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*Moderator*
First post: 7/25/2007
Last post: 2/8/2010
Total posts: 295
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President Obama's speech at Notre Dame yesterday is another sign that pro-lifers are slowly winning the political battles over abortion. It was not the speech of a man who is confident that his position is right and popular. It was the speech of someone who is trying to minimize a problem--which is what the association with abortion assuredly is for the Democratic party. More voters have left the Democrats over abortion than have joined it. And the public has been moving in a pro-life direction for years. (The latest Gallup poll even has a majority of Americans calling themselves pro-life.) Obama wants to defend a status quo in which abortion is effectively legal through all stages of pregnancy and abortion policy is sealed off from democratic decision-making. He even wants to make taxpayers pay for abortion. So at Notre Dame, he handled the political difficulty deftly. He didn't try to make the case for his views on abortion and related issues. He just plead for mutual understanding, civility, and the search for common ground. All of those are perfectly valid goals, of course, but they are also the ones you'd expect to see emphasized by the side that's defending a politically dangerous position. Pro-lifers often get annoyed when they see politicians with hard-line records in favor of legal and subsidized abortion talk, as Obama did, about how much he wants to reduce abortion. But that type of rhetoric, however little follow-through it generates, is itself a concession to the moral and political force of the pro-life case. The more politicians who favor unrestricted, subsidized abortion talk about what a tragedy it is, the more they undermine their own premises. If it's such a terrible thing, why fund it? Why not allow states to try different methods of discouraging it, including restrictions? Obama has handled the politics of abortion deftly. He is doing the best he can from a position of weakness. Do you agree with my take?
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