Abortion: Is a compromise possible?

Politics is the art of the possible, said law professor Doug Kmiec in the Los Angeles Times. As a pro-life Catholic, I’m currently besieged by Republicans telling me I have a moral duty to vote for the pro-life John McCain over the pro-choice Obama. That’s not how I see it. McCain has made the usual Republican commitment to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court in hopes that it one day might overturn Roe v. Wade—a strategy the GOP has been pursuing for decades without saving a single life. Obama, on the other hand, would leave Roe intact, but has concrete proposals that would immediately reduce abortions, especially among the poor: educate teens that “sexuality is sacred,’’ and provide government-supported pre- and post-natal care, maternity leave, and income support for women who choose to keep their babies. As someone who’s “serious about preserving life,” I feel I should vote for the candidate most likely to save the greatest number of actual lives. In 2008, that may well be Barack Obama.

Catholics, don’t be fooled, said Kathryn Jean Lopez in National Review Online. Obama’s views on abortion are far too extreme for any “follower of the pope to back the senator.” He not only wants to keep abortion legal, he wants to fund it with taxpayer money, while stripping funds from “crisis-pregnancy centers” that educate women about the alternatives. Worse, said Robert George and Yuval Levin in The Public Discourse, in the Illinois State Senate, Obama spoke out against a bill “protecting children who were born alive after an attempted abortion.” His supporters are desperately trying to downplay that vote, arguing that Obama couldn’t possibly have supported letting injured babies die. Shocking as it is, however, the charge “has the very considerable merit of being true.”

Sorry, but the notion of Barack Obama as any kind of extremist is hard to swallow, said William Saletan in Slate.com. Unlike, say, Gov. Sarah Palin, who would outlaw all abortions, even in the case of rape or incest, Obama is moderate and conflict-averse to a fault. Instead of seeking an emphatic victory over his foes, he offers the messy but pragmatic compromise—a technocrat’s solution. For more than three decades, abortion has been “one of the nastiest, angriest, most polarizing topics in modern politics.” If Obama could tone down the rhetoric and rally both sides of the abortion debate around the common goal of reducing the number of abortions … well, “wouldn’t that be great?”

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