Today President Obama gave the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, to considerable protest. Obama’s planned presence at Notre Dame has been an issue in the Catholic community for months, only surfacing in the general media in the last week or so. Ever since the announcement that Obama would attend the commencement ceremony, conservative Catholics have complained that he should never have been invited, given his pro-choice political stance. Inviting a pro-choice speaker to commencement runs counter to the moral values of the Catholic church, and there is increasing concern that some of the bigger Catholic universities, especially in difficult economic times, have inclined towards a more secular public image to attract more and better students and faculty.
As a Catholic, I side with the people who say he probably should not have been invited. There are many people who could have given this commencement speech. I hardly remember who gave mine, and don’t care now any more than I cared then. What matters is the diploma and the education. There was really no need for Obama to be there.
Pro-choice people have variously criticized the critics for politicizing the ceremony, or for being somehow intolerant. I don’t see what is intolerant about expecting a commencement speaker to embody the values of a university. Obama could speak at Notre Dame any day of the week. By speaking at the commencement, he had the last word in the entire education of the graduating class. The administration at Notre Dame should have thought this through a little better.
On the other hand, I will concede that, once the offer was made and accepted, that the school was in a difficult situation. You don’t rescind an invitation to the President. The President is not simply a politician, he is the head of state. He represents the United States, and in that capacity he should not be embarrassed. All of us felt a certain irritation when Venezuelan President/Dictator Hugo Chavez greeted Obama at a recent meeting with a copy of a book of anti-American propaganda. We have to endure enough of that from our enemies — we shouldn’t have to endure it at home.
While I believe that, once the offer was in place, Notre Dame could not gracefully back out, I also think the school compounded its mistake by offering Obama an honorary degree. There was no need for that. If there had been no honorary degree, the university could have simply stated that it invited Obama in his capacity as head of state, and not as an endorsement of his political views. That would be fine; universities often have speakers who disagree with the views of the faculty. That is what academic discourse is supposed to be all about. But the honorary degree put the school in the position of having to defend Obama himself, a position a Catholic university should never have to do.
I don’t understand honorary degrees anyway. My alma mater, the University of Virginia, never gives honorary degrees, under the logic that its founder, Thomas Jefferson, never acquired a degree and therefore that the school should not confer an honor it never accorded its own founder. I like that. It shows a certain seriousness about degrees that the honorary degree cheapens. These days most top entertainers end up with honorary degrees. Some celebrities even brag about them, as if they mean something. An honorary degree is like a key to a city. It is recognition, but it won’t open any doors.
There was a time long ago when the honorary degree did mean something. At one time, many very prominent intellectuals did not have college degrees (Mr. Jefferson, for example, or George Washington or Charles Dickens), and an honorary doctorate was a way of recognizing accomplishment in an academic discipline by someone who did not possess an advanced degree. Today, it is a lame way to attract a speaker.
Though I would rather not have seen him give this address, I give Obama credit. He is very serious about engaging with the opposition on various issues. A lesser leader would have confined himself to giving speeches to people who agree with him, as George Bush and Dick Cheney have always done. Obama means to face his opposition, even if only superficially. This is an honorable thing, regardless of the politics involved.
By odd coincidence, President Obama’s appearance at Notre Dame coincided with a recent Gallup poll showing that for the first time, the majority (51%) of Americans describe themselves as pro-life. Pundits have been scratching their heads over this development for the last few days. Now I will explain to you why it has happened.
When Roe v. Wade was decided, most Americans (in my opinion) were not comfortable with abortion, but also shied away from the prosecution of women who had one or the doctors who were doing the procedures. Women’s lib was also fresh on everyone’s mind in 1972, and citizens were inclined to give women more freedoms, rather than fewer.
The problem was the people in 1972 had a naive view of abortion. They thought women would only opt for abortions in extreme circumstances, such as for medical reasons, or for rape and incest. That has not turned out to be the case. Abortions rose from about 100,000 in 1972 to peak at 1.3 million in the 1980s, and hover around 850,000 now. Rape, incest, and medical need, according to a study done in 1998, make up only about 3% of all cases. Most people have abortion for monetary reasons, because a child would interfere with a career or education, or simply because the pregnant woman is “too young.”
In other words, abortion is nothing more than late birth control, in at least 95% of cases.
