Now that Barack Obama has decided to push for a hyper-partisan healthcare bill, the issue of taxpayer-funded abortions is front-and-center. The current proposals would lead to this taxpayer mandate, and could even drive conscientiously objecting doctors out of medicine.

The New York Times wrongly reported that Mr. Obama has decided to go it alone with Democrats in Congress, passing a bill without Republican support. That’s untrue. The decision they’re making is to pass a bill without any moderate Democrats — in other words, a bill of the Far Left.

The liberal officials and activists comprising the Far Left make perfectly clear that their highest social priority is abortion. More than same-sex marriage or gun control, abortion is their defining social issue. So legislation for Obamacare written exclusively by liberal Democrats will protect their agenda.

That means one thing: Obamacare will mandate taxpayer-funded abortions.

Ever since 1976, the Hyde Amendment has prevented most federal taxpayer dollars from funding abortions in America. The late pro-life stalwart, Congressman Henry Hyde, inserted the amendment (that must be renewed each time) into the law funding Medicaid to prevent taxpayer money from paying for Medicaid recipients’ abortions.

But the Obamacare proposals being debated would change that in one of two ways. First, if the legislation does not expressly refuse funding for abortion, then under normal rules of statutory interpretation it would be presumed that funds could be used for that purpose.

Second, Obamacare would eventually lead to abortion funding, even if it excluded it for several years. Once Obamacare is in place, it would fund healthcare at prices below what private insurers could offer. The government’s deficit each year would be paid by tax revenues. Insurance companies would either lose business because they were more expensive, or they would go into the red if they tried to compete at the same price. Either way, private insurers would go bankrupt, and everyone will be on the government plan.

Once the government plan was the sole source of money to healthcare providers, government protocols as to what conditions providers must meet to be eligible to receive federal money would directly dictate treatment decisions. (Obamacare could even exert that influence beforehand, because at some point it will be the single largest payer for every provider, money the provider couldn’t do without.)

This danger goes beyond forfeiting reimbursement for individual treatments. The federal government will have criteria that a provider must satisfy to be eligible for federal funds. The government would make abiding by its treatment protocols a condition to remain eligible. These protocols would include who gets what treatment, in what order patients are treated (this is government rationing), and providing abortions on demand. Violating these protocols would make that provider ineligible for funds.

Once Obamacare becomes the sole source of funds, becoming ineligible means going bankrupt. Distressed over losing their entire careers and aware of how their closure would cause more deaths and suffering by leaving people without care, most providers would rather cave on this narrow issue than close shop.

Talking heads on the Far Left openly say that they believe it’s okay for the government to yank someone’s medical license for refusing to perform abortions. Some, such as Alan Colmes on Fox News, said that this amounts to denying needed care to a person that the person is entitled to, and that it’s not wrong for a provider refusing to perform abortions to be shut down.

The reason they’re so militant on this issue is because the Far Left believes that taxpayer-funded abortions are a constitutional right. Everyone’s heard of Roe v. Wade. Fewer have heard of Harris v. McRae, where the Court held in 1980 that the right to an abortion does not include the right to force taxpayers to fund that abortion.

Most people don’t appreciate how close the Supreme Court is to simply declaring a right to taxpayer-funded abortions. Harris v. McRae was a 5-4 decision; four liberal justices wrote that everyone has such a right.

The current Supreme Court is likely only a single vote from overturning this decision, and declaring taxpayer funding to be commanded by the Constitution. Barack Obama may yet have the chance to change that balance on the Court.

So both legislatively and judicially, taxpayer-funded abortions teeters on a knife’s edge. Doctors’ rights of conscience, whether religious or otherwise, are in critical danger, and Americans should rally to doctors’ sides to stop this outrageous aspect of Obamacare from becoming law.

So it’s come to this.

They want to tax sex.

You read that right. Sex. They want to tax sex. With a delicious irony that speaks only to the utter financial desperation bequeathed by modern American liberalism, there is a move rising in Nevada, the state that has given America Senator Harry Reid, to tax sex.

Are they crazy? No, “we’re desperate,” said the Reid ally proposing the tax.

No wonder Harry’s latest poll numbers are flaccid. A May survey for the Las Vegas Review Journal said half of Nevadans had an unfavorable view of the Senate Majority Leader, with 45% saying they would vote against him in 2010. With Reid’s party now wanting to tax sex, one suspects his polls will not be erected any time soon.

by Michael Ramirez

Between the federal and various state governments having targeted, among other things, soda, beer, poker playing, tires, tobacco, SUVs, fast food and marijuana (in California, if legalized but of course), in Nevada it’s now come down to taxing time with Barbarella, Brandy, Bunny, Goldie and Hortense.

