Bits Blog: Tech Predictions for 2013: It's All About Mobile

If there is one theme that will be the topic of digital business this year, it is mobile.

ComScore, which tracks Web and mobile usage, published a report about what happened in 2012, and what to expect in 2013.

It shows that the effects of a movement toward mobile are everywhere, from shopping to media to search. According to the report, “2013 could spell a very rocky economic transition,” and businesses will have to scramble to stay ahead of consumers’ changing behavior.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the 48-page report.

The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.

Just as they compete on computers, Facebook and Google are dominant and at each other’s throats on phones.

Google’s map app for the iPhone, which had been the most used mobile app, lost its No. 1 spot to Facebook after Apple kicked Google’s maps off the iPhone in October. Now, Facebook reaches 76 percent of the smartphone market and accounts for 23 percent of total time spent using apps each month. The next five most used apps are Google’s, which account for 10 percent of time on apps.

As mobile continues to take share from desktop, some industries have been particularly affected, and they are seeing significant declines in desktop use of their products as a result. They are newspapers, search engines, maps, weather, comparison shopping, directories and instant messenger services.

The most visited Web sites are not so surprising: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. Facebook continues to take up most of our time online.

But there were a few surprises from younger, smaller Web companies. Tumblr was No. 8 on the list of sites, ordered by time spent on them. And several Web sites were breakout hits last year, as measured by growth and visitor numbers: Spotify (music), Dropbox (online storage), Etsy (shopping), BuzzFeed (news), JustFab (shopping), SoundCloud (music) and BusinessInsider (news).

Search, one of the biggest and most reliable Web industries, is at a crossroads, comScore said. Even though the search market continues to be extraordinarily profitable, there is a desire for it to evolve and offer new services to users.

Here is some evidence: Searches on traditional search engines, dominated by Google, declined 3 percent last year, and the number of searches per searcher declined 7 percent. Yet searches on specialty sites, known as vertical search engines, like Amazon.com or Whitepages.com, climbed 8 percent.

Social search, based on what users’ friends like, has put Facebook and Google on a “collision course,” comScore said, particularly in searches for local businesses like restaurants.

In social networking, the visual Web, as comScore calls it, has transformed the landscape. Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, all of which emphasize images, each gained more than 10 million visitors last year.

Last year was also pivotal for online video, comScore said, as viewers increasingly seek the ability to watch video when and where they want. Watching TV shows online helped last year break viewing records, especially during the Olympics.

In the United States, 75 million people a day watch online video and stream 40 billion videos a month, and viewing is driven by YouTube.

There has also been a turning point for video ads. They cost more than typical ads, and have always lagged behind viewership. But in 2012, 23 percent of videos were accompanied by an ad, up from 14 percent the year before. More TV ad dollars are coming to online video, comScore concluded.

Though e-commerce spending grew 13 percent last year, it was a disappointing holiday season online, largely because of economic pressures. Purchasing on mobile phones is beginning to make a dent in e-commerce, comScore said, with mobile shopping accounting for 11 percent of e-commerce in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from 3 percent in the period two years earlier.

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IHT Rendezvous: Q and A: Nina Hoss, at Home at the Berlinale

BERLIN — The German actress Nina Hoss has been a fixture at the Berlinale in recent years. She won the best actress prize in 2007 for Christian Petzold’s “Yella,” served on the jury in 2011 and starred in one of the most acclaimed titles in last year’s competition, “Barbara,” also directed by Mr. Petzold (with whom she has made five movies in the past dozen years).

This year Ms. Hoss returned to the festival with “Gold,” her first film with Thomas Arslan, the German director often grouped with Mr. Petzold as a founding member of the Berlin School movement. A laconic and methodical neo-western, “Gold” chronicles the arduous expedition of several German fortune seekers into the Klondike hinterlands. Ms. Hoss plays Emily Meyer, a poised and somewhat enigmatic divorcée who may be the most driven member of the group, determined to forge ahead at all costs. It’s a typically restrained yet suggestive performance from an actress who has made an art of holding back.

Ms. Hoss, who will next be seen opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of John le Carré’s novel “A Most Wanted Man,” spoke about “Gold” and her collaborations with Mr. Arslan and Mr. Petzold in an interview at the Hotel Mandala during the festival.

Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:

Q.

When you take on a period role, as you’ve done with “Gold” and “Barbara,” do you approach it differently?

A.

As a character you always deal with the environment you live in — that helps you understand why they react the way they do. With Emily, for instance, she wears a corset at the beginning, so there’s a restriction right away, but eventually she lets go. These aren’t problems a modern woman would deal with. But they were only allowed to wear skirts in those days, and they even had to take care of the length of the skirt — the Canadian police would actually fine them if they weren’t long enough. Knowing that, even if we don’t talk about it in the movie, helps you to create the character.

Q.

What else did the research involve?

A.

There’s a Canadian writer, Pierre Berton, who wrote books about the Klondike Gold Rush with loads of photographs. But the thing that helped me the most was making a research trip to Dawson City [the destination in “Gold”] three weeks before shooting. I wanted to see where they wanted to go. When you get to this place in the middle of nowhere — really, you drive for six hours and maybe you see 15 cars, no houses, and it’s still wild — you have this feeling of wanting to stay for some weird reason. I understood what they were longing for.

The people who live there are adventurous, they’re open, and they have to work with each other because otherwise they’re never make it through the winter. I could feel it, this simplicity but also the possibility of a new society, which was particularly interesting for a character like Emily. There are not so many books on women during that time but in Dawson City I found some books on local history. There were women who went there looking for adventure and for freedom and to create themselves again. There was no one to tell you that you couldn’t, so women succeeded there and that was a very interesting perspective on those days.

Q.

What about physical preparations?

A.

We had riding lessons here outside of Berlin, and there were lots of preparations with all the props. There was a specialist who taught us how they made fire. We had to practice packing and unpacking the horses, how to saddle them properly. It was practical training more than intellectual discussions.

Q.

Was it a difficult shoot?

A.

It was quite exhausting. Because it’s a low-budget project there are not too many people around to help with the horses, for example. You can imagine, these seven actors in a dense forest, holding their horses for hours, until the camera is ready. They get crazy — the horses, I mean.

Q.

To what extent did you think of “Gold” as a western?

A.

More a road movie. I think it’s not as lawless as a western. It has parts of the genre in it, like revenge and a shootout. But what I found quite interesting is being German in this country, it’s as if they bring the law with them, and there are all these restrictions that they put on themselves. When you see this German group in the forests of Canada, it immediately tells you how far they’ve traveled. What I found interesting was thinking about what makes people follow their dreams, how hope keeps you going and how it can destroy you.

Q.

Did you see similarities between Emily and Barbara? They’re living in very different circumstances but both are extremely focused women, self-sufficient out of necessity.

A.

In that sense, maybe, and also in that they have principles. Emily has strong principles and is very pragmatic, and same with Barbara. They are women with principles and also they don’t want to let go. For me there’s something very positive underneath with both of them. They believe in life and they want to live, with all its ups and downs. They want to die and say, I lived. No one took it away from me.

But Emily doesn’t have to hold back as much. She does in the beginning because it was dangerous for women to be on their own, so she can’t just be too openhearted.

Q.

Since your characters often reveal little about themselves, do you create back stories for them?

A.

To be so restricted in some of these roles, especially in Christian’s films, can be a tough job. That’s why I need to do other types of films and theater — you become an actor to express yourself, and it’s tough to restrain yourself all the time. I love it, of course, because it’s a specific kind of task and I love the characters Christian writes for me. But I need to know everything about her. From the script I can guess that’s probably why she reacts a certain way, maybe because of the past, so I construct something.

With these characters you don’t just react and say what you think. It’s more like, oh, I would like to say this now but I can’t, so I’m saying this instead. There are so many things going on that I need to exactly know what she wanted to say. That has to be precise, otherwise I go crazy. But I don’t force it. I don’t feel like I need to tell the audience what I’m thinking right now. I love that it can be very precise for me, but when you watch it your mind creates your own story for her.

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Drug Makers Increasingly Join Fight Against Doping

Now, a growing number of pharmaceutical companies are trying to prevent their drugs from the same fate by joining with antidoping officials to develop tests to detect the illegal use of their drugs among athletes.