Most pro-lifers, like myself, feel that they could tolerate a rare abortion for medical reasons or for rape and incest. In my case, it is not necessarily true that I think abortion is right in the case of rape and incest, but that situations like that are uncommon enough and difficult enough that I would not feel comfortable prosecuting people for having one. What we have now, though, is 95 people piggybacking on the 5 people who truly have a right to call their situations unusual and extremely difficult.
Most pro-choicers argue that they want abortion to be “safe and rare.” Fair enough, but rare hasn’t happened, and the way things are going, it is not going to. Most of the people who have abortions are doing something morally wrong because they refused to avail themselves of the many ways to prevent pregnancy. Liberals have even made it some kind of a joke that anyone would have the audacity to argue that not having sex is a good way to prevent pregnancy. People, according the them, won’t ever resist their natural urges. But then, people also have a natural urge for wealth, so by the same logic we shouldn’t hold those poor Wall Street bankers responsible for what they have done either. After all, we’re all just human.
As a medical doctor and thus someone who has had experience with these things, I am convinced that the condom doesn’t break and the pill doesn’t fail all that often. Most of the time, people don’t pay attention to their proper use.
So it is that this 51% of Americans, myself included, feels that we have indulged too long people who refuse to do the right thing and take responsibility for themselves. There are more ways to prevent a pregnancy than I can count on both hands. It is very unlikely that all these very good methods for preventing abortion are failing almost a million times a year.
Let’s face it — liberals talk a good talk about reducing abortions, but what are they really going to do? Obama has been moving frantically on every political front except in this area. The only thing he is likely to do is appoint a Supreme Court justice who will lock up Roe v. Wade for another generation. The Democrats seem to oppose abstinence-only programs in favor of handing out condoms to anyone who wants them, even though a condom only costs about a dollar and is hardly beyond anyone’s financial reach. The sum total of their political message seems to be: “Don’t worry, just keep doing what you want to. We’ve got your back.” Abortion rights, on the other hand, encourage people to avoid the embarrassment of going to a drug store and putting a condom up on the counter, or going to see a doctor, because, after all, if something goes wrong, there is another option.
I am astonished that there is a predominant view on the left that public policy with regard to “reproductive rights” should have nothing to do with personal responsibility. Here I was, like a dope, thinking that if anything falls under the auspices of personal responsibility, it would be what we do with our own bodies.
A few months ago, Pope Benedict, on a trip to Africa, made a comment that was widely ridiculed. He told an audience in Cameroon that condoms “aggravate” the AIDS crisis. This was widely misinterpreted as meaning that condoms don’t prevent AIDS. Benedict knows better, and didn’t mean that. What he meant was that condoms don’t prevent AIDS 100% of the time. (The CDC reports that condoms, "when properly used" protect against pregnancy 98% of the time, but admits that it only assumes, but can't prove, similar effectivness in HIV transmission. The bigger problem is that people don't use them properly. The practical effectivness rate of birth control methods, which takes into account human error, is called use effectiveness, and probably runs in the 70-90% range for condoms). Since condoms don’t always work, telling people they do leads to a false confidence that encourages people to do whatever they want. In a way, people who think they have no defense against HIV may be better off, because they are more likely to weigh their decisions very, very carefully.
This is a problem with human behavior. People will do things they definitely should not be doing if they do not think they will ever pay a price for it. Legalized abortion only seems to encourage more abortions, not more responsible behavior. As long as the U.S. government is in the business of preserving abortions rights and not in driving people towards more responsible behavior, there will be no change in the number of abortions in this country. The fluctuations in the abortion rate in dovetail nicely with demographics, and not with any newfound sense of responsibility. As the Boomer generation ages, abortions should drop -- and they have.
This then, is the reason for the pro-life uptick. There are many people who have been on the fence about abortion, and they are slowly migrating to the pro-life side because they want to see abortion rates drop but see nothing encouraging from the political left.
There has to be a more sensible approach. There are many pro-choicers who say they personally think abortion is wrong, and want to see it used more rarely. What we 51 percenters want to know is, what are you going to do about it? America has lived by your rules since 1972 and the problem has not improved one bit. We are inclined to think you are mouthing the words and intend to do nothing. That sends us back to our last resort — ban it.