WARREN: Now, let’s deal with abortion; 40 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. As a pastor, I have to deal with this all of the time, all of the pain and all of the conflicts. I know this is a very complex issue. Forty million abortions, at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?Everyone I've read in the blogosphere has trashed Obama for this response, particularly the "above my pay grade" part. They see this as a pusillanimous equivocation designed to allow his audience to project their beliefs onto him. I completely disagree with this assessment. I believe that Obama was speaking from his heart and was being totally honest.
OBAMA: Well, you know, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.
WARREN: Have you –
OBAMA: But let me just speak more generally about the issue of abortion, because this is something obviously the country wrestles with. One thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that there is a moral and ethical element to this issue. And so I think anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue, I think, is not paying attention. So that would be point number one.
Evan Sayet turned me on to this notion when I watched his video describing his analysis of modern leftism following 9/11. The concept at work here is that judgment itself is evil. Being non-judgmental is the highest form of truth and beauty. Who are you to say what is right and what is wrong? After all, we used to see blacks as non-people. We used to see women as less than men. We used to see gays as aberrant creatures. The common thread in all of that is the use of concrete standards of judgment. Just look at what that led to.
Consequently, for Obama, it is the use of concrete standards that is wrong. That is the source of Obama's response. Abortion can only be condemned if you adhere to some fixed standards of behavior. If everything is relative then that assessment is indeed above Obama's pay grade. I would venture to extend this to the worship of nuanced answers as well. It is intellectually simplistic to give answers like "we must defeat evil." We used to think that about the American Indians, too. Look where that led. (Fewer massacres of settlers, but then again the settlers had a much larger carbon footprint than the Indians, so that was OK.)
I think the attacks on Obama's abortion response are dead wrong and betray a lack of understanding of his world view. Within his frame of reference, his response was honest, complete and accurate. The underlying debate that we're not having is over the use of concrete standards of behavior. Do we need them? Are they important? If one group believes that the word of God defines sin in concrete terms, is it OK for another group to legislate rights to those sins? Do the believers have to financially support those "sins?"
Obama was speaking from his heart and many of us chose not to hear him.
But, KT - tell me what this statement actually SAYS But let me just speak more generally about the issue of abortion, because this is something obviously the country wrestles with. One thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that there is a moral and ethical element to this issue. And so I think anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue, I think, is not paying attention. So that would be point number one.
ReplyDeleteYes, It is something society wrestles with. We all know that. There is a moral and ethical element, yes, we all know that... there's just talk filling up air time here. He answered with the appropriate number of syllables. Sounds good. Nuthin' there. Same with alot of his other answers. restating the obvious. Playing back what we already know. Is that an answer to the question? In some sort of Confucius kind of way?
I do agree with you, though, saying "above my pay grade" is just a euphemism for saying, I don't have the answer.
Actually, I think he was exactly right about the "above his pay grade" comment. Regardless of whether you think abortion is morally defensible or not, why do people think that the president of the US does, or should, have any say in it? The president does not make laws. The president does not decide court cases. The president does not decide what is legal
ReplyDeleteThe sum total of his legal authority in this area is his ability to pick judges that he thinks might be biased one way or the other. He can also manipulate the way that federal agencies execute their legal obligations, but I feel that he has an obligation to follow the spirit of the laws, and not try to twist them into whatever form he, personally, might like. If you don't like the law, get the law changed.
If the president does anything else in this area, he is not acting as a president. He is acting as a dictator. I mean, would you want the president to have the power to say "Yes, abortion is/is not legal"? How about "murder is legal"? or "Everything is now the property of the US government"? The law is what it is, if you don't agree with the law, take it up with the congress and the courts.
Personally, I think that presidents have been milking the abortion issue for too long. All of them are aware it is out of their hands, none of them have any intention of settling it one way or the other (and are thankful that there is, really, squat all they can do about it), and it is a convenient way to divide the population of voters into two groups where they can say either "I'm Pro-Life" and automatically get one group, or "I'm Pro-Choice" and automatically get the other. It is an easy, risk-free way for them to cleanly claim about a third of the electorate with hardly any effort on their part. And it will just go on and on and on and on and on and on, until we all realize that the presidency is not the office that is going to decide the legality of abortion, and that anytime they talk about it, they might as well be saying "la, la, la, now a third of you have to vote for me".
Rose, his statement about abortion having a moral component may be as judgmental as he can get. When I first heard it, I thought the same as you - it was a bunch of jibber jabber that said nothing. I'm arguing that this statement may be about as far as he can go when it comes to a moral assessment of the act.
ReplyDeletetim, there are lots of ways the president can affect the abortion decision. Judges are one way, funding for abortions through State Department discretionary funding in other countries is another way.
"Judges are one way,"
ReplyDeleteA highly unreliable way, given that the judges can do what they want once they get in, but I agree that's one of the few legitimate things the President can do to affect abortion laws in the US.
"funding for abortions through State Department discretionary funding in other countries is another way."
And this has nothing to do with US abortion laws. And if he did do this sort of thing in the US, I would consider it a violation of his duties.
(Ok, this is going to be a bit long, but I want to get it off my chest):
My wife's second pregnancy turned out to be ectopic. For anyone not familiar with the term, this is where the fertilized egg implants in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus. It is not a viable situation. As the egg grows into a fetus, it will eventually rupture the fallopian tube, and if left untreated, most of the time the mother will bleed to death. It is the classic case of a "medically necessary" abortion - the fetus will never survive, and it will most likely kill the mother unless it is aborted.
