The Freedom of Choice Act and the Informed Catholic Voter

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - October 17, 2008

In the past several months, some prominent Catholics — like Pennsylvania Senator Robert Casey, Pepperdine law professor Douglas Kmiec and Duquesne legal scholar Nicholas Cafardi — have been making the argument that the most effective means to advance the pro-life cause is, paradoxically, not to elect pro-life candidates. Rather, they assert, the lives of more babies would be saved by electing candidates who, even though they favor legal abortion, would seek to increase governmental support for the poor and vulnerable women who may be tempted by circumstances to abort them.

This argument, while presumably sincerely made, is based first on a false disjunction, as if voters face an either-or decision between nominally pro-life candidates who will do nothing to reduce abortions and pro-choice candidates who are more committed to eliminating the causes that lead to abortion. This is erroneous in principle and in practice: in principle, because there is no reason why a candidate cannot both be in favor of reducing the causes of abortion as well as pro-life; in practice, because pro-life candidates and office holders almost always support programs to eliminate the causes of abortion provided that the programs themselves are not morally problematic, like abortifacient contraceptive bills.

The argument — although perhaps rhetorically powerful in assuaging the consciences of pro-life voters who are thinking of supporting candidates who favor abortion — is also patently politically illogical. If it were true that there would be fewer abortions if people elected pro-choice candidates who want to expand welfare programs, we would expect groups like Planned Parenthood who make billions of blood money annually through the process of abortion paradoxically support the type of pro-life strawmen imagined by Casey, Kmiec and Cafardi. We have never heard such endorsements, however, because those who profit from vulnerable women aborting their children know that their business has far more to fear from pro-life candidates than from pro-choice candidates.

In an August parody, Catholic World News' satirist Diogenes applied this flawed argumentation to the issue of the death penalty. Writing after Senator Casey's speech to the Democratic convention, he said, "I haven't heard Catholic Democrats speak the same way on the issue of, say, the death penalty, but I'm certain they'd applaud efforts … to 'grow beyond' the absolutist positions that have led to the death penalty stalemate and to seek common ground. Following Senator Casey's lead, the following editorial ought to appear … any day now:

"The problem with hard-line opponents of capital punishment is that they're only concerned with what happens to the prisoner at the termination of his or her sentence and don't care about what happens to him or her before that. Instead of standing outside prisons holding candles and shouting slogans, states rights opponents should seek to address the hardships and anxieties that cause communities to feel they have to execute the felons in their midst. One place to start is to empower citizens by making cheap defensive firearms available to every household, which both discourages intrusive and violent crime and gives the family a greater feeling of control over its own destiny… We live in a diverse society. Absolutist stances against hanging, electrocution, and lethal injection may gratify sectarian demands, but do little to heal the divisions that tear the fabric of our pluralist society apart."

Those who seek the elimination of the death penalty know that their cause would not be advanced by their supporting candidates who favor capital punishment, regardless of claims about addressing its underlying "causes." They realize that their achievable hopes lie rather with candidates who in principle think that the death penalty is wrong and seek to end it, for candidates opposed to the death penalty in principle are the ones who will more reliably work to eliminate its causes. The same common sense applies with abortion.

It's important to shift from the philosophical to the practical level, however. This puts into even greater relief how the so-called "pro-life" argument in favor of pro-choice candidates is a Trojan Horse.

There is presently a bill in both houses of Congress called the Freedom of Choice Act. It has 107 sponsors in the House of Representatives (of whom 106 are Democrats, including six from Massachusetts) and 20 sponsors in the Senate (all Democrats, including Sen. John Kerry). The Democratic leadership in both houses is on record as committed to passing it, but know that at present they do not have the supermajority necessary to get it past pro-life President George Bush's promised veto. That is one of the reasons why abortion supporters say they are working so hard to elect Senator Barack Obama, who publicly pledged, in a July 17, 2007 speech to the Planned Parent Action Fund: "The first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing that I'd do."

FOCA supporters say that the bill would codify Roe v. Wade just in case the Supreme Court ever overturned it. In fact, however, it would go far beyond the extremities of Roe. The 1973 decision, as evil as it was, allowed state and federal legislatures to make some restrictions with regard to abortion. Since then, all 50 states have passed laws requiring abortion reporting; 46 now have conscience protection laws for health care workers so that they do not have to participate in abortions; 44 require parental notification for minors seeking abortions so that children who cannot receive an aspirin without parental okay cannot receive an abortion; 40 restrict late-term abortions; 38 ban the particularly gruesome practice of partial-birth abortions; 33 require counseling before abortion; 27 give conscience protection to institutions, so that places like Catholic hospitals cannot be forced to do abortions; and 16 mandate ultrasounds before an abortion.

FOCA would eliminate all of these and every other restriction.

Cardinal Justin Rigali, the head of the U.S. Bishops' Pro-life Activities Committee, said, "We face the threat of a federal bill that, if enacted, would obliterate virtually all the gains of the past 35 years and cause the abortion rate to skyrocket… FOCA establishes abortion as a 'fundamental right' throughout the nine months of pregnancy, and forbids any law or policy that could 'interfere' with that right or 'discriminate' against it in public funding and programs. If FOCA became law, hundreds of reasonable, widely supported, and constitutionally sound abortion regulations now in place would be invalidated. Gone would be laws providing for informed consent, and parental consent or notification in the case of minors… Restrictions on partial-birth and other late-term abortions would be eliminated. FOCA would knock down laws protecting the conscience rights of nurses, doctors, and hospitals with moral objections to abortion, and force taxpayers to fund abortions throughout the United States. We cannot allow this to happen. We cannot tolerate an even greater loss of innocent human lives."

With FOCA in the mix, it would be downright insane and disingenuous for someone to argue that the unborn would be better served by electing candidates who support it but who also support giving increased governmental aid to those mothers and children who luckily have evaded the abortionists' forceps.

For this reason, Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, said in a column in his diocesan newspaper, "We can never [morally] vote for a candidate because of his or her permissive stand on abortion. At the same time, if we are inclined to vote for someone despite his or her pro-abortion stance, it seems we are morally obliged to establish a proportionate reason sufficient to justify the destruction of 45 million human persons through abortion. If we learn that our 'candidate of choice' further pledges — through an instrument such as FOCA — to eliminate all existing limitations against abortion, it is that much more doubtful whether voting for him or her can ever be morally justified under any circumstance."

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.