Two major drug makers, Roche and GlaxoSmithKline, have begun evaluating every new drug candidate for its potential to be abused by athletes and have agreed to share information about those products with the World Anti-Doping Agency, known as WADA, which polices drug use in international sports. Several other smaller companies have provided proprietary information about specific drugs. A conference in Paris in November dedicated to the topic drew 250 participants.

The development reflects a significant shift from the days when drug makers paid little attention to how their products could be abused by athletes, said David Howman, the director general of the antidoping agency. In the past, drug makers “felt that any publicity in relation to antidoping control would be negative,” he said. “But what they discovered is the opposite happened.”

Instead of shying away from such stories, Roche and Glaxo have promoted their involvement as an example of good corporate citizenship. Last year, Glaxo went so far as to sponsor the testing laboratories for the London Games, the first time in Olympic history that an antidoping laboratory had a named corporate sponsor.

Pauline Williams, who leads the team at Glaxo that runs the antidoping initiative, said the cooperation with WADA grew out of that sponsorship. “What the London 2012 involvement led to was a real pride and willingness, and a positive attitude toward this continued engagement,” she said. Since the start of the program, the company said it has shared information about four of its projects, and development of a test for one drug is under way.

Antidoping officials have long sought information from drug companies. For instance, Amgen, which developed EPO, helped develop a test for Aranesp, another of its drugs that has been used in doping, in advance of the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics. But such arrangements were ad hoc and fairly simple, said Olivier Rabin, the antidoping agency’s science director. “It was almost more by chance when it was happening,” he said.

Relationships between antidoping officials and pharmaceutical companies have sometimes been tense. In 2006, Amgen was criticized for sponsoring the Tour of California at a time when EPO abuse was rampant among cyclists. Although the company said it had sponsored the race to raise awareness about doping, it was later revealed that the organizers had failed to test for EPO, short for erythropoietin, a synthetic hormone that, like Aranesp, stimulates the production of red blood cells.

“They were associated with some things in the past which we felt were probably inappropriate,” Mr. Howman said. “What we had to do was start the conversation from scratch, and say let’s see how we can work together.”

Steven Elliott, the Amgen scientist who invented Aranesp, said the misperceptions went both ways. He said some believed, wrongly, that biotechnology companies were developing drugs that could be misused by athletes as a way to increase sales. “There was this uneasiness about that,” said Mr. Elliott, who recently retired but continues to work as a liaison between biotechnology companies and the antidoping agency. “There had to be this realization that it was a win-win for both sides.”

Antidoping officials began to work more closely with drug makers after 2004, when Dr. Rabin heard that athletes were talking about a new version of EPO, called CERA, that was being developed by Roche, and asked the company for help.

“We were shocked when they first contacted us,” recalled Barbara Leishman, who oversees the antidoping program there. She said company scientists had not realized that athletes were following the drug’s development so closely. “This is not the sort of thing we like to hear about our compounds.”

Roche then worked with the antidoping agency to develop a blood test for the new drug, turning over proprietary compounds, called reagents, that would help officials test for their drug. Because of the complex nature of the drug, which mimics the body’s own hormones, and the development of the test, the project took years.

In 2009, blood samples from six athletes taken during the Beijing Olympics tested positive for CERA. Other drug makers took note of the media attention Roche received for the collaboration, Mr. Howman said. “Once there’s a foot in the water, then you can follow and walk right in,” he said.

Roche broadened its agreement with WADA, expanding the project to screen all of its drugs in development. Glaxo followed suit and around the same time, two major industry groups representing biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies adopted policies encouraging their members to cooperate.

Halting the abuse of new prescription drugs is only part of the antidoping picture. Athletes today are believed to use a variety of methods to gain an advantage, from transfusing their own blood to taking tiny quantities of tried-and-true doping agents. And some performance-enhancing drugs gain life in illicit laboratories, as was the case with “the clear,” the designer steroid developed in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative that toppled star athletes like Marion Jones.

Still, pharmaceutical companies have an important role to play given how complex new drugs have become, and how athletes are increasingly using substances that closely mimic the body’s natural processes, officials said.

