By Ed Stoddard

DALLAS, April 18 (Reuters) - U.S. social conservatives celebrated Wednesday's Supreme Court decision upholding a nationwide ban on certain later-term abortions, but still see a long fight in their ultimate goal of a total abortion ban.

Abortion has emerged as one of the most divisive issues in American politics. Its most vocal critics are comprised mainly of conservative Christians who are a key base of support for President George W. Bush's Republican Party.

"For today, we have a significant victory for life and it is to be celebrated," said Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Family Research Council, an influential conservative lobby group with strong evangelical ties.

But he told Reuters by telephone that it was too early to speculate when the Holy Grail for social conservatives -- a Supreme Court decision reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that women have a basic constitutional right to abortion -- would be achieved.

Other social conservatives said they were still dug in for a long fight on this issue.

"It is encouraging but we also know that these struggles go back and forth and so it is not the end of the story," said Carrie Gordon Earll, spokeswoman for the Colorado Springs-based conservative advocacy group Focus on the Family.

"I would rank this as a major victory as far as limiting abortion in this country but how far this court will go toward banning abortion we don't know," she said.

POLITICAL BATTLE

Earll added that it highlighted the importance of presidential elections for all sides of the issue. The U.S. president nominates the top court's justices.

"We would like to see more changes on the court like we have seen in the last few years because we are looking for justices who will interpret the Constitution as written ... we do not believe there is a right to an abortion in the Constitution or any of the founding documents," she said.

Getting enough anti-abortion justices on the court to overturn Roe v. Wade has long been a key goal of the social conservative movement. Doing just the opposite is seen as vital by their liberal opponents.

A closely divided U.S. Supreme Court upheld for the first time a nationwide ban on a specific abortion procedure, a ruling critics denounced as undermining 30 years of precedent protecting women's health.

By a 5-4 vote, it ruled that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act that Bush signed into law in 2003 after its approval by the U.S. Congress -- then led by Republicans -- does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion. Both of Bush's appointees ruled with the conservative majority.

The upheld law makes it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion when the "entire fetal head" or "any" part of the fetal trunk past the navel" is outside the woman's uterus.

Some doctors view the procedure, which typically takes place after the first three months of pregnancy, as the safest method for the mother because it reduces several health risks.

Most polls show that those who want to abolish abortion rights altogether are in a minority, though when it comes to issues like later-term abortions the trends change.

This suggests that the issue is not as black and white for most Americans as the opposing activists on the issue claim.

"When the question is posed about very late term abortions most of the public is opposed to it," said Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center.

"But our polling consistently shows that a substantial majority of the public opposes overturning Roe v Wade," he said.

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