Why I’m Voting For Barack Obama

I wanted to put in this whole Time article because it highlights three different things that I think are important.

The first is that I like how Barack Obama is thoughtful and nuanced when he replies to questions that are complex like this issue of abortion. John McCain will give a good sound bite answer that feeds into the American short attention span, but also contradicts his other held positions (like his support for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research).

The second is that Barack Obama doesn’t shift his actual positions, even when appearing before an audience that will not particularly agree with him 100% of the time. I like that he is willing to talk to people like that. John McCain was very quick on the prepared answers that this audience wanted to hear, quite possibly because he listened to all of the questions ahead of time with his advisors.

Finally, it underlines the fact that Barack Obama knows that there is a moral aspect to abortions, is willing to limit 3rd trimester abortions, support women who are trying to keep their babies and reduce the need for abortions. These are the things that I wanted to hear.

McCain and Obama on Abortion
By Nancy Gibbs
Sunday, Aug. 17, 2008

Watching Barack Obama and John McCain handle pastor Rick Warren’s questions about abortion, you could see the whole presidential race in miniature taking shape before our eyes. The clear answer beats the clever one any time … unless you worry about the chaos that clarity can bring.

Before a friendly but still skeptical Evangelical crowd at Warren’s Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., on Saturday night, McCain won a roar of approval when Warren asked him at what point a human being gets human rights: “At the moment of conception,” McCain replied. The answer was clear, unequivocal and a great relief to restless Republicans who had endured a week of indigestion on the issue. Murmurs that McCain was flirting with a pro-choice running mate like former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge or Joe Lieberman had Rush Limbaugh and his army in full stampede. “The fur is going to fly on this one,” Limbaugh warned about the prospect of McCain taking social conservatives for granted.

McCain’s straightforward answer, along with his assertion that he would not have nominated any of the Supreme Court’s four liberal judges (notwithstanding that he voted to confirm all but John Paul Stevens, who was named before McCain was in the Senate), had social conservatives breathing sighs of relief. “I will be a pro-life president, and this presidency will have pro-life policies,” McCain said to cheers from the audience. “O.K.,” Warren said, laughing. “We don’t have to go longer on that one.”

Meanwhile, Obama offered an artful dodge to the question of when a human deserves rights. “Whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity is above my pay grade,” he said. Like many of his responses that night, it was a long, careful, nuanced plowing of middle ground. He did not suggest that the only rights that matter are a woman’s over her body. He also affirmed his moral dimensions of the issue: he noted his willingness to limit late-term abortions, provided there is an exception if a woman’s health is at risk; and he talked about finding the resources to help women who choose to keep their baby, and about trying to reduce the need for abortions in the first place. It reflected the careful effort Obama has made to reach out to the ambivalent middle, which is reflected in a Democratic Party platform that unequivocally defends the right to legal abortion but also calls for better access to contraception and comprehensive sex education. This is classic “common ground” language designed to break with past orthodoxy and reach out to independents who don’t much like abortion but who don’t want doctors and patients being carted off to jail for performing or having them.

Which is why McCain’s much cleaner answer may come back to haunt him. It’s not just that a majority of Americans favor at least limited access to legal abortion. (I’ve seen polls suggesting that a substantial minority of Americans thinks McCain himself is pro-choice, which is a natural mistake given his maverick image. Will independents like him less when they learn more?) McCain’s construction that life begins “at the moment of conception” opens a whole new set of questions. There is a world of mystery in what transpires between the moment when egg meets sperm and the point of implantation, when that fertilized egg nestles into the uterus and begins to grow.

McCain’s position has the great virtue of simplicity: a unique set of chromosomes, having been assembled, has the potential to grow into a unique human being, assuming circumstances permit. As many as half of fertilized eggs naturally miscarry, usually before the prospective mother even knows she was pregnant. But there is a roiling debate over what factors might also affect implantation, with implications for everything from fertility treatment and contraception to criminal law and human rights. I wonder if McCain knows how deeply into troubled waters he has waded.

