St. Louis ? A proposed bill promising major changes in the U.S. abortion landscape has Roman Catholic bishops threatening to close Catholic hospitals if the Democratic Congress and White House make it law.

The Freedom of Choice Act failed to get out of subcommittee in 2004, but its sponsor is poised to refile it now that former Senate co-sponsor Barack Obama occupies the Oval Office.

A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who was the sponsor of the 2004 bill, said the legislation “is among the congressman’s priorities. We expect to reintroduce it sooner rather than later.”

FOCA, as the proposal is known, would make federal law out of the abortion protections established in 1973 by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling.

The proposal spurred one Roman Catholic bishop to threaten to shutter Catholic hospitals rather than comply with FOCA.

“It would not be sufficient to withdraw our sponsorship or to sell them to someone who would perform abortions. That would be a morally unacceptable cooperation in evil,” said Bishop Thomas Paprocki, a Chicago auxiliary bishop who has been mentioned as a contender to be the next archbishop of St. Louis. He was speaking at the bishops’ annual fall meeting in Baltimore in November.

There are 624 Catholic hospitals in the country.

But even within the Catholic community, there is disagreement about the effects FOCA might have on hospitals, with some health care professionals and bishops saying a strategy of ignoring the law, if it passes, would be more effective than closing hospitals.

Ilan Kayatsky, Nadler’s spokesman, said he anticipates that the bill’s other original sponsor, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., will introduce FOCA in the U.S. Senate. “We expect it to be more or less the same bill with some minor tweaks,” Kayatsky said.

Boxer’s office declined to comment.

The nation’s Catholic bishops have been among the most vocal opponents of FOCA and Obama’s abortion-rights positions. In the days before the November elections, one called Obama “the most committed” abortion-rights supporter to head a presidential ticket since Roe. Obama had promised during his campaign he would sign FOCA if he were elected.

According to the Catholic Health Association of the United States, Catholic hospitals make up 13 percent of the country’s nearly 5,000 hospitals, and employ more than 600,000 people. CHA says one of every six Americans hospitalized in the United States is cared for in a Catholic hospital.

Not all bishops or Catholic health care professionals see closing down hospitals as a realistic option. Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Fla., a member of CHA’s board of trustees, wrote on his blog last month that “even in the worst case scenario, Catholic hospitals will not close. We will not comply, but we will not close.” Instead, he advocated a strategy of “civil disobedience.”

Sister Carol Keehan, president and CEO of CHA, said in an interview that she did not believe the language in the most recent version of FOCA — despite its definition of abortion as a fundamental right — would force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. But she also said that if it did, the church would look to the historical example of racial segregation as a model for civil disobedience.

“From the other side we hear consistent talk about being pro-choice,” Keehan said. “If FOCA passes, the concept of being pro-choice will not be incompatible with our position — our choice would be not to participate.”