Barack Obama, Notre Dame, and Abortion

How can this self-professed Catholic institution embrace the most visible proponent of "abortion rights" the world over while simultaneously maintaining its identity?

Notre Dame, a traditionally Roman Catholic institution of higher learning, recently extended to Barack Obama an invitation to deliver the commencement speech at its impending graduation ceremony — a task for which he will be rewarded with an honorary degree.  Given that our current President is by far and away the most impassioned advocate of "abortion rights" that Planned Parenthood and its ilk have ever had in the White House, Notre Dame's decision has engendered no small degree of controversy within the Catholic community. 

How, many wonder, can this self-professed Catholic institution embrace the most visible proponent of "abortion rights" the world over while simultaneously maintaining its identity?  In other words, does its awarding of an honorary degree to Obama not threaten to expose a deep moral incoherence within its own self-understanding and, by extension, that of the Church for which it claims to stand?

I am a practicing Catholic and, I would say, a relatively orthodox Christian.  However, before casting a vote as to whether Notre Dame betrays its distinctively Roman Catholic Christian mission by welcoming Obama, there are some issues that must be sorted out.  The first of which is that of abortion.

The Argument from "the Right to life" and its Problems

Traditional Catholics (and other Christians) typically argue against abortion along the following lines: Since it is always wrong to intend the death of an innocent human being and the prenatal being — from conception to birth — is an innocent human being, abortion is wrong, for (except when the life of the mother is endangered) abortion is nothing else but the deliberate destruction of an innocent human being. 

This line of reasoning is certainly valid but its soundness is, perhaps, questionable. This, no doubt, owes to the fact that its central terms haven't been sufficiently relieved of the ambiguity that they have been made to shoulder.  Consider first the term "human being." Of course there is some fundamental sense in which the prenatal entity from the event of conception is undeniably a "human being" — in that it is conceived by human parents, what else could it be? But is this the only sense in which the term "human being" can be understood? To put the question another way, does the Church really think that there is no morally relevant difference between a zygote and, say, a five year-old?

The philosopher Mary Anne Warren — a self-described proponent of "choice" — several decades ago coined the distinction between "biological" humanity and "moral" humanity. The former belongs to the fetus, she asserted, but the latter does not.  In other words, that an individual being is "human" doesn't suffice to establish that it is a "person," and since only persons are moral agents in possession of rights, no injustice is done to the fetus if and when it is aborted.  Other advocates of "abortion rights" have since defended their position on abortion by exploiting this idea that human beings need not be persons.

This distinction between biological and moral senses of humanity is at once interesting and problematic.  Be that as it may, it isn't any such metaphysical distinction that I invoke, or need to invoke, when I suggest — when I insist — that there isn't one among us who attaches the same value to a fetus in its early embryonic stages that we ascribe to children and adults.  This is no less true in the case of the Catholic Church.  To know that this is no lie, bear the following consideration in mind.

Traditional Catholics and other Christians mightily oppose abortion, but virtually always by peaceful measures: prayer, "walks for life," demonstrations outside abortion clinics, the annual "March for Life," counseling for those women considering abortion as well as those experiencing remorse over having had one, etc.  On those rare occasions when opposition to abortion has been expressed through violence, the response of Christians (and other opponents of abortion) has been swift and unfailingly condemnatory.

But imagine a world in which it is not over 1,000,000 fetuses destroyed per year, but toddlers, or pre-adolescent children. Even if these children were being killed in numbers but a slight fraction of the number of fetuses that are killed in the real world, and even if, as abortion clinics have now, these "clinics" where parents took their children to be destroyed had the force of law behind them, can even the strongest opponent of abortion, and the most committed Catholic or Christian, doubt for one moment that he would hold blameless those who employed violence to save the lives of these innocent children?

Would not every champion of the "pro-life" cause (save, perhaps, those who are pacifists) not feel obligated themselves to use physical force, if need be, to protect little Johnny or little Sally?  Would anyone seriously think that annual marches on the nation's capitol and prayers for the parents who chose to kill their children would come remotely close to being adequate responses to this situation?  Even the Pope, presumably, would no more condemn the efforts of citizens to stop these atrocities by force than, in the real world, he condemned the Allied Powers who used force to stop the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, or Union soldiers who ended slavery by using force.