Accuracy and thoroughness being a necessity here, a sacrifice was made with a trip to a few Nevada brothels. Virtually, but of course. What an interesting world it is. A world where one can quite legally and very physically (if you’re actually there) hop on in to the Cottontail Ranch or just slip into the Cherry Patch if one is done doing the Dovetail. You thought Angelina Jolie was a star? Wait until you spend some quality time with Barbarella, Brandy, Bunny, Goldie and Hortense.

How much would the sex tax be, you ask?

Reid’s fellow Nevada Democrat, State Senator Bob Coffin, the aptly named chairman of the State Senate’s Taxation Committee who represents Las Vegas, thinks it would take $5 bucks a pop…um, per act… to stiffen the finances of Harry Reid’s home state. If you are visiting from, say, Sweden, where they have a 25% tax on condoms, a night of Bunny hopping could start to mount up.

Yet State Senator Coffin’s new definition of a head tax is an interesting proposition. Obamacare advocates are insistently hectoring that X behavior is not only bad for us, it adds gazillions to health care costs. Which is why whatever X is — they want to tax it. For our own good, don’t you know. This is why New York’s Governor David Paterson wants a soda tax, for example. Something Dr. Thomas Frieden, the new Obama head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, enthusiastically supports. Frieden, by the way, is the guy who got trans fat banned when he was New York City’s Health Commissioner.

Says Paterson, illustrating the liberal mind precisely: “The surgeon general estimates that obesity was associated with 112,000 deaths in the United States every year. Here in New York State, we spend almost $6.1 billion on health care related to adult obesity — the second-highest level of spending in the nation.”

Paterson is disturbed X behavior (soda drinking in this case) causes bad result Y (obesity in the Paterson example) and therefore needs to be taxed because X behavior causes death. Ergo this dreadful behavior of drinking sodas in New York is costing his state $6.1 billion in health care costs. Thus the best policy is an obesity tax — make every New Yorker pay through the nose every time they quench their thirst with a Coke or a Pepsi. A tax like the obesity tax results in the best of both worlds in the liberal mind: more revenue for more programs, lower health care costs and, most importantly, more control over you.

Which is why liberals in Washington and around the country have targeted everything from fast food to SUVs, intent on wading into your private life to save you if not the planet.

So. OK. We get it. Let’s fantasize with this bit of Obama-esque mind set, shall we?

Hide the kids, let the dog out, lock the door. Let’s talk sex and taxes.

Isn’t it time to tax people with AIDS? Isn’t it time to tax abortions?

To stay on the straight up and narrow, we turn to Dr. Frieden’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (which is to say the US government) for an AIDS definition and some facts, quoting the CDC.

• What Causes AIDS? “AIDS is caused by infection with a virus called human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This virus is passed from one person to another through blood-to-blood and sexual contact. In addition, infected pregnant women can pass HIV to their babies during pregnancy or delivery, as well as through breast feeding. People with HIV have what is called HIV infection. Some of these people will develop AIDS as a result of their HIV infection.”
• AIDS and Men Who Have Sex with Men: “The term men who have sex with men (MSM) refers to all men who have sex with other men, regardless of how they identify themselves (gay, bisexual, or heterosexual). In the United States, HIV and AIDS have had a tremendous impact on MSM.”
• How Many American Men Who have Sex with Men Have AIDS? “AIDS has been diagnosed for more than half a million MSM. Over 300,000 MSM with AIDS have died since the beginning of the epidemic.”
• How Many Men Engage in This Behavior? “MSM made up more than two thirds (68%) of all men living with HIV in 2005, even though only about 5% to 7% of men in the United States reported having sex with other men.”
• How Widespread is this in the African-American Community? “In a 2005 study of 5 large US cities, 46% of African American MSM were HIV-positive.”
• How Widespread is this in the Hispanic-Latino Community? “Hispanics/Latinos comprise 15% of the US population, but accounted for 17% of all new HIV infections occurring in the United States in 2006.”
• What About Women? “HIV and AIDS were originally thought to affect mostly gay men. However, women have always been affected too. And even though more men than women have HIV, women are catching up. In fact, if new HIV infections continue at their current rate worldwide, women with HIV may soon outnumber men with HIV.”