“Developing detection methods to show that the substance taken in a synthetic form is different than your natural substance is more challenging,” said Matthew Fedoruk, the science director for the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

Many pharmaceutical companies already have the tools to create a doping test for their products because the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory bodies require them to show how the drug passes through the body. During the development process, the companies design reagents to help identify the drug. Amgen and other companies, like the biotechnology company Affymax — which makes a competing anemia drug called Omontys — have given WADA some of these reagents for use in developing tests.

Still, Dr. Rabin and others said some companies needed persuading and did not return his calls. In those cases, he said, he uses peer pressure, reminding them that other companies are also participating.

“We know the progress of their drugs, and we know that at some point collaboration will naturally come,” he said. “We are a bit stubborn.”

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Well: Twins Don't Need C-Sections

Obstetricians increasingly recommend planned Caesarean sections for women having twins, but a new study has found that a C-section for healthy twins usually provides no advantage over vaginal delivery.

Researchers randomly assigned 2,800 mothers carrying healthy twins to either a planned C-section or a planned vaginal delivery. There was no difference in outcome between the two groups. There were serious medical problems, like bone fracture or abnormal levels of consciousness, in 36 babies delivered by C-section and 35 delivered vaginally. Twenty-one babies delivered by C-section died, as did 17 delivered vaginally.

Mothers fared equally well in each group, with serious health problems in 7.3 percent of the C-section mothers and in 8.5 percent of the vaginal delivery group.

The trial was carried out in well-equipped health care settings and by practitioners experienced in multiple births. “These skills should be available to anyone trained in obstetrics,” said the lead author, Dr. Jon Barrett, chief of maternal-fetal medicine at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. “This indicates the need for the current generation of obstetricians who have these skills to impart them to their students and give women the opportunity for the best choice.”

Results of the study were presented at a medical conference in San Francisco last week.

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Well: Twins Don't Need C-Sections

Obstetricians increasingly recommend planned Caesarean sections for women having twins, but a new study has found that a C-section for healthy twins usually provides no advantage over vaginal delivery.

Researchers randomly assigned 2,800 mothers carrying healthy twins to either a planned C-section or a planned vaginal delivery. There was no difference in outcome between the two groups. There were serious medical problems, like bone fracture or abnormal levels of consciousness, in 36 babies delivered by C-section and 35 delivered vaginally. Twenty-one babies delivered by C-section died, as did 17 delivered vaginally.

Mothers fared equally well in each group, with serious health problems in 7.3 percent of the C-section mothers and in 8.5 percent of the vaginal delivery group.

The trial was carried out in well-equipped health care settings and by practitioners experienced in multiple births. “These skills should be available to anyone trained in obstetrics,” said the lead author, Dr. Jon Barrett, chief of maternal-fetal medicine at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. “This indicates the need for the current generation of obstetricians who have these skills to impart them to their students and give women the opportunity for the best choice.”

Results of the study were presented at a medical conference in San Francisco last week.

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Disruptions: Disruptions: 3-D Printing Is on the Fast Track

Will the future be printed in 3-D?

At first glance, looking at past predictions about the future of technology, prognosticators got a whole lot wrong. The Web is a garbage dump of inaccurate guesses about the year 2000, 2010 and beyond. Flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs still are nowhere near a reality.

Yet the prediction that 3-D printers will become a part of our daily lives is happening much sooner than anyone anticipated. These printers can produce objects, even rather intricate ones, by printing thin layer after layer of plastic, metal, ceramics or other materials. And the products they make can be highly customized.

Last week, President Obama cited this nascent technology during his State of the Union address — as if everyone already knew what the technology was.

He expressed hope that it was a way to rejuvenate American manufacturing. “A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything,” Mr. Obama said. He has pushed new technologies before, like solar and wind power, as remedies for our nation’s problems, and those attempts have only revived the debate about the limitations of government industrial policy.

But this one shows more promise. The question is, can the United States get a foothold in manufacturing one 3-D printer at a time?

Hod Lipson, an associate professor and the director of the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell, said “3-D printing is worming its way into almost every industry, from entertainment, to food, to bio- and medical-applications.”

It won’t necessarily directly create manufacturing jobs, except perhaps for the printers themselves. Dr. Lipson, the co-author of “Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing,” said that the technology “is not going to simply replace existing manufacturing anytime soon.” But he said he believed that it would give rise to new businesses. “The bigger opportunity in the U.S. is that it opens and creates new business models that are based on this idea of customization.”

