Pro-Life Obamanistas

Human Life Review, Fall 2008 by Murchison, William

Democratic elections can bring out the worst as well as the best in us frail, fragile mortals. Whichever force carries whatever day, it remains worth noting that an electoral slap in the puss - the kind that Republicans in general and pro-life people in particular - received on Nov. 4, 2008 - tends to concentrate the mind wonderfully.

You know where you are, sort of. You've taken a stand. The sovereign electorate has either affirmed that stand or instructed you to jump in the lake. Thus you have much more than an inkling as to what's coming your way in the months ahead. As the brain whirls in dismay or satisfaction, plans and reactions may begin to evolve.

Which is about enough political science for the moment. What we want to look at, in the aftermath of the 2008 election, is what happened with, and to, the cause of human life, and why, to the extent that "why" is a completely valid query concerning the obsessions of a vexed and deeply worried electorate. Ours, for instance.

I regret to report something that readers of this esteemed journal have fathomed for themselves: The news, from a pro-life perspective, is bad. Not hopeless - bad; and a little enervating too. When, like Sisyphus, for 35 years, you've shouldered and nudged a particular boulder uphill, and suddenly you find yourself scratching and clawing for balance - well! You might perhaps get a little cross. You stare wearily up the hill. You spit on your hands, lay them once more at the back of the blasted boulder - and shove. Because there is no other choice, the stakes being so immense.

An unabashed, unblinking pro-choice president - one who, as an Illinois state senator, voted against restricting partial-birth abortion - will occupy the Oval Office for the next four years. Or let's put it this way, perhaps: a candidate who spoke without embarrassment concerning his support for "the right to choose." It is vain to imagine his emerging, on successive January 22nds, in Washington, D. C, to console and inspire pro-life demonstrators in the manner of Ronald Reagan - who believed the demonstrators, being right, deserved such support as he could convey. Nor probably will the mass media (unless intent on exposing the religious Right) show much continuing interest in these exhibitions of concern and anguish. For the media, abortion is yesterday's issue. As for those who consider it ripe and alive as ever, whatsamatter with such people? Get over it! Go home! Can't you see the world has changed?

They can't. And they won't. These two realities seem never to change to the media's mystification.

So what happened? A sizable shift in certain political and philosophical allegiances may have happened. We can't be sure yet. Nor can we know how long it will be before the shift, if it turns out to have been that, shifts back into an older gear.

We do know that as of Labor Day the pro-life Republican ticket, whose vice-presidential nominee had recently, and joyously, given birth to a Down Syndrome baby, was actually threatening to win. The financial crises of September effectively ended that hope, fueling the theory that the United States needed major "change" and that the Democrats would bring it.

Everything Barack Obama and Joe Biden said afterwards played into this theory. "Hope" for change wasn't the phrase; "demand" was more like it. Some have a hard time listening sympathetically or even attentively to discourses on embryos and wombs when to all appearances the economy is crumbling. No previous presidential candidate was perhaps more luckily positioned than was Obama when the electorate suddenly, with less than two months to go before the election, went into crisis mode over bailouts and plunging stock averages.

There was more to the matter, of course. The general nervousness - a man we hardly knew anything about, apart from his impeccably liberal voting record, was nearing the White House - unsettled people who before had generally agreed on things. It became nifty in some conservative circles to praise Obama, or even endorse his candidacy outright.

I hate, as we all should, the journalistic cliché "poster child," but let's concede that if conservative apostasy in the 2008 election season had such a brat, his name was Douglas Kmiec. Kmiec isn't what anyone would call a major conservative player, yet this Pepperdine University law professor let us remember Pepperdine's generally conservative-Christian reputation had worked in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Justice Departments and thus hobnobbed in at least semi-exalted conservative circles. He was prolife. And he endorsed Obama. As did another self-described pro-life law professor, Nicholas Cafardi of Duquesne University. As did eventually the son of none other than William F. Buckley Jr., the satirist Christopher Buckley; and the old National Review stalwart Jeffrey Hart. The conservative columnist Kathleen Parker whammed pro-life Sarah Palin with gusto and a certain (so it seemed to me) malice. All except Parker saw Obama as a more presentable president than John McCain. Yes, McCain was pro-life. Still . . .