The point about force isn't even necessary to substantiate my thesis that no one values the fetus as he or she values post-natal human life.  In the real world, abortion is widely acknowledged by both its friends and foes to be among the most controversial of issues. Thus, the enemies of abortion, including the Pope, have invested an incalculable amount of energy over the years trying to rationally persuade their rivals of the correctness of the "pro-life" position. That is, while it is with an eye toward the abolition of abortion that they engage in debate, the fact remains that the opponents of abortion debate those who insist it is a "right."  Yet in debating and conversing with the advocates of "reproductive rights," they at least implicitly concede the rational legitimacy of their rivals' position, as well as express respect for their opponents themselves.

In our hypothetical world, however, I think all would agree there would be, there could be, no debate with those who favored the routine killing of children, for such people — if not them, who? — would be deemed moral monsters, and to reason with a moral monster is to risk diminishing the horror for which he or she is responsible.

So, the opponents of abortion agree with its proponents that there is indeed a morally significant difference between prenatal and postnatal entities.  The point to draw from this, however, is not that abortion is permissible.  Rather, the point is threefold.

First, the Church's theoretical commitment to the "equal worth" of all human beings, irrespective of stage of development, is belied by the very unequal ways in which its members — all of its members, from the highest ranks of the clergy down to the layperson — actually respond to situations in which prenatal life is threatened versus those in which postnatal life is imperiled.

Second, if murder is the gravest of evils, abortion cannot be the evil that the Church regards it as, for while it may constitute a case of unjustified killing, the different manner in which its members respond to mothers who kill their toddlers, or child predators who kill their victims, or tyrants, like Hitler and Stalin, who commit genocide so as to realize their aspirations, from the manner in which they respond to mothers who in the first trimester of their pregnancies choose abortion, proves that they do not regard the latter as murder. 

Third, the Church must expressly disavow the equation of abortion with murder, for while prayer and counseling and marches are suitable responses to the former, they fail miserably to suffice as responses to the latter, to say nothing of mass murder, genocide.  A person who attempts to prevent a woman from entering an abortion clinic by tackling her to the ground, or who shoots an abortion doctor so as to stop him from exercising his craft, elicits nothing but scorn and contempt from virtually all opponents of abortion, a fact that reveals their conviction that in answer to abortion, only nonviolent means of resistance are morally permissible.  In stark contrast, these same opponents of abortion would have nothing but scorn and contempt for a person who did not use similar force in order to frustrate the plans of a mother or an executioner who attempted to kill a seven year-old child (or any other innocent person). 

In short, the Church cheapens murder by identifying abortion, either implicitly or explicitly, as an instance of it.  And while Catholics, to my knowledge, never explicitly equated abortion with murder, they implicitly do so whenever the (shamefully high) abortion rate is described as a "silent holocaust."

If there is any need for further confirmation that we ascribe lesser value to the prenatal entity than to children and adults, and that, by implication, greater awfulness to murder than to abortion, consider the implications of the notion of a "silent holocaust."  Logical and moral consistency demands that one who believes that the effects of 35 years of legalized abortion is fundamentally no different from the Holocaust be as willing to treat the perpetrators of the one no better or worse than those of the other: if the Nazis are deserving of punishment, and possibly death, because of the evils they perpetrated against the Jews, then women who choose abortion and their doctors who make it possible are equally deserving of punishment, and possibly death. Yet to my knowledge, I know of no one within the mainline of Christianity who calls for this retribution.

The Case against Abortion

Does all of this mean that there are, then, no real moral grounds on which to object to abortion?  Contrary to the claims of the advocates of "reproductive rights," the acknowledgment of morally relevant differences between the prenatal and postnatal entities no more suffices to justify abortion than the acknowledgment of morally relevant differences between animals and humans suffices to justify cruelty toward the former.

