In his Oct. 27 New York Times editorial “Why I Am Prolife,” Thomas Friedman paints an ugly, implausible caricature — of his own view of the world. Is it really possible that a public intellectual believes he can cancel out support for the intentional killing of inconvenient pre-born babies by favoring measures like smoking bans or carbon-trading?

The term “pro-life,” like its counterpart “pro-choice,” denotes one of the governing values that stand in tension in arguments over abortion: One side favors the sanctity of life, the other of choice. It’s laughable for advocates of legal abortion to skip lightly over the death of more than 1 million American children every year, then claim...READ MORE

I’ve been stunned to see how trivial the religious freedom issue has proved in the campaign, and how few Catholics realize the lethal stakes for which we’re playing. Have there been TV ads about this that I’ve missed? Why wasn’t this subject raised in the debates?

Probably because even the candidates who favor our point of view know it's not a winning issue. It matters to a select group of people (like you and me) but it will not move the needle on Election Day. Huge “swing” states full of Catholics will not be swayed by a major persecution of the Church being enacted by the government.

Let me point out in stark relief what will come if the Obama administration is re-elected, and...READ MORE

Last week’s vice-presidential debate was less cringe-worthy than the VP match-up in 2008. In fact, there was one moment where substance won out, and a vast, yawning canyon opened between the candidates and their parties. That was when the moderator noted that each of the candidates is a Catholic, and asked them about abortion.

Their answers contained every point you might predict: Biden stood behind the Democrats’ even-further-expanded commitment to taxpayer funded abortion on demand without apology, while Ryan reiterated the Republican platform’s promise to try to outlaw most abortions.

Biden made matters starkly clear, promising almost explicitly that support for Roe v. Wade...READ MORE

My prolife friends and I had gotten our hopes up after Ronald Reagan won. Then came Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992), when Sandra Day O’Connor (a Reagan appointee) joined the majority in grounding the “right” to abortion not on the fictitious sands of the invented right of “privacy,” but on the Constitutional rock of “liberty.” Some months later, we marked New Year’s Eve together in the home of Manhattan’s Latin Mass church lady, sharing a fifth of Jameson’s and months’ worth of impotent rage. Just what would it take to pull the abortion issue from the tabernacle of “constitutional rights” and restore it to the reach of democratic governance—a Christian revolution?  I observed:

“The...READ MORE