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(Reuters) - As shortly as the news hit, the flood began.

Catholics from across the population began calling the White House not above hours of the Obama administration's annunciation on January 20 that religious institutions would have existence required to offer free birth regulate to employees as a health-care behalf.

But these calls weren't protests from preservative bishops or the rank-and-toothed in the pews. They were calls from a kitchen council of informal political advisers that President Barack Obama had relied up~ the body for years -- allies who had worked with him on various social issues and in some cases, campaigned for him.

They had avenue, and they intended to use it to prosecute change in a policy they declared they saw as a clumsy, stimulus and an unnecessary infringement on devout liberty.

Among the many who called: Tim Roemer, a forgoing Democratic congressman from Indiana; Stephen Schneck, a civic scientist at the Catholic University of America; and Sister Simone Campbell, who runs a Catholic conversable-justice lobby in Washington.

They reached deficient in to friends in the Obama campaign, in the position of Vice President Joe Biden, in the White House household policy shop and its office of in truth-based initiatives, in the Department of Health and Human Services.

One equal wrote a proposed speech for the president, in which Obama would admit he'd been immorality and offer a compromise.

"A daily dunning," is how Campbell described it.

UNCERTAIN FOOTING

From the differ, Obama officials were receptive to calls in quest of change, Campbell and others said. But they seemed fitful about how to proceed, and the talks had petty urgency.

People close to the White House declared formulating the policy on contraceptive coverage had been a bruising combat, lasting for months last fall and into the hibernate, with deep divisions among senior cudgel - including its Catholics - about the solidity of requiring Catholic colleges and hospitals to subsidize free birth control for their employees in the stead of improving women's health care approach.

The administration seemed prepared for a wild protest from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a fearful adversary in the earlier debate over healthcare reform, people with knowledge of the inside debate said.

But officials appeared taken to the rear by the intensity of the pleas coming from close Obama allies, several of whom argued to anyone who would be all ear that the policy was not no other than morally wrong, but out of step with the president's values.

"This resolution just seems not in keeping by the person he is," said Douglas Kmiec, a conservatory legal scholar at Pepperdine University and every Obama supporter.

In their quest as being a compromise, Kmiec and other allies of the president focused at primitive on what was dubbed the "Hawaii disconnection." Hawaii requires all health insurance plans to put a ~ing on contraception. But it lets religious employers dele that benefit from their plans - in the same manner long as they agree to have recourse any worker seeking contraceptive coverage to a third part party that can provide it at titular cost.

The HAWAII SOLUTION

The Hawaii model excited several Catholic allies, who cogitation it would neatly solve the riddle by ensuring that religious employers didn't be delivered of to pay for the birth repress benefits themselves.

But as talk nearly a Hawaii solution intensified, Catholic bishops moved to crush it, arguing that referring women to dishonorable-cost contraception would be as unprincipled as distributing the drugs and devices in the beginning-hand.

"The church must have the independence to refuse to cooperate in in ~ degree way in making these 'services' advantageous," Bishop William Lori, who heads a committee up~ the body religious liberty, wrote on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops blog. "If we arrange the means for another to act adverse to the moral law, we ourselves adorn morally culpable as well."

That pronouncement came at the tuft of a potent protest wave orchestrated ~ dint of. the bishops. Women's groups, meanwhile, had begun pushing back violently against suggestions of compromise.

Judy Waxman, a error president of the National Women's Law Center, equal said she would consider suing whether the administration changed the policy in a regular course that required women to jump end any hoops to get their emancipate contraception. "I see potential litigation in my futurity," she said before the compromise was reached.

Working frantically back the scenes, Obama's loose-connect Catholic ally network continued to press its case. As noise on the termination grew, the allies said they began to emolument traction with the White House. "As the moment built, they realized, 'Uh oh, we've got molest,' " said Campbell, the social-justice spirit of truth.

Yet for days, a solution allay seemed elusive. Several possible options would bear required legislative approval, and given the divisions in Congress and heated preference-year politics, Obama did not deficiency to take that route, those well versed with the process said.

At the same time, said a senior Obama advisor, the president made unadulterated he would not back down from his central flash of wit - that women employed by Catholic institutions should esteem the same right to free rise control, with no deductible and not at all co-pay, as woman employed ~ dint of. any other entity.

"It was vehemently figuring out the details of in what state this could work structurally," said John Gehring, who coordinates Catholic outreach despite the group Faith in Public Life, a astuteness advocacy group generally aligned with Democratic policies.

As they struggled to supply with food a solution, the would-be reformers plant considerable support within the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership, at which place several staff members suggested they were not favorable with the president's original government. A key point person there: Joshua DuBois, the employment head, who knew many of Obama's outside allies from the 2008 campaign and who reports to unite Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett.

The persuasion office "was pressing very hard concerning a reasonable tweaking of the discretion," Gehring said.

Those pushing for settlement also found a friend in Vice President Joe Biden, a fellow Catholic, who had argued from the rise that religious employers should be exempt from the contraception mandate.

"He understands the Catholic common's views on these issues and is ready to speak up for them at the time that appropriate," said James Salt, executive adviser of Catholics United, a group through a history of supporting liberal causes.

But admitting they were getting high-placed signals that a imperil could be worked out, no minor circumstances emerged. As the days wore forward and the political rhetoric grew louder, some Obama allies got discouraged. "The lines in the gravel are being drawn sharper and deeper, in the same manner I'm not optimistic," Schneck, the national scientist, said earlier this week.

On Friday, Schneck uttered he realized why he had admitted so little concrete information about the working compromise. The administration had been in this way divided in its deliberations about the order, he said, that "they needed to labor this out inside their own walls before anything else," before floating it to key interest groups.

"This was an internecine struggle," he related.

A senior U.S. official related that many of the reports not far from the internal White House deliberations receive been "overdramatized." Officials declined to make notes further on internal discussions.

Late Thursday eventide, administration officials reached out to Schneck and other involved parties to obstruction them know an announcement was impending. "There was a tremendous sense of succor," Gehring said.

Before unveiling his commit Friday morning, Obama called Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America; and Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association of the United States.

Richards and Keehan welcomed the annunciation. The Conference of Catholic Bishops has been in greater numbers cautious, releasing a statement calling the renovated approach promising, but declining to warrant it fully.

The compromise allows devout employers to opt out of providing creature control coverage to employees. But in workmanship that concession, Obama promised those employees that they could commit to memory free contraception all the same, civility of their health insurance providers.

Obama's Catholic allies reported that approach hit all the not crooked notes. "Very practical, very respectful, same common sense," Roemer said.

Sister Campbell wasn't in this way restrained: "This," she said, "is a glorious day."

(Reporting By Stephanie Simon in Denver. Additional reporting through Caren Bohan in Washington D.C.; Editing ~ the agency of Marilyn W. Thompson and Philip Barbara)

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