Obama on abortion

Joseph Bottum has a well written and insightful piece on the politics of abortion under Obama. Here are some clips but go read the whole thing.

On abortion, Obama is the complete man, his support so ingrained that even his carefully controlled public speaking can’t help revealing it. He’s not a fanatic about abortion; he’s what lies beyond fanaticism. He’s the end product of hard-line support for abortion: a man for whom the very question of abortion seems unreal. The opponents of abortion are, for Obama, not to be compromised with or even fought with, in a certain sense. They are, rather, to be explained away as a sociological phenomenon—their pro-life view something that will wither away as they gradually come to understand the true causes of the economic and social bitterness they have, in their undereducated and intolerant way, attached to abortion.

The result is already clear, with an announcement from Obama’s transition team, only days after the election, that the new president will remove all restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research immediately on taking office. The Mexico City policy (which requires all groups that receive federal funds not to perform or promote abortion abroad) will disappear the first day, as well. Back in 1992, the Clinton administration gave social policy at the United Nations and other treaty organizations—all the minor jobs in international affairs—to the far left as part of its spoils in the Democratic victory, and the first signs suggest that the Obama administration will do the same.
The Freedom of Choice Act currently before Congress is as extreme a measure as the nation has ever seen, invalidating for the entire country all restrictions on abortion before viability, including parental notification, waiting periods, and partial-birth abortion bans. Obama was one of its sponsors in the Senate, and in July he announced at a Planned Parenthood event that “the first thing I’d do, as president, is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That’s the first thing that I’d do.”
….
More to the point, such advice is probably unnecessary. Without resistance from the White House, the congressional Democrats are certain to push beyond the general public’s views on the life issues. And when they do, the Republicans will be forced to trumpet the Democrats’ extremism. That’s an inherent pressure on the politics of opposition, and it will keep the life issues in the news, whatever pro- Roe Republican pundits and activists wish.

Meanwhile, what should the pro-life movement do? The reasoning offered by some of the Catholic public figures who supported Obama was embarrassingly bad, but we should not, for that reason alone, admit to the perpetual tying of the pro-life cause to the Republican party. The Republicans have done some good and some ill for the cause since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, but, however one weighs it up, the results are not full repayment for the support pro-lifers have given the party over those years. The coming fights promise no new seriousness on the part of the Republicans. They talk a better game than they play, in Congress at least, and they have often been better on the life issues when they are out of power than when they are in.

emphasis added