And last but not least, the favorite question posed by all ObamaCare enthusiasts.

• How Much Does HIV/AIDS Cost? Says the CDC: “The Federal Government alone, through the Ryan White CARE Act, Medicaid, and Medicare and other care programs, spent $11.7 billion on HIV-related medical care in 2005. CDC estimates that the aver age cost of lifetime treatment for HIV infection is $210,000. If 40,000 people are newly infected with HIV in one year, the additional cost to society for their lifetime HIV-related medical care may be as high as $8.4 billion.”

To sum up using the liberal logic: getting HIV/AIDS is one heck of an expensive proposition for the health care system. And what is the answer to dealing with behavior that costs us all so much money in health care?

All together now: we…tax it! Be it soda in New York or sex in Nevada, the answer is tax, tax, tax and tax again.

This case having been effectively drilled into us (so to speak) in the Obamacare health care fantasy, isn’t it time to ask: why aren’t we taxing sexual behavior that winds up costing Americans billions? The CDC has been helpful enough to tell us that a single person who contracts HIV/AIDS will need a “lifetime treatment” costing $210,000. If, says Uncle Sam, 40,000 people are newly infected every year, that’s an additional $8.4 billion in costs.

Got it. So how do we do this? How do we tax people who contract AIDS? Not to mention those who walk in with this or that sexually transmitted disease (STD)?

Every time a newly infected person is diagnosed by a doctor or hospital or clinic, their information is immediately reported to the IRS. If we’re all socialists now and Obamacare is going to keep a gimlet eye on our death spirals then, as State Senator Coffin has correctly deduced out there in Nevada, what you do with your sex life can’t be allowed to escape the tax man either. Just as hospitals and doctors who treat gun shot wounds are required to report the fact to police, and car accidents are filed with the appropriate insurance company, we just require all new HIV/AIDS patients and those with STD’s to be turned in to the IRS.

Interestingly, the scent of erotic taxation has titillated Indiana Republican Congressman Steve Buyer, who has fantasized aloud about taxing unprotected sex.

As reported here, Buyer streaked this thought through a health care hearing of the Energy and Commerce Committee: “Someone who smokes, drinks, participates in bad conduct and behavior, unprotected sex, maybe bad things happen to them, maybe they should pay higher premiums,” Buyer said. “That is a radical thought, isn’t it?”

Well, its radical only if HIV/AIDS whether incurred by unprotected sex or drug use is suddenly not thought of as behavior, be it good, bad, indifferent or simply mind blowing. Taking a page from the liberal playbook, just think of gay sex as a revenue raiser, in the end, funded by a head tax

Once we begin collecting revenues from MSM’s that the CDC reports are “more than two thirds (68%) of all men living with HIV in 2005″ we can’t turn from that other problem resulting from unprotected sex: abortion. What’s fair is fair. You don’t want to screw around with sexual equality.

The CDC reports that there were over 820,000 abortions in the U.S. in 2005, the last year for which it lists complete statistics. Other sources put the figure at over a million. Obviously, the need for an abortion results from unprotected heterosexual sex, whether deliberate or accidental. Why it happened is as irrelevant in the world of Obamacare as why you felt the need for a cold Coke on a hot day. You drank the soda, you had the sex. You risked getting fat and adding to America’s health care costs, you risked getting pregnant, and in both cases health care resources that could have gone elsewhere were used to deal with your mistake.

Sorry. But in the world of Obamacare you have to pay the piper — or the state of New York or the state of Nevada or the IRS or some government official somewhere.

According to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute the average cost of a surgical abortion in 2001 at ten weeks was $468, with women on average paying $372. A medical abortion, again using 2001 statistics, cost on average $487. A 10% surcharge would be just the incentive to, as former President Clinton urged, keep abortion “safe, legal and rare” — not to mention reduce health care costs for the rest of us by bringing in needed revenue.

When someone shows up to be appropriately attended to at an abortion clinic, a tax filing based on the cost of the abortion is signed by the patient and the attending physician, then goes straight to the IRS. As the President himself says, the substance of this is above our pay grade. But money is money, and actions have health care consequences, as we are reminded repeatedly. So baby out, dollar in.

Think of it: Roe v. Wade, the backbone of America’s economic recovery.

