President Obama’s ommisions and obfuscations.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States.  Many thousands of people participated in the March for Life to protest the continued legality of that barbarous practice. For his part President Obama issued a statement celebrating Roe v. Wade.  The website of First Things website has a great article analyzing the president’s statement.

What is most remarkable and also most encouraging about the message from the President in support for abortion is that it does not in fact include the word “abortion.”  That omission  reflects a cultural and political reality, — the reality that most people oppose most abortions that are actually performed. Most people do oppose elective abortions. Because of that the President, and others like him have to use euphemisms  such as “reproductive health care,” or “privacy,” or such, instead of saying what they actually mean. The writer of the First Things article, Matthew Schmitz, points that the President’s statement is Orwellian in it’s identification of the cause of abortion with building “safe communities for children” (indeed what the President says is, “all” children) and with giving “everyone” the “freedom and opportunity” they deserve. When a politician feels he cannot call the thing he is defending by its common name, it is evidence that the cause he serves is in major trouble. The President’s unwillingness to say the word “abortion” should give heart to those who have been struggling (and, like yesterday, marching) for more than forty years against the bloody reality that, as far as Barack Obama is concerned, dare not speak its name.

Reproductive freedom ought to mean the freedom to give life, not the gruesome act of taking it. We are not “free” to take the lives of others. To clothe such a barbaric practice in the robes of noble language, and to use the influence of the office of the President of the United States to do so, is a great barbarity in itself.

Read the article in First Things here.

President Obama’s statement is here.