Consider the obvious implications if rights attain the moment the egg and sperm meet: all kinds of embryo research become questionable, starting with the stem-cell research McCain says he favors. Couples who undergo in vitro fertilization and then choose not to implant all the embryos are surely violating the rights of those that are discarded or frozen. Some forms of contraception, such as IUDs and the morning-after pill, would presumably be illegal if they affect the ability of an egg to implant. Abortion opponents contend that the birth control pill itself, while designed to prevent ovulation so no egg is fertilized in the first place, may also have the effect of blocking implantation of any egg that sneaks through. Suddenly, a whole range of reproductive choices comes into question.

The eternal battle over when life, and rights, begin has been playing out this summer on the blog of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, who sought comments on a proposed regulation to refuse federal funds to any hospital or clinic that didn’t respect the “conscience” of its workers. This refers to doctors, nurses, pharmacists and others who refuse to perform abortions or prescribe drugs like Plan B, which they view as equivalent to abortion. By defining abortion so broadly, as “any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation,” the regulation set off a firestorm from reproductive rights groups and members of Congress. Slate’s William Saletan brilliantly toured the implications in a “letter” to Leavitt, noting that by the same logic, the government should be outlawing breast-feeding (which by affecting a woman’s hormones interferes with ovulation and, in theory, implantation), not to mention drinking coffee (can increase the chance of miscarriage), riding horseback (same) or exercising in general.

Four years ago, President George W. Bush was able largely to avoid trudging through this treacherous ground because he had the confidence of his base (this despite a grandfather who served as a Planned Parenthood treasurer and a wife who told Katie Couric she didn’t think Roe should be overturned). He talked about promoting a “culture of life” but didn’t get down in the weeds about when exactly that life started. McCain enjoys no such benefit of the doubt, and so he had to offer blunt reassurance. But his construction of human rights beginning “at the moment of conception,” while theoretically clean, is a practical mess. It throws the entire weight of argument onto one side of the scale; a woman, whose womb and RNA are essential to the development of a fertilized egg, would be obliged to do nothing that could even inadvertently interfere with the progression from zygote to newborn. This would have, among other effects, such immense impact on access to contraception that it would all but guarantee an increase in unwanted pregnancies — and the abortions that McCain opposes. I suppose this counts as definitive leadership; I just wonder if McCain’s definition takes him in the direction he really wants to go.

The Republican plank on abortion is unequivocal on their support for life:

Faithful to the first guarantee of the Declaration of Independence, we assert the inherent dignity and sanctity of all human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution, and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion and will not fund organizations which advocate it. We support the appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity and dignity of innocent human life.
–quoted from LifeNews.com

I definitely give the RNC kudos for their affirmation of the dignity and sanctity of life. 

The thing that I would like to know is why did they pull out a similar clause in their plank about working to reduce the number of abortions? The same group of evangelicals and Catholics who worked on the pro-life language at the DNC worked for similar language at the RNC. The draft of the plank contained the following statement:

We invite all persons of good will, whether across the political aisle or within our party, to work together to reduce the incidence of abortion;

However, before the plank was approved, the Republican platform committee removed that statement. The groups committed to working to reduce the number of abortions in America sent this letter exhorting them to put it back in.

Here is where I have become very cynical about the Republican party and their true commitment to being pro-life.

Since I was 8 years old, the majority of the time spent in office has been with Republican presidents who “rallied the base” on culture war issues, primarily abortion. Yet what has actually happened? The majority of the Supreme Court has judges appointed by these presidents and many cases have come before them on this issue and Roe v Wade is still standing.

Let’s remember back to Planned Parenthood v Casey. This account is from Wikipedia (not a primary source), yet it is how I remember it happening.

The case was a seminal one in the history of abortion rights in the United States. It was the first case which provided an opportunity to overturn Roe since the two most liberal Justices, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, were replaced with the Bush-appointed Justices David Souter and Clarence Thomas. Both were viewed as ostensible conservatives compared to their predecessors. This left the Court with eight Republican-appointed justices - five of whom had been appointed by Presidents Reagan or Bush, both of which were well known for their opposition to Roe. Finally, the only remaining Democratic appointee - Justice Byron White - had been one of the two dissenters from the original Roe decision.