Just imagine all the possibilities here. IRS Form SCRU-U2 would become must-reading, based as it would be on the old best seller The Joy of Sex. Page 53 of the book is a 5% tax, while page 116 of the book is a 10% surcharge. Barney Frank will stand up for an entire series of tax credits based on another book altogether.

But the bottom line (sorry) is that your freedom and personal privacy as we once knew it are slip-sliding away.

Soda today, sex tomorrow. With apologies to Shakespeare, after the taming of the shrew comes the taxing of the screw.

Here’s hoping you understand the need for protection.

I’ve been intrigued to watch the foment about whether the man who killed Dr. Tiller is a terrorist.

At the ThinkProgress Wonk Room, Matt Duss says, emphatically, “Yes, Dr. Tiller’s Murderer is a Terrorist.” LifeNews.com, a nominal representative of the other “side,” is equally eager to report that abortion activists are calling pro-life advocates “terrorists.”

Mostly, it appears, the Tiller/terrorist question is emotional energy-drink for both sides of the abortion debate. We should let these ideologues be ideologues and move on. But it is worth thinking about the issue in terms of terrorism broadly and in terms of reducing violence prospectively.

Here’s an interesting statement of Duss’ about the killing: “It’s [sic] goal was to intimidate women against exercising their right to choose abortion, and to intimidate doctors who perform them.” Perhaps Duss has had an opportunity to interview Tiller’s killer, who has been highly forthcoming, but more likely Duss is imputing motives to the killer that fit his own worldview and that start an argument he wants to have.

Knowing nothing about the killer, I think it’s a possibility that he might have wanted to avenge what he sees as wrongful deaths that the doctor has brought about, with no contemplation of the prospective effect on women or doctors. The killer might have been trying to impress someone he knows who hated Dr. Tiller. Perhaps he suspected Dr. Tiller was sleeping with his wife (very unlikely, but possible). I don’t think that Duss is wrong, but ascribing motivations to people based on the results they cause is a fascinating habit. To match the hugely shocking results of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush supplied huge reasons that terrorists do what they do, and a deeply unproductive “war on terror” was on.

Now, if the goal is to reduce violence, calling Dr. Tiller’s killer a “terrorist” seems distinctly unhelpful. The criminal laws against homicide contain every penalty that the killer deserves, and he should get justice as the criminal law prescribes it. There is no criminal offense called “terrorism” – and there shouldn’t be, for reasons that follow.

The question in play with Tiller/terrorism goes to future violence – the actions of others. If Tiller’s killer has allies – direct allies or people who agree with what they think he was doing – calling him a “terrorist” will tend to exalt his actions to them. They will perceive it less as an ugly murder and more as political violence done for a cause – something righteous.

If Tiller’s killer were to become widely viewed as a “terrorist,” this would deepen the resolve of his “allies” because they would come to regard the political structure as arrayed against them and their cause. Tiller’s killer would look heroic to them, and his example is one they might seek to emulate in their ideological struggle.

The better approach is to methodically and calmly apply the criminal law to the killing – without rhetorical excess. Putting aside the “political” content will let the ugliness and sadness of the murder carry the day in terms of public attention. This will signal to abortion opponents who might be susceptible to “radicalization” that violence is something sad and pathetic people do. The criminal law accords criminals the justice they are due, families grieve, and the society moves on.

These messages will drain power from the idea of using violence to advance political aims. The best way to talk about the killing of Dr. Tiller is to deal with it only as a grisly and pathetic murder – if the goal is to protect doctors who perform abortion from future violence.

by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, NJ — A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.

The new results, obtained from Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002.

The May 2009 survey documents comparable changes in public views about the legality of abortion. In answer to a question providing three options for the extent to which abortion should be legal, about as many Americans now say the procedure should be illegal in all circumstances (23%) as say it should be legal under any circumstances (22%). This contrasts with the last four years, when Gallup found a strong tilt of public attitudes in favor of unrestricted abortion.

Gallup also found public preferences for the extreme views on abortion about even — as they are today — in 2005 and 2002, as well as during much of the first decade of polling on this question from 1975 to 1985. Still, the dominant position on this question remains the middle option, as it has continuously since 1975: 53% currently say abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances.

When the views of this middle group are probed further — asking these respondents whether they believe abortion should be legal in most or only a few circumstances — Gallup finds the following breakdown in opinion.