In addition to the lab that the president mentioned, a federally financed manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio, schools are embracing the technology. The University of Virginia has been working to introduce 3-D printers into some programs from kindergarten through 12th grade in Charlottesville to prepare students for a new future in manufacturing.

“We have 3-D printers in classrooms, and in one example, we’re teaching kids how to design and print catapults that they then analyze for efficiency,” said Glen L. Bull, professor and co-director of the Center for Technology and Teacher Education. “We believe that every school in America could have a 3-D printer in the classroom in the next few years.”

The education system may want to speed things up. The time between predictions for 3-D printers and the reality of what they can accomplish is compressing rapidly.

For example, in 2010, researchers at the University of Southern California said that another decade would pass before we could build a home using a 3-D printer. Yet last week, Softkill Design, a London architecture collective, announced that it planned to make the first such home — which it will assemble in a single day — later this year. The home isn’t that pretty, and will look more like a calcified spider web than a cozy house, but it will show it can be done. The price of 3-D printers has also dropped sharply over the last two years, with machines that once cost $20,000, now at $1,000 or less. That’s partly because Chinese companies are driving down prices. Yes, China sees the opportunity in these things, even though the technology may undermine some of its manufacturing advantages.

“When it costs you the same amount of manufacturing effort to make advanced robotic parts as it does to manufacture a paperweight, that really changes things in a profound way,” Dr. Lipson said.

This leaves us with one more question about the future: When will these 3-D printers be able to make us flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs?

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 18

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A First Step on Continent for Google on Use of Content

PARIS — Publishers in France say they have struck an innovative agreement with Google on the use of their content online. Their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, however, say the French gave in too easily to the Internet giant.

The deal was signed this month by President François Hollande of France and Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, who called it a breakthrough in the tense relationship between publishers and Google, and as a possible model for other countries to follow.

Under the deal, Google agreed to set up a fund, worth €60 million, or $80 million, over three years, to help publishers develop their digital units. The two sides also pledged to deepen business ties, using Google’s online tools, in an effort to generate more online revenue for the publishers, who have struggled to counteract dwindling print revenue.

But the French group, representing newspaper and magazine publishers with an online presence, as well as a variety of other news-oriented Web sites, yielded on its most important demand: that Google and other search engines and “aggregators” of news should start paying for links to their content.

Google, which insists that its links provide a service to publishers by directing traffic to their sites, had fiercely resisted any change in the principle of free linking.

The agreement dismayed members of the European Publishers Council, a lobbying group in Brussels, which has been pushing for a fundamental change in the relationship between publishers and Google. The group criticized the French publishers for breaking ranks and striking a separate business agreement that has no statutory standing.

The deal “does not address the continuing problem of unauthorized reuse and monetization of content, and so does not provide the online press with the financial certainty or mechanisms for legal redress which it needs to build sustainable business models and ensure its continued investment in high-quality content,” Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the publishers council, said in a statement.

German publishers were also scornful, with Anja Pasquay, a spokeswoman for the German Newspaper Publishers’ Association, saying: “Obviously the French position isn’t one that we would favor. This is not the solution for Germany.”

Germany has been in the forefront of the push to get Google to share with online news publishers some of the billions of euros that the company earns from the sale of advertising. A proposed law, endorsed by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel and working its way through the federal legislature, would grant a new form of copyright to digital publishers. If enacted, it could allow publishers to charge search engines or aggregators for displaying even snippets of news articles alongside links to other Web sites.

Mr. Hollande had vowed to introduce similar legislation this winter if Google and the publishers did not come to terms. It appears that Google, which had threatened to stop indexing French Web sites’ content if it had to pay for links, has sidelined the threat of legislation, at least for now; the agreement will be reviewed after three years, Mr. Hollande has said.

Under the deal, Google says it will help the publishers use several of its digital advertising services, including AdSense, AdMob and Ad Exchange, more effectively.

Publishers are already free to use these services, and it was not immediately clear how they would be able to generate more revenue from them; this part of the accord remains confidential, both sides say, because they are still negotiating the fine print.