At this point, only two of the Justices were obvious supporters of Roe v. Wade: Blackmun, the author of Roe, and Stevens, who had joined opinions specifically reaffirming Roe in City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health and Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Given these circumstances, even most pro-choice advocates expected Roe to be overruled and were gearing up for a subsequent state-by-state campaign against the passage of particular anti-abortion laws.

I remember pro-life groups gearing up for it as well. However, the Supreme Court upheld the core right to legal abortion in Roe v. Wade.

Douglas Kmiec recently wrote:

The Republicans are dug in on seeking the elusive 5th vote to overturn Roe, but even with all the past Republican appointments to the Court, that is unlikely. And in any event, overturning Roe does nothing directly to save a life; it merely tosses the issue to the states which may or may not affirm life.

Catholic teaching tells us when we reach an impasse for life, we need to seek out another way - to make at least some progress in building up the culture of life.

So, the cynical side of me wonders why the Republican leaders are waiting on the “elusive 5th vote” and happily rallying the base every election cycle on this issue without setting out a plan to reduce abortions. Why all or nothing? Could it be that they don’t really want abortions to be restricted and that very conservative judges suit their corporate-minded values just fine?

And then we have John McCain. The John McCain running to be the Republican presidential candidate in 1999/2000 is a very different John McCain of late.

“I’d love to see a point where [Roe vs. Wade] is irrelevant, and could be repealed because abortion is no longer necessary. But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe vs. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations.”
– Interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 1999.

“John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench.”
– McCain for President (2008) website

Hmm. Then there is the matter of a VP and the Supreme Court appointees that you get to pick out.

McCain reiterated that he would not have an abortion “litmus” test for a running mate or Supreme Court nominees.
–On CNN’s “Late Edition,” August 22, 1999

This time around, he kept trying to pick a VP who was pro-choice. He wanted Senator Joe Lieberman. He wanted former Pennsylvania governor and homeland security secretary Tom Ridge. CNN reported that “one Republican insider said McCain campaign manager Rick Davis has called several state party chairs and indicated that Ridge will be the Republican vice presidential pick this cycle.”

After Pat Buchanan threatened to lead a walkout at the convention and McCain felt the intense pressure of social conservatives like Rush Limbaugh to not pick a pro-choice VP, he eventually capitulated.

I strongly feel that John McCain is trying to play both sides of the field on this topic.  A Pew poll in July found that 56% of people did not know where he stands on abortion. The proud Hillary supporter who did a commercial for her support for John McCain was asked about his pro-life stand and she said she supported John McCain because of his pro-choice viewpoint. He is trying to have his cake and eat it too.

Regardless of his position this year, it seems like the abortion issue is not a top priority to him. How much work would he do to reduce the number of abortions? How much would he do to make abortion illegal in the US? Will this be the top issue when he nominates Supreme Court justices?

If this is not a top priority and he gets elected, then the American people went with the all or nothing choice that most likely will never happen.

Once upon a time, there was a guy named Solomon who had a tough decision to make. I would give the Solomon of the year award to Barack Obama for his negotiations on the abortion plank of the Democratic party platform.

I can’t think of too many things that are more polarizing than abortion. Maybe the Iraq War? It all started in January 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade when only 4 states had abortion on demand. Possibly the abortion debate would be less polarized if the states all got to figure out when to legalize abortion based on when their populations became more accustomed to the idea. Much like gay civil unions are being handled now. Or maybe not since it does seem to boil down to a life and death decision for many people.

