the landscape, transforming what had been a pressing political issue into a personal decision for women facing unplanned pregnancies.

There’s no question that many have been galvanized into action by a proposal by Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan that the House passed last month as part of its health care overhaul. Whether they are willing to see the health overhaul go down over potential restrictions to abortion is another matter.

His amendment would prohibit private health care plans receiving federal subsidies in a new insurance marketplace from offering abortion coverage except in cases of rape, incest or to save a mother’s life. In the Senate, a similar measure sponsored by Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., was voted down.

Nelson, whose vote is needed for passage, agreed late Friday night to support an overhaul after winning fresh concessions to limit the availability of abortions in insurance sold in newly created health exchanges. He had threatened to oppose the legislation without a compromise that addressed his concerns.

Hundreds of activists, many of them college-age women, attended a lobbying day in Washington this month to press members of Congress to remove abortion restrictions from the health care debate. Several national organizations, including Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Feminist Majority Foundation, have devoted considerable resources to enlisting younger women in the fight.