“This agreement can help accelerate the move toward greater advertising revenues in the digital world,” said Marc Schwartz of Mazars, a consulting firm, who is serving as an independent mediator in the talks. “I’m not saying we have done everything, but it’s a first step in the right direction.”

More has been said about the planned innovation fund. Publishers will submit proposals to the fund, which will select ideas to finance and develop, with the involvement of Google engineers.

“The idea is that it would inject innovation into the sector in France,” said Simon Morrison, copyright policy manager at Google.

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Cuomo Bucks Tide With Bill to Lift Abortion Limits

ALBANY — Bucking a trend in which states have been seeking to restrict abortion, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is putting the finishing touches on legislation that would guarantee women in New York the right to late-term abortions when their health is in danger or the fetus is not viable.

Mr. Cuomo, seeking to deliver on a promise he made in his recent State of the State address, would rewrite a law that currently allows abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy only if the pregnant woman’s life is at risk. The law is not enforced, because it is superseded by federal court rulings that allow late-term abortions to protect a woman’s health, even if her life is not in jeopardy. But abortion rights advocates say the existence of the more restrictive state law has a chilling effect on some doctors and prompts some women to leave the state for late-term abortions.

Mr. Cuomo’s proposal, which has not yet been made public, would also clarify that licensed health care practitioners, and not only physicians, can perform abortions. It would remove abortion from the state’s penal law and regulate it through the state’s public health law.

Abortion rights advocates have welcomed Mr. Cuomo’s plan, which he outlined in general terms as part of a broader package of women’s rights initiatives in his State of the State address in January. But the Roman Catholic Church and anti-abortion groups are dismayed; opponents have labeled the legislation the Abortion Expansion Act.

The prospects for Mr. Cuomo’s effort are uncertain. The State Assembly is controlled by Democrats who support abortion rights; the Senate is more difficult to predict because this year it is controlled by a coalition of Republicans who have tended to oppose new abortion rights laws and breakaway Democrats who support abortion rights.

New York legalized abortion in 1970, three years before it was legalized nationally by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. Mr. Cuomo’s proposal would update the state law so that it could stand alone if the broader federal standard set by Roe were to be undone.

“Why are we doing this? The Supreme Court could change,” said a senior Cuomo administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the governor had not formally introduced his proposal.

But opponents of abortion rights, already upset at the high rate of abortions in New York State, worry that rewriting the abortion law would encourage an even greater number of abortions. For example, they suggest that the provision to allow abortions late in a woman’s pregnancy for health reasons could be used as a loophole to allow unchecked late-term abortions.

“I am hard pressed to think of a piece of legislation that is less needed or more harmful than this one,” the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, wrote in a letter to Mr. Cuomo last month. Referring to Albany lawmakers in a subsequent column, he added, “It’s as though, in their minds, our state motto, ‘Excelsior’ (‘Ever Upward’), applies to the abortion rate.”

National abortion rights groups have sought for years to persuade state legislatures to adopt laws guaranteeing abortion rights as a backup to Roe. But they have had limited success: Only seven states have such measures in place, including California, Connecticut and Maryland; the most recent state to adopt such a law is Hawaii, which did so in 2006.

“Pretty much all of the energy, all of the momentum, has been to restrict abortion, which makes what could potentially happen in New York so interesting,” said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. “There’s no other state that’s even contemplating this right now.”

In most statehouses, the push by lawmakers has been in the opposite direction. The past two years has seen more provisions adopted at the state level to restrict abortion rights than in any two-year period in decades, according to the Guttmacher Institute; last year, 19 states adopted 43 new provisions restricting abortion access, while not a single significant measure was adopted to expand access to abortion or to comprehensive sex education.

“It’s an extraordinary moment in terms of the degree to which there is government interference in a woman’s ability to make these basic health care decisions,” said Andrea Miller, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice New York. “For New York to be able to send a signal, a hopeful sign, a sense of the turning of the tide, we think is really important.”

Abortion rights advocates say that even though the Roe decision supersedes state law, some doctors are hesitant to perform late-term abortions when a woman’s health is at risk because the criminal statutes remain on the books.

“Doctors and hospitals shouldn’t be reading criminal laws to determine what types of health services they can offer and provide to their patients,” said M. Tracey Brooks, the president of Family Planning Advocates of New York State.

