The recent House of Representatives vote on a draft healthcare Bill has pitted pro-choice Democrats against anti-abortion Democrats and a Catholic bishop against a Kennedy.EVER SINCE the US Supreme Court gave American women the right to terminate pregnancy in the 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling, abortion has been one of the most divisive issues in US politics.
When Notre Dame University invited President Barack Obama to deliver the commencement address last May, some Catholics objected because Obama had supported abortion rights during his campaign.
Then the debate quietened down. Obama shifted emphasis from women's rights to reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. He kept reiterating that the 1976 Hyde amendment prohibits federal money being spent on abortion.
But the issue blew up again this week, in the wake of the November 7th vote in the House of Representatives on a draft healthcare Bill. It is pitting pro- choice Democrats against anti- abortion Democrats and a Catholic bishop against a Kennedy.
The abortion battle is likely to continue next week in the Senate, when majority leader Harry Reid hopes to bring a draft healthcare Bill to the floor.
The US is closer than it has ever been to achieving near universal healthcare, but the entire painstaking process could unravel over abortion.
It wouldn't have happened if both sides had left well enough alone and simply relied on the Hyde amendment. Ironically, both sides claim they want nothing more than the status quo.
In recent years, the Democratic party has gone out of its way to court social conservatives, to win seats previously held by Republicans. That strategy has backfired on abortion.
It was a Democratic congressman, Bart Stupak from Michigan, who put forward an amendment demanding not only that the government insurance option in the healthcare Bill be banned from covering abortion, but that private insurance companies participating in an insurance market or exchange to be established under the Bill also be forbidden from paying for abortions.
The Bill would give subsidies to companies in the exchange and tax credits to any family of four with an income of less than $88,000 a year purchasing insurance.
Companies participating in the exchange would have to drop abortion coverage and women receiving tax credits would not be eligible for abortion coverage, unless purchased privately outside the exchange, dramatically reducing the availability of the procedure to poor women.
Without the Stupak amendment, House speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn't have got the draft healthcare Bill passed. The amendment proved more popular than the Bill itself: 240 representatives voted for it, including 64 Democrats, while only 220 voted for the Bill, which passed by a whisker.
Tony Perkins, the head of the evangelical Family Research Council, called the passage of the Stupak amendment the biggest victory for opponents of abortion since 1973.
Terry O'Neill, the head of the National Organisation for Women, said Obama should not achieve healthcare reform "by pushing women back into the back alleys to die".
Kate Michelman and Frances Kissling, pro-choice activists writing in the New York Times , accused Democrats of sacrificing women's rights to political expediency. "In doing so, these so-called friends of women's rights have arguably done more to undermine reproductive rights than some of abortion's staunchest foes."
Now pro-choice and anti- abortion Democrats threaten to hold healthcare reform hostage to the abortion question.
Congresswoman Diana DeGette this week presented Pelosi with a letter signed by 40 House Democrats saying they would vote against the final Bill if it contained the restrictions of the Stupak amendment.
For his part, Stupak threatened "there will be hell to pay" if his fellow Democrats "double cross" him and that he too could muster 40 No votes.
The process will be equally fraught in the Senate. A quarter of US senators are Catholic. Not all of them oppose abortion, but every Democratic vote will be required to pass a Bill. Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska, said he would demand restrictions such as those imposed by Stupak in the House.
The American Conference of Bishops has long campaigned for universal healthcare in the US, but they were also the driving force behind the Stupak amendment, instructing priests to mobilise parishioners and openly lobbying for the House vote.
Critics say the presence of four envoys from the bishops' conference on the Hill on November 7th was a violation of the separation of church and state and have suggested the church should lose its tax-exempt status.
The dispute became personal in Rhode Island, where representative Patrick Kennedy, son of the late senator Ted Kennedy, clashed with Thomas Tobin, Bishop of Providence.
Kennedy accused the church of fanning "flames of dissent and discord" on Capitol Hill and asked "how the Catholic church could be against the biggest social justice issue of our time".
Bishop Tobin called Kennedy "a disappointment to the church" and suggested he should be denied Communion.
"If you freely choose to be a Catholic, it means you believe certain things," the Bishop said on a Providence radio station.
"If you cannot do all that in conscience, then you should perhaps feel free to go somewhere else."
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