Opponents of abortion, I believe, make matters harder for themselves when they insist on arguing to the wrongness of abortion from the fetus's "right to life," for this line elicits from their rivals the kind of abstract philosophical responses of the sort of which Mary Anne Warren's argument is representative. The distinction between biological humanity and moral humanity, human beings and persons, is not implausible, and it has just enough appeal to lure the enemies of abortion into the snares of a debate from which they cannot escape, or at least escape unharmed: rationality, linguistic capacity, sentience, a self-conception, and so forth — the standard terms in which our conception of personhood must be couched — are not possessed by (young) fetuses. 

No, the opponents of abortion need not and should not invoke a doctrine of "inalienable rights" (the "right to life") when making their case; nor should they involve themselves in debates over whether the prenatal entity is a "person," or of a value comparable to that of a person. Rather, they should remain focused on the one indisputable fact that the fetus is a human life conceived by human parents.

Of course, that the fetus is a human being no more demonstrates that abortion is always immoral than the fact that adults are human beings demonstrates that killing adults is always wrong.  But the humanity (biological or otherwise) of the fetus, its membership in the human species, points to a general prohibition against any procedure that would entail its violent, deliberate destruction — a procedure, that is, that we call abortion.

Prenatal entities are without guilt; they are the most defenseless members of the human race; and they are our offspring.  That the inhabitants of a society render legally permissible the killing of the weakest, most defenseless members of the human race — its own offspring — reflects on the part of its inhabitants a disregard for human life that the perpetuation of the practice threatens to further intensify.

To put it simply, abortion is immoral not just, or even primarily, because of the harm done to the fetus — in its earliest stages, the fetus, lacking sentience, can experience no harm.  Rather, abortion is immoral and should be, if not criminalized, powerfully discouraged because of its inherently life-denying character, its standing repudiation of the most powerful and enduring of human relationships, the parent-child bond, and because it is but one more variation of an historical theme — the oppression of the weak by the strong — of which, by virtue of the sheer vulnerability of the unborn, it is emblematic.  A society that promotes abortion corrupts itself: it is this that renders it so awful.

Obama and Notre Dame

Now that this all too brief analysis of abortion is at a close, we return to our original question: should President Obama be permitted to speak at Notre Dame?

Colleges and universities across the nation, including those that haven't shed their traditional religious identities, can claim as members of their communities both students and faculty alike who identify themselves as "pro-choice." For that matter, there are churches full of practicing Christians similarly sympathetic to the case for abortion.  That a proponent of "abortion rights" should be permitted to speak at a Christian institution is not particularly scandalous.  Furthermore, considering that abortion is indeed among the most controversial moral issues of our time, an issue with respect to which people of intelligence and good will can be found on both (all?) sides, any institution of higher learning worth its salt should invite the articulation and defense of minority perspectives. It isn't just that the university, whether religious or not, should be committed to the free exchange of ideas for its own sake; where there is intellectual diversity, where every party is allowed a voice in the conversation, each is vastly more likely than not to achieve greater self-understanding.

But what about when that voice is that of a holder of public office?

As President of the United States, Barack Obama is not just any officeholder. While American presidents are constitutionally forbidden from possessing nearly as much power as the average person imputes to them, the fact of the matter remains that in the popular imagination, both at home and abroad, there is no greater and more visible sign of state power in the contemporary world than the American president. 

Now, the presidency is an office of the federal government, and abortion is the "law of the land" because of the support it receives from the federal government.  It is for this reason alone that any occupier of any federal office, irrespective of whether he or she is personally opposed to abortion or not, should not be permitted to speak at those institutions committed to promoting the traditional Catholic stance on this issue.  But when the federal office in question is the presidency especially, and when the occupier of that office has repeatedly and unabashedly made known his determination to make abortion ever more accessible, then his appearance at a Christian institution like Notre Dame undermines the credibility of the latter, for such an appearance can all too easily be read as a tacit endorsement of precisely that federal law to which it claims to be vehemently opposed.

In short: it is at the cost of its own moral legitimacy that Notre Dame invites President Obama to speak at its graduation ceremonies.