President Obama at Notre Dame

Yesterday, President Obama addressed the graduating class at Notre Dame. Unless you’ve been living in a cave in the Ozarks for the last several weeks, you know about the controversy surrounding this particular speech. President Obama not only supports traditional abortion, but also partial birth abortions and embryonic stem cell research. The Catholic Church opposes all forms of abortion wholeheartedly and therein lies the controversy.

So the President, recognizing that many Catholics do not support his views (oddly enough, they already have a Messiah), called for people to be more “open-minded” on the issue of abortion. He recognized that the different points of view are irreconcilable. How then, can one still hold to his/her convictions and stand by as those convictions are denied in federal courts?

The answer is that you can’t. To pro-lifers, the issue of abortion is about life and death. How do you compromise on life and death? Abortion is murder. One human takes the life of another human. It is pretty simple. But liberal politicians like President Obama claim that the life of the baby in the womb (or partially out of the womb) has no value. To them, abortion is a solution to the inconvenience associated with irresponsible sexual behavior. They justify the killing of babies by claiming that it is the right of the mother to decide what to do with her body. They claim that the baby isn’t really its own person until it is fully born and breathing air. They claim that it is better to abort than to bring the baby into a world in which it may not be well cared for.

But the pro-choice folks are leaving out some pretty important considerations. It takes two to make a baby. Where are the rights of the father when it comes to abortion? They do not exist. And that baby is a real, living child in the womb with a heartbeat, and brain function and the capacity to feel pain. http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/Fetal_Pain/FetalPain091604.pdf. And as far as bringing a baby into a world in which it may not be well-cared for, perhaps the liberals should look at their social programs and start focusing on helping parents learn to prevent pregnancy in the first place and to teach them to care for babies rather than providing a way to get rid of them. And perhaps legislators should look at drafting enforceable laws with serious consequences for parents who neglect their responsibilities as parents rather than providing for federally funded abortions.

Advocates for “choice” often indicate that mothers must have the option of abortion to protect their own health, but the reality is that 93% of all abortions performed in this country are performed for social reasons and not for health related reasons. Less than .5% are the result of rape, 4% for the mother’s health, and 3% because the baby may have a health problem while the other 93% are performed because the mother isn’t ready, can’t afford, or simply doesn’t want a baby. *

In response to conservative pro-lifers, many liberal pro-choicers claim that there is hypocrisy in being pro-life. They claim that the churches promote war, that many conservatives support the death penalty, etc. My response to that is that wars happen for various reasons and they are always tragic- but they are not all products of the church by any means. Whatever your feelings on the death penalty might be, comparing it to abortion is like comparing apples and oranges. Death penalty is reserved for extreme cases of violence and law-breaking. Since 1973 (the year of Roe v. Wade) fewer than 2,000 death row executions have taken place in America. That is just over half the number of babies who were aborted today! Since 1973 over 49 million babies have been aborted in this country. How can you even compare the situations?

As usual, President Obama left the Notre Dame graduates with some words of wisdom (after all, he is the smartest President ever- or so I've heard) :

“But remember, too, that you can be a crossroads. Remember, too, that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It's the belief in things not seen. It's beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us. And those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own. “

Perhaps the President could take heart to those words and have faith that when God said thou shalt not kill, He knew what he was talking about.





*Source: Lawrence Finer, et. al, "Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives" Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, Vol. 37 No. 3 (Sept., 2005) p. 110.