On Sunday, April 25, seven national groups are combining to produce what organizers hope will be a massive show of support for reproductive freedom. In Washington, D.C., the ACLU, Black Women's Health Imperative, Feminist Majority Foundation, NARAL, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, NOW, and Planned Parenthood hope to mass hundreds of thousands of pro-choice activists and concerned citizens.

And across the rest of the country, most of the rest of us - especially men - will yawn. Why?

Increasingly, pro-choice activism is on the defensive in the United States. Part of the problem is demographic - the generation of women who won reproductive freedoms in the 1960s and '70s are now grandmothers, and many of their daughters and granddaughters have never really seriously considered a world where abortion wasn't available. Nor have their husbands, boyfriends, or lovers.

The steady drip, drip, drip of anti-abortion foes has taken its toll. Across the country, the number of women seeking abortions has steadily declined in recent years - a combination of demographics, more widely available birth control and the advent of "morning after" pills, less widely available abortion services in many areas, and the cumulative effect of years of prominence by political and media conservatives and the resulting cultural shaming of abortion.

To the extent that the declining trend is a result of voluntary decisions, it's a good thing. Abortion is never a decision any woman or couple takes lightly, and most view it not as a frivolous exercise, but as the tragic best of a bad set of choices. If the choices are improving, bravo.

But the option to end a pregnancy after conception still needs to be there - no matter how widely available birth control is, no matter how early technology makes a fetus "viable." And the other effect of all that dripping is a certain girl-that-cried-wolf response: we've been hearing for 25 years that Roe v. Wade is in danger of being rolled back or repealed, and it's never happened. Why should we care now?

Five words will suffice:

It's none of their business.

Women, and men, should be alarmed when the state starts deciding what we can and can't do with our private bodies. More and more, that's the trend. A generation of conservative federal judges is in place. With Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress likely to remain, a second term for George W. Bush almost certainly will see at least one, perhaps up to three new U.S. Supreme Court nominees. Probably only one more Clarence Thomas type in the mix would be enough to end Roe v. Wade, and with it, a woman's remaining ability to seek clean, private, safe abortion services in the United States.

Already this year, Congress has passed a bill defining a fetus as a human being. Patty Murray, to her credit, fought to oppose it; in the House, her probable fall opponent, Republican Rep. George Nethercutt, was a major co-sponsor. The implication, if applied consistently, would be that every woman, every male lover, and every doctor ever involved in an abortion decision would be considered a murderer by this congressional majority. That's no casual matter.

Meanwhile, we have a president who wants a constitutional amendment to prevent the law from being applied uniformly to same-sex couples wanting to be married - another version of the same paternalistic impulse, where conservative politicians want to legislate social mores. Their social mores. And these are the guys - and yes, they're almost all guys - who used to rail about activist judges and social engineering.

These sorts of precedents, and countless lesser ones - from encouraging poor aid recipients to enter (heterosexual) marriages, to the steadily expanding Faith-Based Initiative tentacles in federal social programs - have their parallels in countless local governments across the land. Women and men are at equal risk. In the case of abortions, the father, too, stands to be liable for an unplanned pregnancy, for the birth control method that fails. And, sooner or later, all of them can.

In D.C., the March for Women's Lives is focused on reproductive rights - rights that have already steadily been lost, especially in rural areas and among the poor and uninsured, in the last quarter century. But a great deal more is still out there to be preserved. The social engineering precedent desired by anti-choice activists and their political colleagues is far broader than what has come before. It is, in essence, a vision of a theocracy, where permissible social conduct is defined by the state religion - their religion -- and all who stray are deviants who will be punished accordingly, in this and future lives.

Do we want another four years of a president who claims he talks to God - and whose God always seems to tell him exactly what he wants to hear?

That should scare anyone - woman or man. Our lives, and our bodies, are none of their business.

Information and an on-line petition to support the March for Women's Lives is available at http://www.marchforwomen.org.