Glad to see that pro-lifers still aren’t troubling themselves with actual babies:
Yes, that’s Alan Keyes pushing a Cabbage Patch doll in a Spongebob Squarepants stroller. Because what better way to show your dedication to life than to push around some rag dolls?
In fact, the policies that Obama promotes do more to decrease the abortion rate than anything far-right “pro-life” groups offer. While protestors at Notre Dame push around Cabbage Patch dolls, it’s pro-choice advocates who actually push for things like contraception access and comprehensive sex ed (which decrease the need for abortion in the first place) and social services like universal health care, aid to women with dependent children, early childhood education and affordable childcare (which make it more feasible for women to make the choice to give birth, and which actually help children once they’re out of the womb). Despite how Notre Dame protestors are framing it, it’s not actually about Catholics vs. non-Catholics; it’s about social conservatives vs. social liberals.
As Hendrik Hertzberg so aptly puts it:
Notre Dame planned from the start to confer an honorary doctorate on Obama, as it has done for eight of his predecessors, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt. This only heightened the dudgeon of the American Catholic right. The loudest protests have been orchestrated by the Cardinal Newman Society, founded in 1993 and unconnected with the Newman Centers for Catholic students, which are a familiar sight on hundreds of campuses. The group describes itself as dedicated to strengthening “Catholic identity” at Catholic colleges and universities, “many” of which—including Notre Dame, apparently, the Gipper notwithstanding—embrace “a mistaken notion of academic freedom.” It claims to have collected three hundred and fifty thousand names on a Web petition demanding that Notre Dame rescind its invitation and “halt this travesty immediately.” Pat Buchanan chimed in, accusing Notre Dame of saying that Obama’s alleged “support for policies and programs that bring death to more than a million unborn children every year is no disqualification to being honored by a university dedicated to Our Lady who carried to term the Son of God.” And the protests are not just a fringe phenomenon. Sixty-eight American bishops—one of whom suggested that Notre Dame change its name to Northwestern Indiana Humanist University—have voiced their displeasure.
But Obama is not such an easy target. One of his first acts as President was to cancel the so-called “global gag rule,” which denied funds to overseas family-planning organizations that also offer abortion services, or even information about abortion. But because the main focus of such organizations is contraception, cutting off their funding almost certainly resulted in more (and more dangerous) abortions, not fewer (and safer) ones. The President also reversed his predecessor’s ban on funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but specified that the embryos must come from fertility clinics that would otherwise discard them. At his most recent press conference, he rejected the idea “that this is simply an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations.” And he noted that his domestic-policy staff “is working with groups both in the pro-choice camp and in the pro-life camp to see if we can arrive at some consensus” on ways to reduce the unwanted pregnancies that are abortion’s invariable precondition.
In any case, the controversy about Obama’s Notre Dame appearance is less about him than about divisions within the American Catholic community. Church teaching holds that abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, is an “intrinsic evil.” Contraception is an “intrinsic evil,” too (as is torture). But a Pew poll prompted by the Notre Dame flap found that more Catholics would keep abortion legal in all or most cases than would ban or restrict it, and a Gallup study found practically no difference between Catholics and non-Catholics on embryonic stem-cell research, which is “morally acceptable” to around sixty per cent of both groups. It is significant that sixty-eight bishops have protested Notre Dame’s invitation, but just as significant that hundreds have not. The real division is between social conservatives, on the one hand, and social moderates and liberals, on the other, not between Catholics and non-Catholics. But that doesn’t make it any less deep, and Obama’s approach—practical, nonideological, “pro-choice” but hardly pro-abortion—is more likely than any of the alternatives to keep it relatively civil.