The president deserves credit for having the courage to address an issue that dominated the controversial invitation extended to him by one of the nation’s leading Catholic universities.
He doesn’t seem to get, however, why what he requests is unlikely to happen.
Those who are ardently pro-life see abortion in stark terms. It is the killing of an innocent human life — as abhorrent when it’s done six months before birth as it would be if it were done six months after. If you believe life begins at conception and deserves to be protected, how “fair-minded,” as Obama asks, can you be to those such as the president who don’t believe the same?
There is no gray area here. A fetus is either a human life or it’s not. If you believe it’s life, then no one — not even the mother bearing that life — should have the right to terminate it. It’s just that simple.
The pro-choice supporters will try to muddy the water with the extremely rare exceptions — arguing, for instance, that no woman should be forced to have a child who is the product of rape or incest. In fact, it’s estimated that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the abortions performed in this country are for those reasons. The vast, vast majority of abortions are performed because the pregnancy is inconvenient, embarrassing or uneconomical.
The president, as most pro-choice politicians do, takes the line that he supports abortion rights but wants the procedure to be rare. Certainly, more widespread use of contraception and greater promotion of adoption as an alternative have and can help reduce the incidence of abortion. But even though the abortion rate has been falling since the 1990s, it’s not falling fast enough. About one out of five pregnancies is still terminated by abortion in this country.
If you believe those 1.3 million fetuses aborted every year are 1.3 million human lives, neither your mind nor your heart can be open to sugarcoating such genocide.
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