Obama Flunks Rick Warren's Abortion Question

by Deal W. Hudson - August 18, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

Here's a truism: If you're running for President, don't answer a question by saying, "That's above my pay grade." After all, if you want to occupy the White House, there is no higher pay grade. You are the boss, and the buck stops with you.

But Barack Obama used precisely that expression when asked by Rick Warren at what point "a baby gets human rights."

Obama said, "Whether you're looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity… is above my pay grade."

How can a man who has voted three times on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act be unable to answer that question with "specificity"? Does he mean that he voted against BAIPA without having an answer to that question? But then what did he base his vote on?

Obama made the telling mistake of pitting the truths of science against the truths of theology. He seems to think there are two truths in contradiction to each other. And his implication is clear: Theology teaches life begins at conception, but science sees it differently.

Isn't this supposed to be the faith-friendly Democratic candidate for president? The fact is, those who hold to Obama's ideology have come to the conclusion that human life does not begin at conception, regardless of what theology and science both teach.

Doug Kmiec is right to point out that the desire to uphold a woman's right to choose is what has determined Obama's outlook on abortion. This is why the phrase "abortion should be safe, legal, and rare" was taken out of the platform of the Democratic Party.

As Kmiec, an Obama supporter, puts it, "To impose either safe, or legal, or rare is, to him, to have the government displace the woman's freedom." Furthermore, "as [Obama] sees it, Roe is not an endorsement of abortion, so much as an affirmation that abortion is a moral question for which only the potential mother can give answer."

Passing over the issue of whether the father should have any say in the matter, it's strange indeed that a choice about life and death should be awarded, free from interference, to a single person. Where is the unborn child's advocate? In the world described, the child has no advocate; the mother's freedom is inviolate.

Kmiec and others have said Obama is a "different type of candidate." But I don't see much of a difference here at all: For Barack Obama, a woman's right to choose trumps every other constraint.

That sounds like the standard pro-abortion argument to me.

Deal W. Hudson is the director of the Morley Institute, and is the former publisher of CRISIS Magazine, a Catholic monthly published in Washington, DC. His articles and comments have been published in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, National Review, Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Village Voice, Roll Call, National Journal, The Economist, and by the Associated Press. He appears regularly on television shows such as NBC Nightly News, One-on One with John McLaughlin, C-Span's Washington Journal, News Talk, NET's Capitol Watch, The Beltway Boys, The Religion and Ethics Newsweekly on PBS, and radio programs such as "All Things Considered" on National Public Radio. He was associate professor of Philosophy at Fordham University from 1989 to 1995 and was a visiting professor at New York University for five years. He taught for nine years at Mercer University in Atlanta, where he was chair of the philosophy department. He has published many reviews and articles as well as four books: Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend (Mercer, 1988); The Future of Thomism (Notre Dame, 1992); Sigrid Undset On Saints and Sinners (Ignatius, 1994); and Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). His autobiography, An American Conversion (Crossroad, 2003), is available from Amazon.com.