Americans’ recent shift toward the pro-life position is confirmed in two other surveys. The same three abortion questions asked on the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey were included in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from May 12-13, with nearly identical results, including a 50% to 43% pro-life versus pro-choice split on the self-identification question.

Additionally, a recent national survey by the Pew Research Center recorded an eight percentage-point decline since last August in those saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases, from 54% to 46%. The percentage saying abortion should be legal in only a few or no cases increased from 41% to 44% over the same period. As a result, support for the two broad positions is now about even, sharply different from most polling on this question since 1995, when the majority has typically favored legality.

Republicans Move to the Right

The source of the shift in abortion views is clear in the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey. The percentage of Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) calling themselves “pro-life” rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essentially no change in the views of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Similarly, by ideology, all of the increase in pro-life sentiment is seen among self-identified conservatives and moderates; the abortion views of political liberals have not changed.

“Pro-Life” Up Among Catholics and Protestants

One of the more prominent news stories touching on the abortion issue in recent months involves President Barack Obama’s commencement speech and the bestowal of an honorary doctorate degree on him at the University of Notre Dame — a Roman Catholic institution — on Sunday. The invitation has drawn criticism from conservative Catholics and the church hierarchy because of Obama’s policies in favor of legalizing and funding abortion, and the controversy might have been expected to strengthen the pro-life leanings of rank-and-file Catholics.

Nevertheless, the swelling of the pro-life position since last year is seen across Christian religious affiliations, including an eight-point gain among Protestants and a seven-point gain among Catholics.

Gender Agreement

A year ago, Gallup found more women calling themselves pro-choice than pro-life, by 50% to 43%, while men were more closely divided: 49% pro-choice, 46% pro-life. Now, because of heightened pro-life sentiment among both groups, women as well as men are more likely to be pro-life.

Men and women have been evenly divided on the issue in previous years; however, this is the first time in nine years of Gallup Values surveys that significantly more men and women are pro-life than pro-choice.

Bottom Line

With the first pro-choice president in eight years already making changes to the nation’s policies on funding abortion overseas, expressing his support for the Freedom of Choice Act, and moving toward rescinding federal job protections for medical workers who refuse to participate in abortion procedures, Americans — and, in particular, Republicans — seem to be taking a step back from the pro-choice position. However, the retreat is evident among political moderates as well as conservatives.

It is possible that, through his abortion policies, Obama has pushed the public’s understanding of what it means to be “pro-choice” slightly to the left, politically. While Democrats may support that, as they generally support everything Obama is doing as president, it may be driving others in the opposite direction.

Survey Methods

Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,015 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted May 7-10, 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points.

Gallup Poll Daily results are based on telephone interviews with 971 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted May 12-13, 2009, as part of Gallup Poll Daily tracking. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

By Michael Novak

Did the University of Notre Dame invite Sen. Stephen Douglas of nearby Illinois to receive an honorary degree in 1858? That was the year Douglas was defending the principle of choice: the right of western territories to make a choice between permitting slavery and maintaining liberty. His opponent in the most famous of American debates was Abraham Lincoln, also of Illinois. There and elsewhere, Lincoln made a simple point based on natural law and natural right: No man is in a position to will himself into slavery, so no one can commit another to slavery. On top of that, the Union itself cannot survive half-slave and half-free. Finally, the Declaration of Independence makes it brilliantly clear that every human being is endowed by his Creator with an inalienable right to liberty.

Lincoln hoped that the dreadful institution of slavery would die away, state by state. He argued that slavery is incompatible with natural rights, and the United States is a natural-rights republic.

NATURAL RIGHTS: FROM SLAVERY TO ABORTION
What the question of slavery and the question of abortion have in common is their basis in natural right. Just as every human being is endowed by his Creator with the natural right to liberty, even more so is he endowed by his Creator with the right to life.

Almost 40 years ago (during the presidential campaign of 1972), journalists were arguing on the press bus. Some said that having an abortion is no different from having an appendix taken out or tonsils removed. Others said that science was on the side of those who were in favor of permitting abortions.

Alas, even then they were out of date. The famous cover of Life magazine with photos of the developing infant in the womb had appeared in 1965. Since then, public discussion of basic embryology has only made the reality in the womb much more vivid — older siblings now see photographs of the budding sister or brother within their mom on the refrigerator — what embryology had long taught: viz., that from the moment of conception, the organism growing in the womb of its mother is human. It is not the embryo of a cocker spaniel, or a camel, or a donkey. Also, not only is it the embryo of an indisputably human being, its DNA gives it a unique, individual identity. It comes not only from its father, and not only from its mother. It is a distinct human embryo — distinct in its identity from both its parents. Today, science is on the side of those who say that from the first moment of conception abortion takes away a human life. The Declaration of Independence insists that every individual human being has a natural right to life.

