My colleague George Weigel has written an intelligent and important piece in Newsweek on the Democrats and abortion. Among other things, George slices and dices Nancy Pelosi’s statements on Sunday on Meet the Press, in which she apparently confused St. Augustine with St. Thomas Aquinas, misrepresented the judgment of the Catholic Church on when life begins, and misrepresented the legal impact of Roe v. Wade. Apart from that, Ms. Pelosi was razor sharp on the issue.
But the core of Weigel’s article is his careful analysis of Barack Obama’s muddled views on abortion. According to Weigel,
[a]t Saddleback, Senator Obama expressed his “respect” for the views of consistent pro-lifers because their conviction that “life begins at conception … is a core issue of faith” for those voters. This, however, is another dodge. Yes, for some pro-lifers, obedience to religious authority is the source of their conviction. Yet to suggest, as Obama did, that the pro-life position rests on private (and thus inherently undebatable) religious intuitions is to have missed virtually the entirety of the substantive pro-life argument since 1973. Pro-lifers of both parties-some of them agnostic and atheists-have made genuinely public arguments, based on scientific knowledge, reason and democratic political theory. Judging from the evidence to date, the Democratic candidate for president has yet to engage those arguments seriously.
Weigel goes on to add:
However far they may be below the pay grade of a pope, pro-life advocates deserve the respect of having their arguments taken seriously. Given the opportunity to do just that at Saddleback, Barack Obama opted for rhetorical finesse over substantive engagement; that choice may have done fatal damage to his capacity to peel evangelical and Catholic swing voters away from the now-tattered Republican coalition.
George is quite right. Obama’s effort to portray abortion as an issue which is beyond reason and science, and is therefore at its core, and even solely, an issue of faith, is simply wrong. This view ignores what we know about embryology. It is as if sonograms don’t exist and reveal nothing of significance. To frame the debate as Obama does is further evidence, I think, of the weakness of the case made by those who are fierce advocates of abortion rights.
Determining the moral and legal status of the human embryo is not the easiest topic to grapple with. But nor is it an impenetrable issue, cloaked only in mystery, and therefore beyond political debate.
Many advocates of abortion rights hope to relegate it to the area of theology, as if determining the rights we owe to a human embryo belongs in the same category as the doctrine of the trinity, the merits of pre- v. post-millennialism, and transubstantiation.
One’s views on abortion may be informed by faith, just as Lincoln’s view of slavery was informed by faith. But as Weigel points out, scientific knowledge, reason, and democratic political theory all have a vital role to play. You would think that a person like Mr. Obama–a former constitutional law professor who presumably has thought long and hard about this issue–would know all that. Perhaps he does. And perhaps that’s why he wants to avoid a serious engagement with the issue.
