Abortion. The word seems tethered to volatility itself, provoking passionate opinions and righteous declarations. In the US abortion has been, next to race relations, the most polarising issue of the last two decades.

All the words surrounding the issue are coded. People who oppose abortion call themselves "pro-life". The pro-abortion side terms them "anti-abortion". People who favour the legality of abortion call themselves "pro-choice", not "pro-abortion".

It is a linguistic maze that must be navigated by politicians and healthcare providers. But like most matters of wordplay, the dance obscures the reality of the American abortion wars.

Although the medical procedure is legal in the US, and has been since 1973, abortion has become increasingly unavailable in most of the 50 states. It has become, in other words, a little bit like Ireland; you can get an abortion, you just have to travel somewhere far from home to do so.

The reasons for this are simple: doctors and nurses who provide abortions, along with the secretaries and the file clerks who work in clinics or hospitals, are afraid of being killed.

The New Woman Health Care Clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, was like most clinics around the country. They had endured their share of protests and threats. The harassment of women seeking abortions or even contraceptive counselling at the clinic had grown so intense that a security guard was hired. On January 29th, 1998, that security guard, Robert Sanderson, was already at work at 7.30 a.m. as Emily Lyon, a nurse, arrived.

Neither noticed a package on a walkway to the clinic. It exploded, spewing nails at a deadly velocity.

"Both of my kneecaps were full of nails. They had to open those up. Remove the nails so the joints would move again," Ms Lyons recently told the New York Times. "My left leg was broken. It pretty much mangled my right hand. The lower right side of my abdomen had a hole the size of your fist in it. They had to remove part of my large and small intestine."

Ms Lyons also lost her left eye. Her right eye was so badly damaged she has not been able to see in almost a year, but is happy now because a new contact lens has improved the sight. Mr Sanderson was not so fortunate. He was killed.

What makes the incident startling is that it was not unusual. More than a fourth of 351 abortion clinics surveyed in 1998 by the Feminist Majority Foundation had experienced severe violence.

Hillary Clinton, speaking out in favour of abortion rights on January 23rd, the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision which affirmed a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, outlined recent history. "In the last 10 years there have been seven murders, 38 bombings, 146 cases of arson and 733 cases of vandalism," she said. "Wherever one stands on the issue of abortion, surely we should all agree that when doctors are murdered, clinics are bombed, splattered with acid or set on fire, this is not free expression. This is domestic terrorism, and it's got to stop."

And that, domestic terrorism, is a new code word. A bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton in 1994 made it a federal crime to blockade or attack an abortion clinic. The law has teeth. The Attorney General, Ms Janet Reno, set up a special task force to investigate groups who appear to advocate violence on the Internet or through the media.

Mrs Clinton announced a proposal to spend $4 million next year to protect clinics. The federal government would provide extra security measures for high-risk clinics, including closed-circuit television cameras, motion detectors and bullet-resistant windows. But people who oppose abortion say it is those very measures that have triggered the intense violence. It is that extremism that has contributed to the absence of rational middle ground for most. People who would otherwise support certain limits on abortion are hard-pressed to entertain compromise when groups calling themselves The Army of God distribute manuals that contain instructions for bomb construction and feature diagrams about how to sever a doctor's hands.

The emotions are likely to grow more intense as positions harden. This week an Oregon court fined an anti-abortion Website $107 million, ruling that its gory graphics and list (they call it the Nuremberg Files) of doctors who perform abortions, along with their children's names and home addresses, constituted a threat.

The absurdities of such divisiveness, as well as its ironies, were apparent a couple of years ago in Los Angeles. Hundreds of anti-abortion protesters gathered early one Saturday at a downtown clinic. They brought posters of aborted foetuses, flags, and signs. Calling themselves Christian soldiers, they wept and lay on the ground to prevent access to the clinic, and for the benefit of the media solemnly displayed a tiny coffin they said contained the remains of an aborted girl foetus dubbed "Baby Dot".

Clinic defender volunteers had also been duly organised. They wore bright orange vests and locked arms to protect women who were trying to walk into the clinic. The affair was loud and rowdy, and bruising, although no outright violence occurred.

An hour or so after the protest ended, a few reporters walked down the street to grab some breakfast at a diner. A few of the anti-abortion protesters were gathered in a booth, laughing and recounting various tales of the morning's protests. And there, slung on the floor beneath their booth at the International House of Pancakes, sat the coffin allegedly containing Baby Dot.

The protest was over, the theatrics concluded, and gone also was any pretence of respect or dignity. It seemed to be about symbols, and symbols are disposable.

It could only make one wonder, then as now, where the abortion wars were truly headed.