For Mr. Cuomo, the debate over passing a new abortion law presents an opportunity to appeal to women as well as to liberals, who have sought action in Albany without success since Eliot Spitzer made a similar proposal when he was governor. But it also poses a challenge to the coalition of Republicans and a few Democrats that controls the State Senate, the chamber that has in the past stood as the primary obstacle to passing abortion legislation in the capital.

The governor has said that his Reproductive Health Act would be one plank of a 10-part Women’s Equality Act that also would include equal pay and anti-discrimination provisions. Conservative groups, still stinging from the willingness of Republican lawmakers to go along with Mr. Cuomo’s push to legalize same-sex marriage in 2011, are mobilizing against the proposal. Seven thousand New Yorkers who oppose the measure have sent messages to Mr. Cuomo and legislators via the Web site of the New York State Catholic Conference.

A number of anti-abortion groups have also formed a coalition called New Yorkers for Life, which is seeking to rally opposition to the governor’s proposal using social media.

“If you ask anyone on the street, ‘Is there enough abortion in New York?’ no one in their right mind would say we need more abortion,” said the Rev. Jason J. McGuire, the executive director of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, which is part of the coalition.

Members of both parties say that the issue of reproductive rights was a significant one in November’s legislative elections. Democrats, who were bolstered by an independent expenditure campaign by NARAL, credit their victories in several key Senate races in part to their pledge to fight for legislation similar to what Mr. Cuomo is planning to propose.

Republicans, who make up most of the coalition that controls the Senate, have generally opposed new abortion rights measures. Speaking with reporters recently, the leader of the Republicans, Dean G. Skelos of Long Island, strenuously objected to rewriting the state’s abortion laws, especially in a manner similar to what the governor is seeking.

“You could have an abortion up until the day the child would be born, and I think that’s just wrong,” Mr. Skelos said. He suggested that the entire debate was unnecessary, noting that abortion is legal in New York State and saying that is “not going to be changed.”

The Senate Democratic leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Yonkers, who is the sponsor of a bill that is similar to the legislation the governor is drafting, said she was optimistic that an abortion measure would reach the Senate floor this year.

“New York State’s abortion laws were passed in 1970 in a bipartisan fashion,” she said. “It would be a sad commentary that over 40 years later we could not manage to do the same thing.”

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Cuomo Bucks Tide With Bill to Lift Abortion Limits

ALBANY — Bucking a trend in which states have been seeking to restrict abortion, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is putting the finishing touches on legislation that would guarantee women in New York the right to late-term abortions when their health is in danger or the fetus is not viable.

Mr. Cuomo, seeking to deliver on a promise he made in his recent State of the State address, would rewrite a law that currently allows abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy only if the pregnant woman’s life is at risk. The law is not enforced, because it is superseded by federal court rulings that allow late-term abortions to protect a woman’s health, even if her life is not in jeopardy. But abortion rights advocates say the existence of the more restrictive state law has a chilling effect on some doctors and prompts some women to leave the state for late-term abortions.

Mr. Cuomo’s proposal, which has not yet been made public, would also clarify that licensed health care practitioners, and not only physicians, can perform abortions. It would remove abortion from the state’s penal law and regulate it through the state’s public health law.

Abortion rights advocates have welcomed Mr. Cuomo’s plan, which he outlined in general terms as part of a broader package of women’s rights initiatives in his State of the State address in January. But the Roman Catholic Church and anti-abortion groups are dismayed; opponents have labeled the legislation the Abortion Expansion Act.

The prospects for Mr. Cuomo’s effort are uncertain. The State Assembly is controlled by Democrats who support abortion rights; the Senate is more difficult to predict because this year it is controlled by a coalition of Republicans who have tended to oppose new abortion rights laws and breakaway Democrats who support abortion rights.

New York legalized abortion in 1970, three years before it was legalized nationally by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. Mr. Cuomo’s proposal would update the state law so that it could stand alone if the broader federal standard set by Roe were to be undone.

“Why are we doing this? The Supreme Court could change,” said a senior Cuomo administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the governor had not formally introduced his proposal.

