In 2003, as part of his campaign for a Senate seat from Illinois
that would set him up for his presidential run, Barack Obama
fielded questions. “I am pro-choice,” he said, so a local reporter
prodded, “In all situations, including the late-term thing?” Obama
pushed past that explosive question, and repeated himself: “I am
pro-choice. I believe that women make responsible choices and they
know better than anybody the tragedy of a difficult pregnancy and I
don’t think that it’s the government’s role to meddle in that
choice.”
Conservative critics play up the supposed radicalism of Obama,
but in this respect, he is a boringly and ghoulishly conventional
modern Democrat. Obama has consistently stood against any legal
limitations to abortion. He has gone so far as to oppose
legislation while he was in the Illinois state house that would
have extended legal protections to fetuses accidentally born during
abortions — or, as most of us would call them, live babies.
Obama the legislator earned a 100 percent voting record on the
issue. As president, he has expanded government-mandated and
controlled healthcare that pays for the morning-after pill and that
leaves the door open to a later abortion funding mandate. This has
horrified the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, among
many other groups. Opponent Mitt Romney has charged that it amounts
to a bureaucratic war on religion. Nonplussed, Obama and his
supporters have fired back that Romney and fellow Republicans are
pursuing a war against women by supporting some curbs on
abortion.
Some of the war on women rhetoric is truly funny for its utter
disconnect with reality. Future historians, I nominate this piece
of rubbish from the venerable leftist British magazine the New
Statesman for taking the cake. The cover story of the latest
issue
warns us that “Romney has said he would be happy to sign a law
making all abortion illegal in all circumstances, including cases
of rape and incest and when the procedure is necessary to protect a
mother’s health. If that were to happen, Mexico and Canada (perhaps
the UK, too) would become medical refugee destinations for those
who can afford the air fare. American women who travel abroad to
abort can expect to be arrested for murder on their return.”
Of course Romney, a late and halting convert to the pro-life
position, has said and would do no such thing. He would decline to
do so not just because it would be political death but because that
heavy-handed approach is anathema to the type of politics
Republicans pursue on almost every other issue. On matters
domestic, Republicans profess support for lower taxes, less
fettered markets, fewer burdensome regulations, school reforms that
favor the rights of parents. They are, in other words, a truly
pro-choice party.
Indeed, the rhetoric of choice sounds odd when coming from most
Democrats, who favor more stringent government intervention and
regulation in nearly every sphere of life. As a party, Democrats
are not pro-choice on what light bulbs you should be allowed to
use, spending public school funds to enroll children in private or
charter schools or how much water your toilet ought to be able to
flush down in one go. But on abortion, they’re suddenly staunch
civil libertarians.
This contradiction is a product of a historical mismatch. In
1973, when Roe v. Wade was handed down making
abortion-on-demand the law of the land, more Democrats than
Republicans polled as pro-life. But Republicans were the party that
protested many heavy-handed judicial decisions. The rising liberal
wing of the Democratic Party tended instead to genuflect to them,
and so people resorted into different parties over the next 40
years. Nancy Pelosi fanned the flames of this old faith in 2005
when she declared that when the Supreme Court has handed down a
ruling, it’s “almost as if God has spoken.” If that pronouncement
had come out of a Republican’s mouth, Democrats would be quick to
accuse her of theocracy. But such is the state of our confusing and
contradictory politics in the Year of Our [Censored] 2012.
