Pro Ecclesia * Pro Familia * Pro Civitate: Prof. Kmiec Shifts the Goalposts

From The Weekly Standard:

... But Kmiec's argument ignores one very inconvenient fact: Obama's policies on abortion, taken as a whole, would very likely lead to a higher abortion rate. That's because Obama supports subsidizing abortion by repealing the Hyde amendment, which prohibits Medicaid and other government funding for abortions. According to a study by University of Alabama political scientist Michael New, "state laws restricting the use of Medicaid funds in paying for abortions" reduce the abortion rate by more than 29,000 abortions for every 1 million women of childbearing age.

Squaring Obama's pledge to subsidize abortion with his goal of reducing the number of abortions is quite a difficult task. In a phone interview in late May, I asked Kmiec if he was aware that Obama supports public funding for abortion. "I can't say that I am quite frankly," he replied.

I asked Kmiec, in light of Obama's commitment to taxpayer funding of abortion, if he would consider renouncing his endorsement if the senator didn't change his position. "I haven't seen the social science literature that you're obviously much more privy to and obviously sending me," he said. But assuming that public funding would significantly increase the abortion rate, Kmiec added, "I would be at a loss to say anything other than I can't support the senator at that point."

Kmiec pointed to a piece he had written for Slate, in which he declared his endorsement of Obama "will be renounced more loudly than it was given," if Obama failed to "work to reduce the incidence of the practice [of abortion]".

I emailed Kmiec reports on a number of studies showing that Medicaid funding of abortion causes a higher abortion rate. But when he got back to me in mid-June, he said Obama's position on abortion funding was not a dealbreaker. Kmiec explained that one "must take full account of the church's social teaching" on other issues like poverty, war, and the environment. When I asked him about his statement that he would likely renounce his endorsement if Obama didn't reconsider abortion funding, he replied: "If I said it quite that categorically, that's not quite where I'm at."

On June 11, before our second conversation, Kmiec, along with about 30 religious leaders, attended a private meeting for several hours with Obama in Chicago. Kmiec told me he didn't get a chance to ask Obama about abortion funding. But he still hoped that Obama would work to reduce the abortion rate by enacting policies such as a "maternal care voucher" that "would actually fund life." But according to the University of Alabama's Dr. New, although such programs supporting pregnant women are "certainly admirable," "there is little in the way of good social science data to evaluate how many of [these programs] will actually affect the incidence of abortion."

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