What does “working together” on abortion look like to Clarence Page and Barack Obama? It means that they get to retain legalized abortion and in exchange, they will refrain from calling pro-lifers “yahoos” and “right-wing ideologues.” Sounds fair to me.
If you listen carefully to the preternaturally detached President Obama, you will hear the perplexing echo of Professor Irwin Corey. While Obama’s rhetoric has all the necessary parts of speech-nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.–when you parse it carefully, you discover no sense. Or nonsense.
Take his speech at Notre Dame. While acknowledging that “at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable,” he nonsensically argues for “common ground,” urging Americans “to work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions.”
But the common grounds he beguilingly dangles in front of his mesmerized acolytes are peripheral to the central issue of abortion. A “sensible conscience clause” has little to do with the legal right to abort the unborn. Compelling a medical professional to facilitate pre-natal slaughter or permitting him to refuse to facilitate such slaughter is only peripherally connected to the question of whether abortion should be legal in the first place.
All of Obama’s suggestions are only concessions made within the context of legalized abortion. In other words, on the fundamental question, his side concedes nothing.
Cooperation and compromise are good and necessary civic activities, but some issues simply are not amenable to common ground compromises, like, for example, slavery. Although a strong argument can be made that as heinous as slavery was, abortion is even worse, there are sufficient similarities to make it an effective analogy.
Imagine that Joe Abolitionist wants slavery outlawed. He views blacks as equivalent in intrinsic worth to whites and deserving of the full complement of civil rights and protections, including the right to life and liberty. Joe Slave-holder, on the other hand, believes that blacks are intrinsically inferior and not deserving of the full complement of civil rights and protections, including the right to life and liberty.
Now imagine our president saying that “although these two positions are ultimately irreconcilable, let’s, work together to reduce the number of slaves while keeping slavery legal.” Imagine a president saying that while he fully intends to keep slavery legal, we should all tone down the rhetoric. Imagine a president talking about slavery the way President Obama talked about abortion: “Let’s have open hearts, open minds and use fair-minded words when discussing the practice of slavery.” The suggestion to maintain an “open heart” about the slaughter of the unborn is as obscene as a suggestion to maintain an open heart about slavery would be.
Obama’s suggestion that Americans “work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions,” sounds like Hillary Clinton’s suggestion that abortion be “safe, legal and rare.” Clinton and Obama need to answer this question: If incipient life is so devoid of personhood as to be undeserving of basic Constitutional protections, why should abortion be rare?
His Notre Dame speech included a number of appealing-sounding phrases, but what did they mean?
When he said “Let’s reduce unintended pregnancies,” did he really mean “Let’s teach comprehensive sex ed in all our high schools and provide condoms to teens through government-funded high school health clinics”?
When he said “Let’s make adoption more available,” did he really mean “Let’s compel adoption agencies to give children to homosexual couples”?
When he said “Let’s provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term,” did he really mean “Let’s provide cradle to grave governmental hand-outs to women who have children out of wedlock”?
When he said “Let’s . . . make sure that all of our health-care policies are grounded . . . in clear ethics as well as a respect for the equality of women,” did he really mean “Let’s ensure that women retain unfettered access to abortion and ensure the government subsidization of abortions for poor women”?
The product of conception between two humans is undeniably human. The fact that a pre-born baby is not fully developed and the fact that he or she depends on another for survival do not diminish his or her right simply to exist. If a woman’s right to control her reproductive capabilities comes into direct conflict with another human’s right simply to exist, the right to exist must take precedence over reproductive rights. It should be obvious to all that existence is a right of a higher moral order.
Obama wants pro-lifers and pro-choicers to find common ground while retaining legalized abortion. “Yahoos” and “right-wing ideologues” should propose a comparable idea: Make abortion illegal, and then we can try to find common ground with pro-choicers on the issues of pregnancy prevention, adoption availability, and how best to support single mothers.
