BY CINDY RICHARDS

As always, my children stood at the cardboard voting box with me last week and took turns using the punch pin to help me vote.

My son chose to vote for Democratic senatorial candidate Barack Obama. That was a tough one for me. In my 25 years as a voter, there have been only a handful of candidates for whom I have voted proudly. I was very much looking forward to casting that ballot myself. But, in the interest of raising a future voter, I put aside my selfishness and let him punch the chad.

My daughter chose to vote for John Kerry for president. Fine with me. I wanted my vote cast for him -- or, more correctly, against George W. Bush -- but I wasn't all that keen on doing the deed myself.

That little family scene might tell us something about why Democrats failed last week to oust a president who has taken us into war on a lie, racked up a record federal budget deficit and chipped away at the Constitution in the name of national security and religion. Our candidate simply couldn't energize the electorate.

Bush, however, chooses to see his 3.5-million vote margin as a mandate for moral action in a country that hemorrhaged Republican red on election night. Now, the issues that barely got a hearing during this campaign are jumping to the top of Bush's to-do list.

He is moving ahead with environmental changes, plans a sweeping tax code revamp, and if his most conservative supporters have their say, will appoint a new Supreme Court that would overturn Roe vs. Wade, the landmark ruling that made abortion legal in America.

That prospect ought to strike fear into the hearts of women everywhere, according to Anu Kumar. The former Evanston resident now is executive director of Ipas, a Chapel Hill, N.C.-based nonprofit that works to prevent unsafe abortions and increase access to reproductive health services around the world. She knows what happens when abortion is outlawed.

"[T]he more barriers there are to safe abortion, the more dangerous it is for women," Kumar said.

Around the world, nearly 40 women undergo an unsafe abortion every minute -- some in countries where abortion is legal but limited. Nearly 70,000 women die each year from the complications of the dangerous procedures. In 1965 women died here, too: 193 deaths, 17 percent of all maternal deaths, were abortion-related in those bad old days, Kumar said.

It's not so far-fetched to think that it might happen again. There are about 3 million unplanned or unwanted pregnancies each year in America. In a post-Roe world, wealthy women still will be able to afford safe abortions. But poor women may turn to a coat-hanger or bleach for a self-induced abortion.

Fearing such disasters, Planned Parenthood Federation of America has formed a "Post-Roe Service Delivery Task Force" to figure out how to provide abortions if federal law should ban them. The group is exploring the possibility of setting up clinics along the U.S. border in Canada, on Native American reservations and on ships anchored offshore, and it is developing a strategy to ensure that "safe states," such as Illinois, stay safe.

Scariest of all, the task force has urged doctors to get training in how to deal with a medical crisis all but eradicated from our country: infection, uncontrolled bleeding and other life-threatening complications of botched abortions.

Illinois is considered to be a "safe state" but, as Terry Cosgrove, executive director of Personal PAC, said at the group's annual awards lunch: "We're only one election away from losing choice."

It didn't happen last week, but anti-choice activists did pick up a few seats in the Illinois House of Representatives and one seat in the Illinois Senate.

Steve Trombley, president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood Chicago Area, said he believes Illinois will remain a "safe state" for women seeking abortion. In a post-Roe world, "The role we play would become increasingly important, if not critical."