Obama Flunks Rick Warren's Abortion Question

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.

WASHINGTON, DC (Inside Catholic) - 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 Again 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.

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

Deal W. Hudson is the director of InsideCatholic.com and the author of Onward, Christian Soldiers: The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States (Simon and Schuster, March 2008).

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