Barack Obama took a Democratic party that was even more polarized than US society in general. You have the very pro-choice group who did not want to give an inch on making the platform inclusive. Then you have the very pro-life group that felt like they did not have a voice at all in their party’s platform. For those of you who do not remember Planned Parenthood v Casey, the first real opportunity to overturn Roe v Wade, remember that the Casey in that suit was Bob Casey, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. (I participated in a huge rally in DC, so it was something that I remember well.) The same year, when Casey wanted to speak about abortion at the 1992 Democratic Convention to give a voice to this point of view, he was rejected. Interestingly enough, although Governor Casey passed away, his equally pro-life son Senator Bob Casey Jr was given a prime speaking slot at this year’s convention.

Obama made sure that everyone had their voices heard and that the best environment for an agreement was put into place. Steve Waldman, editor-in-chief of beliefnet.com called the action this way:

The Obama forces engineered an interesting and potentially important compromise. It moved the platform in the pro-choice direction on a few things in order to get pro-choice forces to agree to a key request from pro-life liberals: language affirming and supporting women who choose to carry the baby to term instead of having an abortion.

The Democrats had always talked about “freedom of choice” but usually spoke only of one choice, having an abortion. Pro-life liberals are convinced that many women have abortions for economic reasons, so providing them with support could actually reduce the number of abortions more than the Republican approach of emphasizing legal restrictions. (That argument summarized here.) The platform provides the outlines of a potential Democratic argument for reducing abortion number while preserving abortion rights.

The compromise tells you a great deal about Obama’s possible governing style. He did not put forth specific language ahead of time. His team worked quietly behind the scenes with different constituencies - pointedly declining to ever have the factions in the room at the same time. The resulting compromise got support from both the pro-life liberals and pro-choicers. Like most such compromises, it can and will be criticized for not gong far enough in either direction

In fact, a few days ago, I was one of the people who accused them of “squandering” an opportunity. Now that I understand how this came down, I’m a bit more impressed with what the Obama campaign did. Once it became clear that the pro-choice forces would not agree to strong language demanding a reduction in the number of abortions — a stand that could cost the Democrats dearly in the fall — the Obama camp was faced with a choice. They could try to roll the pro-choice groups. That would have made a big splash and appealed evangelicals and Catholics, but would have alienated pro-choice groups and splintered the party. Or it could have worked toward a compromise that would gain some modest ground for pro-life forces while getting support from both sides. They chose the latter.

It’s classic Obama, really. Ultra-pragmatic, consensus-buidling, favoring incremental steps in the right direction over broad culture war battles.

Waldman’s “public” Wall Street Journal article with a detailed account of the compromise can be found here: http://blogs.wsj.com/politicalperceptions/2008/08/19/the-real-story-of-the-democrats-abortion-plank/

You can read both the current and previous planks of the Democratic party here in this article at the Washington Post: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/08/13/conservative_dems_hail_party_p.html

Tony Campolo was one of the evangelicals working on the pro-life side of the plank negotiations with various other groups. He recently wrote a blog post about his experiences and why he felt, as a Christian, that he had to strive “to be the ‘leaven’ that permeates both parties with biblically-based judgments and values derived from Christian beliefs”. The whole article is worth a read, but I wanted to pull out this one bit:

These achievements were lauded by Democrats for Life and by the Catholic Alliance for Life. While at the Democratic National Convention, religious leaders of other faith traditions personally thanked me for my efforts. Even leaders of some pro-choice organizations hailed this compromise, claiming that at last they could find some common ground with pro-life advocates.

Purists, on the other hand, have had hard words for me, claiming that I should not have been involved in any way with a political party that is pro-choice. While I understand their desire to settle for nothing less than the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, I nevertheless believe that my decision to work for abortion reduction was a good one.

Consider these questions: If 10 children are drowning in a swimming pool, and you can only save six of them, should you save the six? Or, should you wait until help arrives that can save them all, even if you know that the six you could save will be lost in the meantime?

Douglas Kmiec, a Pepperdine law professor and former Catholic University law school dean who served in both the Reagan and elder Bush administrations, said in a press conference “the plank would help get the abortion debate out of the rut it’s been in, with both sides entrenched in their positions over Roe v. Wade and too little attention given to the task of reducing abortions.”