There are some people who still claim that what is aborted is so small and so without human form that it may be treated as a thing, merely discarded. For them, the choice of the mother takes precedence over the choice of the individual, just as under the Douglas plan the choice of the state takes precedence over the liberty of the individual.

* * *

I doubt very much whether the University of Notre Dame would ever give an honorary degree to a slave owner or a propagandist for slavery. Until recently, I used to doubt that Notre Dame would ever give an honorary degree and its highest platform — its commencement address — to someone who was one of the nation’s strongest proponents of abortion. In the eleven weeks since he became president, Barack Obama has opened up every avenue to abortion presented to him. He has begun razing every obstacle put up against the spread of this evil institution in the past — beginning with the Mexico City ban, and accelerating with extreme pro-death-in-the-womb nominees to key offices, promises to kill the Hyde Amendment, and other actions.

Pro-abortion advocates are now pressing the president to repeal the ban against a horrific practice, partial-birth abortion, and also the Born-Alive Act. Both of these acts have had tremendous impact on the public consciousness of what abortion actually is. Nothing has done so much to make the public aware of the ones who are aborted — their visible shape, survivability, and acute pain. Infants assaulted in the womb in an attempt to kill them, who somehow survived, were discarded in the garbage, left to shiver and die alone. In the whole country, no more than 15 percent dare to support killing infants alive, whether in the breech a moment before birth, or after a botched abortion. The Democrats in Congress went along with the Born-Alive Act without making an issue of it.

Often, doctors and nurses have been tormented by the incompatibility of two tasks in which they have been required to engage: In one room, they work all night to save the life of a baby in the early stages of development; in the next room just afterwards, they are asked to help kill a baby not a day further along in its mother’s pregnancy. Apart from the shock to their raw consciences, this shock to their emotions seems too much to ask of anyone. The conscience clause now protects doctors and nurses whose consciences revolt against abortions. Just as abolitionists once revolted against slavery, so do the irrepressible emotions of many doctors and nurses scream in protest against abortion at any stage in a child’s development.

President Obama has said he will repeal this protection for the consciences of doctors and nurses.

Douglas Kmiec and Notre Dame’s Cathleen Kaveny are among the Catholic professors who told us that President Obama would actually lower the number of abortions. I hope that they are counting. It is certainly difficult at this point to see any obstacle to abortion that President Obama will allow to stand. The Kmiec/Kaveny tangle of illusions underlies Notre Dame’s rationale for inviting the most extreme proponent of abortion in American presidential history to receive the university’s highest honor.

A defense of slavery would have barred him. His support of harsh offenses against human beings in the womb does not disqualify him?

POVERTY AND ABORTION
Profs. Kmiec and Kaveny used to argue that President Obama’s reductions in poverty will bring abortions down. That proposition does not seem empirically valid. Even the poorest households in our big cities spend much more money each year than they report as income. They have far more money at their disposal than the poor of two generations ago, when abortions were far more rare. Poverty is not so acute today, but abortions in some sizeable areas — in Washington, D.C., for example — now exceed live births.

Moreover, existing abortion statistics in America are skewed by the fact that black women make up about 11 percent of the national female population, but have more than 36 percent of all abortions in America. Put another way, of the 47 million children aborted since 1973, some 16 million have been black. If those children had been allowed to live, the black population would today be about 50 percent larger than it is — about 49 million blacks instead of 33 million.

Think of the talents that have been lost. Think about the lost contributions to their own families and to the nation. Think how much stronger our Social Security funds would be today, if all those 47 million aborted (of all races) had come of age, and were creating new wealth, and paying into Social Security.

Taking the black abortion rate and abortion numbers out of the equation, it would be interesting to check the hypothesis that a reduction in poverty reduces abortion. Is it poverty that makes the difference? Or out-of-wedlock pregnancies? Or something else?

What proportion of abortions among whites and Asians, for example, coincides with poverty? Have the numbers or proportions of abortion among the middle and more highly educated class gone up since 1973? Do fairly well-off women at Boston College or the University of Notre Dame have more abortions today than they did three decades ago? Getting people out of poverty, while good for many other purposes, does not necessarily decrease abortions.

