Obama on Abortion

President Obama Delivers The Commencement Speech at Notre Dame

As President Obama took the stage, hundreds protested outside the school’s gates. The media buildup to this moment was as strong as any during his short tenure in office.

Understanding the gravity of the situation, President Obama quickly cast a compelling vision for the future. He emphasized the historic nature of the times, and called for a new generation of leaders to embrace the challenges ahead. Part of this leadership, he said, would be to understand the importance of open mindedness and balanced political discourse.

Then, as he has done since first marking his path on the campaign trail, President Obama deftly wove his controversial stance on the issue at hand into a framework of common ground compromise. On abortion, he called for the use of “fair-minded words,” and noted that we must “open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do.” He continued by saying, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually, it has both moral and spiritual dimensions…that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.” Queue the applause.

President Obama, who has since been lauded by the media for his fair minded handling of the controversy, did what he has always done best: He painted himself as a moderate in the midst of extreme controversy. This first began on the campaign trail, when a Senator with only 143 days of active service in the Senate, the most liberal voting record in the history of Congress, and strong ties to extremists William Ayres and Jeremiah Wright, somehow became a moderate, inspirational leader. It continued with his ascendance to the White House, where sharply liberal earmarked spending initiatives, like the stimulus and the 2010 budget, became the balanced solution to the economic crisis. It now persists with the abortion debate, where his stance, carefully articulated at Notre Dame, is a measured approach that emphasizes liberty while showing reverence for morality. Queue the applause.

Protestors Outside of Notre Dame

What Americans must realize is that President Obama is arguably the greatest politician in U.S. history. He is an incredibly powerful speaker, who combines inspirational rhetoric with a disarming sense of humor. He crafts the message of each policy initiative to draw in both sides of the aisle. While such political acumen can provide for unifying leadership in a time of crisis, it can also hide the reality of an aggressive partisan agenda.

On abortion, that reality is that President Obama holds the most extreme views of any elected official. While in the Senate, he opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion—a practice fellow Democrat Daniel Moynihan once called “too close to infanticide.” He later publicly attacked the Supreme Court decision upholding the partial-birth ban. While serving in the Illinois state Senate, he came out strongly against a bill similar to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which prevents the killing of infants mistakenly born alive during attempted abortions. Put bluntly, this means President Obama supports a mother’s right to terminate a birthed child, so long as the child was birthed with the intention of aborting it.

During the 2008 campaign, he famously claimed that he would not want his daughters to be “punished with a baby” because of a crisis pregnancy. More recently, he eased restrictions on federal funding for international family-planning groups that support abortion rights, and forwarded his agenda on embryonic stem-cell research.

To his credit, the centrist line that President Obama attempted to walk at Notre Dame would be welcome in the abortion debate. But, as often happens in politics, reality betrays rhetoric. As he has so clearly demonstrated on issues of economic and fiscal policy, President Obama’s stance on abortion is far from moderate. And on an issue so important to so many, such extremism is simply unacceptable.

I have long strayed from commenting on abortion because of the deluge of impassioned and emotional arguments on both sides of the issue. Rational discourse left the landscape of abortion a long time ago. Furthermore, I’ve said on many occasions that the Republican Party’s championing of certain social activist positions as “conservative,” like its hard-line claim that pro-life meant pro-Republican, did a great disservice to the true economic and philosophical underpinnings of conservatism. To that end, I hold that the question of abortion should not be a question of party, of liberalism, or of conservatism. All Republicans need not be pro-life, and all Democrats need not be pro-choice. Abortion transcends the philosophical divide between liberal and conservative, and the political divide between left and right.

Fundamentally, the question of abortion is a question of the careful balance between life and personal liberty, and should be met with sobriety, not banal rhetoric. Those that are pro-life must understand that the pro-choice position is fundamentally a position of personal liberty and freedom. Those that are pro-choice must understand that the pro-life position is intensely spiritual, and is rooted in a desire for justice for the innocent. In this discourse, there is no place for President Obama’s dismissive view of life.

What happened last weekend was a thinly veiled attempt by President Obama to paint himself as a moderate in the midst of a hailstorm of controversy. He performed, as he always does, magnificently. But Americans, certainly the media, must learn to look to the man, not the politician. And when that happens, they will find a man whose economic policies quash capitalism, whose social policies approach socialism, and whose views on abortion are wantonly extreme.  

-Matt Benchener from TruPolitics.net