The Fourth Procedure

People don't always talk about it, but popular fiction is normally targeted toward one gender or the other. As a rule, the more technological jargon and thunderous explosions a novel features, the more it's apt to have a largely male audience. Thus at first glance Stanley Pottinger's THE FOURTH PROCEDURE (Ballantine, $23.95) looks to be a classic example from the Testosterone School of thrillers: blackmail, terrorist bombings, a series of mutilated corpses, and an intrepid congressman named Jack MacLeod to the rescue. Upon closer examination, however, The Fourth Procedure isn't quite what it seems. Billed as ''a novel of medical suspense,'' it takes place in the future, when the President nominates Abner Titus to the Supreme Court. If Titus is confirmed, his swing vote will enable the court to outlaw abortion. Alas, the plot is quite impossible to summarize sufficiently without giving away its secrets. Suffice it to say that MacLeod is in love with a woman whose closest friend is a leading organ transplant surgeon, Dr. Rachel Redpath, who also happens to be Judge Titus' personal physician. Redpath would do anything to prevent his voting to overturn the abortion ruling. Ultimately, Pottinger never targets his reader, using women's issues to propel his potboiler. It would be easy to write off The Fourth Procedure as a second-rate thriller-but that would ignore its sheer, opportunistic vulgarity. C