Pressure is mounting on Governor Pataki this week, as he faces a tricky decision on emergency-contraception legislation that will be used to divine his political ambitions.

The bill in question, passed Thursday by the Republican-controlled state Senate, would allow women and girls to obtain the morning-after pill from pharmacists and other health-care practitioners without a doctor’s prescription. It has provoked outrage among some Republican state senators and among many New York social and religious conservatives.

According to political observers, the bill has also placed Mr. Pataki in what one said was a “checkmate” bind regarding his future. Mr. Pataki’s decision on whether to veto the bill, they said, will send a clear signal as to whether he is appealing to left-leaning New Yorkers in advance of a 2006 bid for a fourth term as governor, or instead is seeking to establish credibility with a right-leaning national electorate while looking to a presidential attempt in 2008.

Since emergency contraception is viewed by many social conservatives as an abortifacient – an agent that induces abortion – and because the lobbying efforts for last week’s legislation were spearheaded by advocates from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League, Mr. Pataki risks alienating a key GOP constituency if he approves the bill.

“This issue cuts right to the heart of the base of the party in these early primaries and caucuses and will probably cause him some problems,” a national Republican political consultant, Scott Reed, said yesterday. “These early events in the national process are heavily dominated by strong social conservatives, and they care about the issue of life.”

If Mr. Pataki hopes not to alienate New York’s liberal voting base, however – and hopes not to be branded a “flip-flopper” for backtracking on his record of support for abortion rights – he will have to sign the legislation and risk the wrath of primary and caucus voters in New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina.

“It’s a checkmate situation for a moderate Republican governor looking to appeal to national conservatives,” a New York-based Republican political consultant, William O’Reilly, said.

A veteran national pollster, John Zogby, said the smartest move at this point for the governor would be to approve the legislation quietly but not run for re-election in 2006. “If he has serious plans for 2008, and it seems like he does, it’s much better to not be running as an incumbent,” Mr. Zogby said. “It also seems that this is a legitimate way of bypassing what could be a sticky issue for him.” According to Mr. Zogby, the governor has an uphill climb: A poll last week showed him with 2% support in a GOP primary race, running last in a field that placed Senator McCain of Arizona first, with 35% backing.

“I don’t see him satisfying conservatives under any circumstances,” Mr. Zogby said, adding, “Flip-flopping doesn’t work. Just ask John Kerry.”

According to a political consultant at the State University of New York, Gerald Benjamin, Mr. Pataki has New York’s political environment to thank for his predicament. Since Governor Rockefeller established the state as a bastion of progressive Republicanism when he confronted the Reagan Republican movement at the 1964 GOP convention, Mr. Benjamin said, “there’s been no serious national candidacy by a Republican from New York.”

“The reason,” he said, “is that the center of New York politics is a very different place. It’s a problem for Giuliani, and it’s a problem for Pataki – and this is a very concrete example of a larger phenomenon,” Mr. Benjamin said of Mr. Pataki’s emergency-contraception dilemma.

Allies of the governor, however, are pinning some of the blame for Mr. Pataki’s bind on the Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, Republican of Rensselaer. The emergency-contraception legislation passed the Democratic-controlled Assembly in January, and last week Mr. Bruno brought it to the floor of the Senate – where Republicans outnumber Democrats 35 to 27 – over the objections of most of the GOP senators.

“I think that the number of senators that voted against it was very telling,” one member of the Republican conference, Martin Golden of Brooklyn, said. Mr. Golden gave an impassioned speech against the bill Thursday on the floor of the Senate.

At a press conference after the bill’s passage, Mr. Bruno was asked about its effect on Mr. Pataki’s political future and expressed his support for the governor, saying: “I hope the governor runs for governor and for president. I think he’ll be elected to both, and I want to be on the record saying that.”

Mr. Bruno’s move, and his vote for the bill, may have been calculated to help the measure’s Republican sponsor, Senator Nicholas Spano of Yonkers, who won re-election by only 18 votes and is seen as a vulnerable political target next year in a liberal downstate region.

Given the slim and dwindling Republican majority in the Senate, spectators in Albany suggested that Mr. Bruno’s move was an effort to allow Mr. Spano to attach his name to legislation heavily favored by Democrats, helping him keep his seat and maintaining the Senate’s Republican majority. Mr. Bruno denies that implication.

If a Republican majority yields a form of abortion on demand for minors, however, it’s not worth keeping, the chairman of the New York State Conservative Party, Michael Long, said.

Because the legislation in question grants pharmacists, nurses, and midwives the ability to supply, under the auspices of blanket prescriptions that do not specify a patient, emergency contraception to women and girls regardless of age and without parental notification, it makes the morning-after pill easier to obtain than normal contraceptive drugs.

Advocates of the legislation have said, among other arguments, that increasing access to contraception will reduce the number of surgical abortions in New York state. Yet while the morning-after pill can work to prevent the formation of an embryo, it can also prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. To those who believe, for scientific or religious reasons, that life begins at conception, emergency contraception thus can destroy a human life that was created at the moment of fertilization.

“I clearly think that the overwhelming majority of Americans really think that when it comes to this kind of drug, that children should not be allowed to walk into a drugstore like they’re buying a Hershey bar or cough drops,” Mr. Long said.

He said Mr. Bruno’s decision was “another clear example that the moral compass that used to be represented by the Republican majority” had been forfeited. The Conservative Party, for its part, will strenuously lobby the governor to veto the bill, Mr. Long said.

Joining Mr. Long’s cohort will be religious conservatives, in an effort spearheaded by the New York State Catholic Conference. A spokesman, Dennis Poust, said yesterday that the conference plans to mobilize its network of more than 13,000 members to pressure Mr. Pataki to veto the legislation. New York’s Catholic bishops, too, could be involved in the effort to persuade the governor, who is Catholic, Mr. Poust said.

In addition to the conference’s moral objections to the legislation, they plan to raise healthcare concerns, Mr. Poust said.

“The FDA has not as yet deemed this safe to be sold over the counter, precisely because the effects of repeated use on young girls are not known,” he said. Furthermore, because young women could obtain the drug without ever consulting a doctor, it would reduce the likelihood of their being evaluated for signs of sexual abuse or for possible harmful reactions to the drug, he said.

Observers said that in light of the FDA’s concerns about emergency contraception, and because of the lack of age restrictions, Mr. Pataki may dodge his predicament by citing those concerns and vetoing the bill, while expressing his philosophical support for access to abortion.

Spokesmen for the governor have given no indication about Mr. Pataki’s plans. Once legislation is received, the governor has 10 business days to review it before reaching a decision.

The emergency-contraception bill may be dispatched to the governor next week.