First problem: the general climate where we live is strongly anti-abortion, to the point where the doctors are either opposed to abortion themselves, or are so intimidated that they are terrified that somebody might accuse them of performing abortions and hound them out of town. So, even though they were pretty certain that her pregnancy was ectopic, they just sat on their hands, hoping that it would spontaneously abort and they wouldn't have to risk sullying their hands with it. Of course, it didn't - her fallopian tube ruptured, and she had to go to the hospital at midnight for emergency abdominal surgery after she'd already lost a good deal of blood. If the doctors hadn't been so intimidated, they could have (and most likely would have) treated this with a minor laparoscopic surgery a couple of weeks earlier, at minimal risk to her. Instead, they went for an "operate or die" situation. I therefore regard the anti-abortion movement as being at least partially responsible for nearly killing my wife. This is a case where there was no codified policy, just a lot of people who thought they knew better than the law, and so they force unintended consequences.
Second problem: Just as an acorn is, at most, only a potential oak tree, I cannot convince myself that an early phase fetus should be considered any more than a potential human. It has no nervous system, very little structure, and without genetic analysis can't be told from the fetus of any other mammal. As far as the question of a "soul", I don't think that you, I, the Pope, or the Bible have the slighest idea when the fetus develops one. As time goes by, if it is lucky enough to avoid the approximately 50% odds of spontaneously aborting, then it becomes closer to being a full human, and a newborn child is certainly human, but I can't see any justification for considering it to be like flipping a switch where it goes from "not human" to "fully human" at a particular instant. If I could convince myself that it was fully human, though, then I'd be in a position of believing that my wife and I had three children rather than two, but our second child we had to murder in self-defense. And isn't that a nice thing to tell the kids someday? "Oh, yes, we had another child, but we had to kill it because it was killing your mother." Yes, I am aware that the doctrine of the Catholic church is that this is one of the few cases where abortion is acceptable, but it still amounts to pinning a "murderer!" label on the mother, her doctor, and possibly her husband that I don't believe is deserved.
So why did I write this? I wanted to illustrate why I believe that abortion is not a cut-and-dried, right vs. wrong situation. And, as such, given the extremely limited capability of a president to affect the legality of abortions anyway, I think the "pro-life/pro-choice" litmus test that a lot of people apply to presidents is, at best, pointless. And at worst, it could cause someone to elect a president that they would otherwise reject.
I mean, what if Obama did come out and say he was morally opposed to abortion and would do everything he could to stop it, and then McCain declared that he supported the right of women to have an abortion, but they otherwise left their platforms unchanged? Should the pro-life people then drop everything and vote for Obama?
Wow. That's quite a story. I'm sorry that you and your wife went through all of that.
ReplyDeleteI don't have any problem with the mother's life exception at all. I think part of the problem (and anger) with abortion on demand is pretty well described by Theodore Dalrymple in his essay The Frivolity of Evil.
The point I'm leading to here is how secularism and moral relativism has obliterated whole portions of our society. The annihilation of the family in black, inner city areas has led to the decline of civilization. Dalrymple looks at the British corollary to that, removing the racial aspect, but in the US, our worship of the cult of self-indulgence, particularly sexual self indulgence, of which abortion has played a very large part, has done a lot of destruction in these populations.
KT, I hear what you are saying with respect to moral relativism and a resulting lack of a concrete answer to the question, however... with a voting record like Obama's and from a voter's perspective in that type of forum he has to have a better answer than that.
ReplyDeleteIs it a stretch to think that armed with that voting record, Obama might think that life begins at birth or (applying his shoot-down of the abortion survivor bill) perhaps at some undetermined time after birth?
Certainly a man who feels as strongly about the unfettered right to abortion must have some idea when life begins... instead he gives some throw-away glibness that makes me repulsed by the man even more.
What Dean said.
ReplyDeletedean, I'm giving the Barack the benefit of the doubt. If Barack doesn't feel comfortable with moral judgments about anything, then voting to allow people to make their own moral judgments is what he has done. It certainly is in line with the general philosophy that we have no right to impose our morals on others.
ReplyDeleteI don't agree with it, but at least it makes sense.
KT, It might make sense had he not been so categorically for abortion at any time, any stage of the pregnancy right up to partial birth abortion, it's just another of his expedient trimming of the sales to the way the wind is blowing. I don't think he has an honest bone in his body.
ReplyDeleteIf he has children, and he does, then he has some knowledge of 'when life begins' - and as Jim says, in the early stages that is debatable.
ReplyDeleteAnd I agree with you, KT, that now that I have heard more of what Obama said, and did with regards to that bill certainly colors the "above my pay grade' remark.
The woman, interviewed on Hannity and Colmes was talking about late term abortions, and live babies, not fetuses. Sounded like it was a Downs baby.
What society is to do with them when the parents don't want them - what a quandary. Yet, in that case, letting them die is the same as killing them - and Scott Peterson went to prison for that same basic thing... is it murder if it is a wanted child, but not if it is not?
Serious questions. Above my pay grade - meaning I don't have any answers.
But cases like Scott Peterson do as much or more to 'undermine Roe V Wade' if that is all Obama was really concerned about.
Life. What a beautiful choice.