By teeing up a public battle over abortion in the health care bill now before the Senate, congressional Democrats could be risking more than just the fate of the legislation.

Hanging in the balance are millions of Catholic swing voters who moved decisively to the Democrats in 2008 and who could shift away just as readily in 2010.

According to exit polls, President Barack Obama won the support of 53 percent of Catholic voters, a seven-point increase over the showing of the Democrats’ 2004 nominee, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a Catholic. Among Latino Catholics, who are often more conservative than their white counterparts on social issues, Obama did even better, winning more than two-thirds of their support, a 14-point improvement over Kerry’s totals, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Those gains will be at risk if a polarizing abortion fight takes place in the Senate.

“There could be political repercussions in the election. It could be harder for the Democrats to keep those Catholics voters they gained and they may put some of their members at risk,” said John Green, a religion and politics expert at the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron.

Moreover, said Green, Catholics are a constituency that backs the reform effort itself. “To alienate them on abortion could be to alienate them on health care reform,” he said.

The abortion issue, practically dormant during the 2008 campaign, was reignited in the last hours of the health care debate in the House because of an amendment offered by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) that would prohibit the use of federal subsidies to pay for insurance that covers abortion, except in the cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is threatened. 

The amendment, after heavy lobbying by the Catholic Church, eventually passed despite the furious objection of the abortion rights advocates who have long been a key part of the Democratic base. Now the fight goes to the Senate, where there will be a sharp division on the issue between party liberals and moderates.

Already it’s become an issue in the primary to choose a Democratic candidate for the Massachusetts Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy.

In a local television interview, one of the candidates, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, said that if she had been in the Senate she would have killed the health care reform bill rather than support the Stupak amendment.

One of her opponents, Rep. Michael Capuano, defended his House vote for the bill by saying he wanted to keep the reform effort moving. But he vowed to vote against a final bill if it still contains the abortion funding amendment.

In the neighboring and equally Democratic and Catholic state of Rhode Island, the abortion amendment has played out another way. Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin, an outspoken critic of prominent Catholic politicians he believes are acting against church tenets, is engaged in a public feud with Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who voted against the Stupak amendment.

Anger over the church’s lobbying for the amendment prompted Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), an abortions rights supporter, to call for an Internal Revenue Service investigation of the church’s tax status.

It’s a hollow threat. No law prohibits religious organizations from lobbying Congress, provided the bulk of their budget expenditures are spent on other programs.

But the Woolsey retaliatory attack, published in POLITICO, generated fresh headlines about the dispute and could drive a deeper wedge between the party and a key electoral constituency.

Tad Devine, a Democratic political consultant, said the party would be better off downplaying the disagreement.

“Voters who consider themselves Catholic are able to see the church teachings in ways that can be pro-Democratic Party or pro-Republican Party,” said Devine, noting that the church is also a strong advocate for immigrants in the health care debate.

The Catholic Church's involvement in the health care debate particulalry with regard to the Stupak amendment may sway enough Catholics back to the Republican side of the ledger in 2010 to cause the Democrats severe indigestion with a bloc they thought they were gaining frim control over.

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