Abortion: Obama at Notre Dame

last updated 8 January 2015

Catholics should be proud that President Obama is delivering this weekend’s commencement address at Notre Dame, said Patrick Whelan in the Chicago Tribune. There has been a “loss of decorum” on campus as Catholic conservatives protest the visit because Obama doesn’t share the church’s opposition to abortion. But Obama does support efforts to reduce the number of abortions -- surely that’s a mutual goal everybody can embrace.

In Washington, maybe, said Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review. But Notre Dame is one of the nation’s most important Catholic institutions, so it is duty-bound to uphold the Catholic church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life. And the church “proposes that the injustice of abortion is a moral truth that all people should recognize.”

No one expects Obama’s visit to resolve the differences between people who believe women should have the right to choose abortion, said the South Bend, Ind., Tribune in an editorial, and those who think it is murder. But that doesn’t make if right for people like anti-abortion activist Randall Terry to make good on threats to turn the campus into “a political mud pit.” Surely we can “disagree without threats or expressions of hatred.”