What if groups that demanded reproductive choices for women actually offered them?

Mark these words: Adoption Access Network. Few people have ever heard of it, but it’s the rare phenomenon (we’re talking meteor-strike rare) that feminists on both sides of the abortion debate — the Sarah Palin-mama grizzly variety, as well as the old-school, march-on-Washington kind — can get behind.

The idea is simple. It is about choice. Not choice as a euphemism for the right to have an abortion, but choice in the true sense of the word: options, informed consent and support for women trying to figure out what to do with an unwanted pregnancy.

Imagine this: a woman enters her local Planned Parenthood office and notices, in the bathroom, a poster that says: “Questions about adoption? We can answer those, too.”

Such posters, which should be up in the hallways of at least 15 abortion providers in New York within the month, are produced by the Adoption Access Network as part of a campaign to make adoption a subject that patients and social workers alike feel more comfortable broaching in abortion clinics. The thinking is that all the clinics’ clients, whether they seem uneasy about abortion or not, should have a clear understanding of how adoption works, rather than just be handed a list of references — a list that essentially says, adoption is fine, but it’s not our thing.

To many who have labored for abortion rights, it might seem at first blush that abortion clinics need adoption specialists the way fish need bicycles — that it represents an infiltration of the opposition. Corinna Lohser, one of the founders of the Adoption Access Network, said that when she worked at an abortion clinic in Cleveland years ago, she and many of her colleagues were wary of adoption, noting that abortion providers are “the ones getting all this harassment from protesters about adoption.”

Now Ms. Lohser, 33, works for Spence-Chapin Adoption Services, a New York adoption agency that supports abortion rights, and has come to regret the lack of information she had been able to provide women in Cleveland. If a client said she didn’t think she could carry a pregnancy to term, then never see the child again, Ms. Lohser’s response was, she recalled, “Yup, check, me either.” She did not realize how much more common open adoptions had become; she knew of no adoption agency that would speak to women with an open mind about abortion.

With the financial support of Spence-Chapin, Mr. Lohser brainstormed with her co-founder, Cristina Page, a longtime abortion-rights advocate, on how to start training and educating willing abortion providers about adoption (since 2009, she has trained about 15 clinic staff members, one of whom serves 13 clinics). One clinic social worker recently counseled a woman, in frequent phone consultation with Spence-Chapin, through the placement of the baby with an adoptive family.

Discussing these choices is always delicate, but perhaps even more so in this setting. Social workers in abortion clinics run the risk of sounding as if they’re offering a refutation of the service they are there to provide. As Ms. Page put it: “It’s like you’ve come to this Italian restaurant — do you really want the waiter saying, ‘There’s this great German place down the block, not sure how much you know about it, but you might like it’?” The new training offers the counselors language that makes it clear the information is offered as education, not persuasion.

After Ms. Palin’s recent “mama grizzlies” speech, pundits focused more on whether she could call herself a feminist than on addressing her critiques of the abortion-rights message. Feminist groups, she said, want to tell women: “You’re not capable of doing both. You can’t give your child life and still pursue career and education.”

If Ms. Palin feels confident lobbing that point it’s because the right has kept old-line feminists so busy protecting abortion rights that they have less energy to focus on issues like adoption or, for that matter, quality child care for women who want to parent. The Adoption Access Network suggests recognition of one weak spot — and perhaps the emergence of a generation of women’s advocates who want to remedy that.

In a debate that’s about life and death for one side, and the autonomy of women on the other, common ground has been, to say the least, elusive. Give an inch, and it looks like your cause is giving up the ghost, which is why young women haven’t been feverishly starting Common Ground clubs on college campuses. But the Adoption Access Network suggests that common ground need not be a watering down of a commitment; in the best-case scenario, it’s an expansion of it.