But opponents of abortion rights, already upset at the high rate of abortions in New York State, worry that rewriting the abortion law would encourage an even greater number of abortions. For example, they suggest that the provision to allow abortions late in a woman’s pregnancy for health reasons could be used as a loophole to allow unchecked late-term abortions.

“I am hard pressed to think of a piece of legislation that is less needed or more harmful than this one,” the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, wrote in a letter to Mr. Cuomo last month. Referring to Albany lawmakers in a subsequent column, he added, “It’s as though, in their minds, our state motto, ‘Excelsior’ (‘Ever Upward’), applies to the abortion rate.”

National abortion rights groups have sought for years to persuade state legislatures to adopt laws guaranteeing abortion rights as a backup to Roe. But they have had limited success: Only seven states have such measures in place, including California, Connecticut and Maryland; the most recent state to adopt such a law is Hawaii, which did so in 2006.

“Pretty much all of the energy, all of the momentum, has been to restrict abortion, which makes what could potentially happen in New York so interesting,” said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. “There’s no other state that’s even contemplating this right now.”

In most statehouses, the push by lawmakers has been in the opposite direction. The past two years has seen more provisions adopted at the state level to restrict abortion rights than in any two-year period in decades, according to the Guttmacher Institute; last year, 19 states adopted 43 new provisions restricting abortion access, while not a single significant measure was adopted to expand access to abortion or to comprehensive sex education.

“It’s an extraordinary moment in terms of the degree to which there is government interference in a woman’s ability to make these basic health care decisions,” said Andrea Miller, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice New York. “For New York to be able to send a signal, a hopeful sign, a sense of the turning of the tide, we think is really important.”

Abortion rights advocates say that even though the Roe decision supersedes state law, some doctors are hesitant to perform late-term abortions when a woman’s health is at risk because the criminal statutes remain on the books.

“Doctors and hospitals shouldn’t be reading criminal laws to determine what types of health services they can offer and provide to their patients,” said M. Tracey Brooks, the president of Family Planning Advocates of New York State.

For Mr. Cuomo, the debate over passing a new abortion law presents an opportunity to appeal to women as well as to liberals, who have sought action in Albany without success since Eliot Spitzer made a similar proposal when he was governor. But it also poses a challenge to the coalition of Republicans and a few Democrats that controls the State Senate, the chamber that has in the past stood as the primary obstacle to passing abortion legislation in the capital.

The governor has said that his Reproductive Health Act would be one plank of a 10-part Women’s Equality Act that also would include equal pay and anti-discrimination provisions. Conservative groups, still stinging from the willingness of Republican lawmakers to go along with Mr. Cuomo’s push to legalize same-sex marriage in 2011, are mobilizing against the proposal. Seven thousand New Yorkers who oppose the measure have sent messages to Mr. Cuomo and legislators via the Web site of the New York State Catholic Conference.

A number of anti-abortion groups have also formed a coalition called New Yorkers for Life, which is seeking to rally opposition to the governor’s proposal using social media.

“If you ask anyone on the street, ‘Is there enough abortion in New York?’ no one in their right mind would say we need more abortion,” said the Rev. Jason J. McGuire, the executive director of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, which is part of the coalition.

Members of both parties say that the issue of reproductive rights was a significant one in November’s legislative elections. Democrats, who were bolstered by an independent expenditure campaign by NARAL, credit their victories in several key Senate races in part to their pledge to fight for legislation similar to what Mr. Cuomo is planning to propose.

Republicans, who make up most of the coalition that controls the Senate, have generally opposed new abortion rights measures. Speaking with reporters recently, the leader of the Republicans, Dean G. Skelos of Long Island, strenuously objected to rewriting the state’s abortion laws, especially in a manner similar to what the governor is seeking.

“You could have an abortion up until the day the child would be born, and I think that’s just wrong,” Mr. Skelos said. He suggested that the entire debate was unnecessary, noting that abortion is legal in New York State and saying that is “not going to be changed.”

The Senate Democratic leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Yonkers, who is the sponsor of a bill that is similar to the legislation the governor is drafting, said she was optimistic that an abortion measure would reach the Senate floor this year.

“New York State’s abortion laws were passed in 1970 in a bipartisan fashion,” she said. “It would be a sad commentary that over 40 years later we could not manage to do the same thing.”

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