“While the platform still falls short of the Catholic ideal, we live in this world and we pursue the art of the possible, and if we move to protect even a single life then we’ve done a good thing,” he said. “Anything that recognizes Roe v Wade as legitimate is unacceptable from a Catholic point of view, but we live in the real world. Our faith is not unexposed in our pocket, but rather meant to transform the political process as it exists. This gets us beyond Roe. Roe has turned out to be a legal dead end, and a moral dead end.”

You can read the article that Mr. Kmiec wrote in Catholic Online about the drafting of the plank and how it relates to the Catholic faith here: http://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=28865

All of the work by many good people of faith to create a commitment to reduce the number of abortions in America and the willingness to listen by the Obama campaign has Rev. Joel Hunter, Republican and the former president-elect of the Christian Coalition, commenting that the Democrats “could arguably steal the title of the pro life party.”

So, cheers to you Barack Obama. You’ve given us something to work towards that we can all agree on and opened up a place to start the discussions anew.

I’m not going to get into a big talk about why I’m pro-life. Suffice it to say that I am and it is something that influences my voting.

Unlike my stance on war, college didn’t change my mind. It did, however, give me friends that I could talk to that made this difficult choice. For example, one of the women in my suite was raped at 15 and chose to have an abortion. I thank God that I didn’t have to walk in her shoes and I’m not sure what choice I would have made if I were in the same position.

I don’t think that I voted for a pro-choice candidate (maybe Christie Todd Whitman) until 2002. There was a governor’s race that was going decidedly one-sided for Democrat Ed Rendell and the Republican Mike Fisher started the worst mud-slinging campaign that I’ve ever seen to try and counteract that. I looked around and decided to vote for Libertarian Ken Krawchuk.

I enjoyed Ken’s position on abortion. He called himself “pro-option” and it was one of the few stabs at a compromise that I had ever seen. It was a little weird on the science-fiction, but put out a platform that we could start debating. And part of it is logical. If a baby is viable outside the womb (and that threshold drops with every new medical advance), it should be given the right to have adoptive parents instead of a partial birth abortion.

2002 marked a time when my tech industry started to really suffer and collapse. The company that I was working at became rather slap-dash at paying their employees which made me more aware of how I was going to pay for rent and food. I watched people in my life who I would classify as working poor or just barely in the middle class trying to make ends meet with new babies. I started to think about people who just couldn’t afford a child or daycare or missing work. Or people who get a test that their child will have special needs and can’t afford that. I heard about a friend’s sister lying about her conception date so her pregnancy wouldn’t be considered a “pre-existing condition” that wouldn’t qualify for payment under her health insurance plan.

I started to wonder what would happen if people’s poverty levels rose? What if there was a way of getting daycare so you could work and have a child? What if there was a national health care system that would give you the medical care that you needed to have a baby? Already 1/3 of the 4 million births every year are paid for by Medicaid. Medicaid gives free medical checkups for a year after the birth, but then what?

It is very interesting with the timing of this post since last week, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good released the first U.S. study to examine the long- and short-term effects of public policy on the abortion rate over a twenty-year period.

“The study of all U.S. states from 1982-2000 finds that benefits for pregnant women and mothers, employment, economic assistance to low-income families, quality child care for working mothers and removal of state caps on the number of children eligible for economic assistance in low-income families has reduced abortions.”

Succinctly stated, “pro-family policies reduce abortions, but do not increase the pregnancy rate.” Women living below the poverty level have an abortion rate of more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level. States that spend more generously on nutritional supplement programs, see up to 37 percent lower abortion rates. The higher male employment rates of the 1990’s created a 29 percent reduction rate.

I guess my evolved position is that in order to be fully pro-life, I need to support an environment that would allow people to choose life instead of choosing to survive themselves. Things like the Pregnant Women Support Act. It makes me appreciate that the Catholic Church puts its money where their mouth is since my sister was only able to afford daycare through Catholic Charities. It seems like the government, especially an administration that has been shouting from the rooftops that they are pro-life, should do the same thing.