It looks like the Democratic Party’s leadership has decided to make the Party’s fierce commitment to protecting abortion against meaningful legal restrictions of any kind and extending its availability a, if not the , central theme of its national convention .
I’ll leave to the pundits the question whether this is good politics. (I suppose it’s one way to avoid focusing on the state of the economy.) It is, however, a great sadness from the point of view of faithful Catholics and others who believe in the inherent and equal dignity and right to life of every member of the human family—from the child in the womb, to the mentally or physically handicapped individual, to the frail elderly person nearing death. The Democratic Party could once boast that it was the party that “looked out for the little guy.” No more. That will be clear when speaker after speaker at the podium proclaims abortion as a sacred right and virulently condemns those of us who stand up and speak out in defense of abortion’s tiny victims. I have pity for the dwindling band of pro-life Democrats who will sit in front of their television sets, or in the conventional hall itself, listening to the roars of approval as the presidents of Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America, among many others, deliver their carefully crafted applause lines.
The spectacle will, of course, reflect the position and strategy of the Obama-Biden ticket, and reinforce for those of us who are pro-life the points I made in 2008 in ” Obama’s Abortion Extremism ” and (with Yuval Levin) ” Obama and Infanticide .”
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