Bill Clinton took one of the biggest gambles of his presidency yesterday when he signalled his willingness to link the payment of nearly $1bn in unpaid American dues to the United Nations to a limit on US aid for international family planning initiatives which support abortion.
The concession, which Mr Clinton resisted in previous budget battles with his Republican opponents, drew condemnation by women's groups and liberal Democrats as a "capitulation".
Faced with an agonising political choice between his credibility as a supporter of abortion rights and the need for the US to maintain its role at the heart of the world's most important international body, Mr Clinton chose the UN, but in so doing handed conservative Republicans their most significant victory in many years on the emotive abortion issue.
Though the exact terms of the deal have not yet been settled, the move risks a crisis within the president's Democratic party in a key election year.
The decision is certain to be an issue in the New York senate election race between first lady Hillary Clinton, a strong supporter of abortion rights, and her Republican opponent, Rudolph Giuliani.
In previous years, the White House and congress had always reached an eyeball-to-eyeball political impasse on the abortion issue, with Republican congressional leaders refusing to agree budget legislation which would allow the US to pay its back dues to the UN without attaching anti-abortion restrictions, and Mr Clinton vetoing any link between the two.
This year, however, Mr Clinton was the first to blink, faced with the prospect of the US losing its seat in the UN general assembly at the end of the year if the debts remained unpaid.
Under the deal struck late on Sunday night, congress will release $926m to pay back dues to the UN. In return, during the 1999-2000 fiscal year, government-funded bodies will be forbidden from lobbying for liberalised abortion laws outside the US.
Mr Clinton will retain the right to waive the restriction in individual cases. But every waiver will result in a $12.5m reduction in the $385m which the US spends in supporting overseas family planning programmes.
Negotiators from the two sides were still working on the exact details of the waiver penalty system yesterday. "The devil's in the details," the Republican leader in the house of representatives, speaker Den nis Hastert, said yesterday. But Mr Hastert added that "the basic parameters are tied down". Both sides signalled that they expected to settle the remaining issues this week.
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, a liberal Democrat from California, said the deal was "not a compromise. It is a capitulation." But Ms Pelosi stopped short of saying she would vote against it in congress. "They gave the president no choice," Ms Pelosi said. "We have to pay our dues to the UN."
A spokeswoman for abortion rights research group the Alan Guttmacher Institute condemned the decision as "disappointing in the extreme".
White House officials sought to minimise the impact of the U-turn, stressing that Mr Clinton would use his waiver powers, and pointing out that the agreement would expire at the end of September 2000. "The practical impact on money for these organisations is minor," an official said.
The deal is a huge personal victory for the anti-abortion Republican congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, a Roman Catholic. Mr Smith, who chairs the congressional subcommittee on international operations and human rights, said yesterday that he regards his continuing stand as "a badge of honour".
