Any day now, President Bush’s secretary of health and human services, Michael Leavitt, is expected to deliver a parting blow to women’s reproductive freedom: new regulations further limiting access to abortions, contraceptives and accurate information about reproductive health care options.

If that happens, it will be a big victory for the far-right  one, as it happens, that is partly rooted in an old controversy involving Sarah Palin’s church, her former obstetrician and the small local hospital serving Wasilla, Alaska.

In 1992, a coalition of some 20 evangelical churches in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Valley  including the Wasilla Assembly of God Church, where Ms. Palin was baptized at age 12  captured control of the operating board of the community’s Valley Hospital.

The new board promptly voted to bar doctors from performing abortions at the hospital with limited exceptions for cases of rape, incest, dire medical necessity or where a doctor documents “the fetus has a condition that is incompatible with life.” The policy change left Alaska without any hospital where a woman with, say, a negative amniocenteses result or other problem not included among the exceptions could obtain a second trimester abortion at a doctor’s discretion. Such procedures account for about 10 percent of all abortions.