by John McGuinness - February 5, 2008
The most important political issue to me is the protection of the unborn. And, in Missouri's open primary, I just voted for Barack Obama. How can this be?
It's not because the boss told me to.
First, from a pro-life perspective, Obama's voting record and public statements are about as bad as they can be. Like the other Democratic nominees, he issued a strong statement when the Supreme Court did not overturn a ban on the gruesome partial-birth abortion ban. "Present" votes notwithstanding, Obama has always presented himself as a pro-choice politician.
From a checkbox perspective, any of the four remaining Republican nominees would be superior. Mike Huckabee has been consistently pro-life, and seems to understand that that position carries with it responsibility. Ron Paul is also pro-life, with added points for consistency in also opposing the Iraq War. John McCain has a strong pro-life record, even if he has never been a terribly eager advocate for the unborn. And Mitt Romney's recent conversion to the pro-life position may or not be sincere, but positions himself such that it would be difficult to turn back.
So why support Obama?
The current campaign for the Republican nomination has been quite revealing about what's important to the Republican establishment, and protecting the unborn is not it. They were mostly fine with the possibility of the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani being nominated, but panicked when Huckabee started gaining support, and have been much more strident in opposing McCain than they were when Giuliani is the front runner.
The campaign has also laid bare the incoherence at the heart of the conservative, or Reagan coalition. We are tough on crime, willing to do whatever it takes, including pre-emptive wars and torture to protect the homeland, we must shut down our borders to prevent immigration from the South, we must cut taxes, we must oppose regulations on business, even those that promote work-life balance, and the unborn are human persons who should enjoy the full protection of the law. One of these things is not like the others.
Adding the unborn to the list of those protected by the law is not in line with the direction of the rest of conservatism. In a post envisioning what a pro-life America would look like, Ross Douthat wrote:
But more than that, it would almost certainly require large-scale (and expensive) experimentation with the American welfare state, to address the needs of the hundreds of thousands of pregnant women each year who would suddenly no longer have the option of aborting their unborn - and the hundreds of thousands of children who would come into the world as a result.
What exact form this sort of experimentation would take I'm not sure; it's a thorny enough subject to make a topic for a long essay or even a book. But over the short term, there's no question that it would require conservatives to temporarily table many of their longstanding policy goals - from cutting illegitimacy rates to reducing welfare dependency to limiting the size of government – in the name of the pro-life cause.
I have no doubt that this is true.
But I do have very serious doubts that these are sacrifices modern conservatives are willing to make. They are happy to nominate "strict constructionist" judges, and harvest in the pro-life vote. But I find it very unlikely that the conservative coalition would get behind the changes necessary to absorb the shock of a post-abortion world.
Not that it matters anyway. George W. Bush is as pro-life as any president, but the unborn enjoy very little additional protection compared to 2000. Each side has dug into their positions, and there isn't much movement between them. If anything, the Bush Presidency has diminished the moral standing of the pro-life movement, linking it with policies like the invasion of Iraq, vetoing S-CHIP, expanding torture, and other policies that others find difficult to reconcile with a consistent ethic of life. Another pro-life Republican president who pursues these same policies, as both Romney and McCain indicate they are likely to do (with the exception of McCain's rebuke of torture), will not win many converts.
Which is where Obama comes in.
I have become increasingly convinced that most people would find the pro-life message much more appealing if it were not attached to the stereotypical image of the pro-life messenger.
While Obama does not share the pro-life conviction, he does not engage in demonization either. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama printed a letter from a pro-life doctor challenging his pro-choice position. He seems to understand that the pro-life position need not stem from sexism and misogyny.
So while I do not expect Obama will abandon his pro-choice position (though the impact of a popular pro-choice Democratic president coming around to the pro-life position would be difficult to overstate), he will pursure other policies that are more consistent with an ethic of life -- getting out of Iraq, providing health care, rejecting torture.
An Obama presidency would sow the cutlural ground to embrace protections for the unborn, and create space in our national conversation where the pro-life position can receive a fair hearing.
And that is all we need. The truth is on our side. Technologies like 4-D ultrasound are making the position the contention that a fetus is not a person increasingly untenable. We have seen the coarsening and cheapening of life that has happened in the past thirty years. We in the pro-life movement need to trust in the rightness of our cause, as well as the ability of our fellow Americans to see what is so obvious to us.
Yes, we can.
John McGuinness is a father and software engineer living in St. Louis, MO. He blogs at Man Bites Blog.