Yet even if there were evidence of a relationship between a reduction of poverty and a reduction of abortions, President Obama plainly does not have as his primary priority reducing poverty. That is not the direction in which his economic actions point. Quite the reverse; every economic move he has made since his inauguration seems to point to the constriction of economic activity, loss of entrepreneurial confidence, and punishment for job-creators, investors, and entrepreneurs. There can be no new employees, alas, without employers; no new jobs without new capital investments.

Again, one of President Clinton’s great achievements was to sign the Welfare Reform Act, which set time limits to welfare benefits and demanded work from the fit and the able. Welfare rolls soon dropped precipitously in most states (down by one-third or more). Morale among the newly working population, observers noted, was far higher than before. Those who previously felt no pride in being on welfare experienced real pride in their new economic independence.

President Obama promises to have that act repealed. And that will help morale, reduce dependency, and lower the number of abortions? Reason and experience counsel skepticism.

THE WAR IN IRAQ
Another argument the Kmiec/Kaveny school produced in support of Obama is that he will end the war in Iraq, which they seem to think was illegal and, on balance, evil. Well, as far as the facts go, it appears that President Bush’s war in Iraq produced a hard-won victory (not necessarily long-lasting) over the die-hard followers of Saddam, “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Iranian infiltrators, and other assorted Yemeni and Syrian homicide bombers and terrorists. The depredations these fascist forces committed against democratic Iraqis finally ignited revulsion among their victims. A fierce rebellion against al-Qaeda caught fire among their former allies. These rebels joined with the largely Shiite democratic parties and supported the Americans in the final stages of this precarious victory.

On top of that, the much-derided “surge” worked magnificently. Gen. David Petraeus turned out to have a better grasp of Iraqi reality than Senators Reid, Clinton, and Obama, to name but three.

Most impressively of all, Iraqi democracy seems to be growing slowly but steadily from strength to strength. Violence in Baghdad is at lower levels than in Chicago — although, granted, Chicago does not experience bomb attacks killing 20 or 30 at a time.

Iraq today boasts the largest functioning democracy among the Arab states. It is certainly far ahead of Iran, Syria, and others of its neighbors — even Egypt across the Mediterranean. There is new hope for the protection of human rights, the liberation and education of women, and a new level of religious liberty.

Now that he has been fully briefed on the available intelligence on terrorism, on Iraq, and on Iran, President Obama has been pushed by facts into positions quite close to those of President Bush. This has dismayed many on the left. But it is a tribute to the facts, honestly studied. The gains in Iraq are too hard-won to squander. President Obama has now acknowledged that a contingent of 50,000 Marines and soldiers will remain in Iraq (as in South Korea) until the beginning of 2012. One may doubt that he will remove them during that election year.

ABORTION IS NOT LIKE WAR AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
Finally, Cardinal Ratzinger cut through the Kmiec/Kaveny argument about the relative moral importance of the issues of war, poverty, capital punishment, and abortion, in his famous letter to the American bishops during the 2004 campaign:

Not all moral issues have the same weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.

I respect Doug Kmiec, Cathleen Kaveny, and others for publicly putting themselves on the line to support Obama, based on their position regarding the war in Iraq and their preferred strategy and tactics for reducing abortions in the United States and around the world. But their arguments are not very persuasive.

Even weaker have been the arguments by the leadership of the University of Notre Dame. It may be that President Obama is looking for a chance at Notre Dame to announce a new position in favor of life and against death. But that seems wildly naïve. It may be that Notre Dame is hoping for an argument, a discussion, an engagement, a dialogue on the side of life. Yet it seems that this is not the time nor the place for that — not at a commencement address, not given the glowing citation for the honorary degree, not with so much going at on at graduation. This is a time to shower the president of the United States with praise.

President Obama would feel perfectly entitled to use this honor from Notre Dame as leverage in favor of his full-tilt support for the falsely named “Freedom of Choice Act,” whose real point is not freedom, but the suppression of all consciences that find abortion an evil like slavery.

— Michael Novak’s latest book is No One Sees God. His website is www.michaelnovak.net.

For a decade now, the question of federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research has made for a heated political debate. Scientists believe the research may hold the promise of advancing medical research, but it also involves the destruction of living human embryos, and therefore raises the explosive question of the protection and regard we owe to human beings in their earliest stages.

Since 1995, Congress has prohibited taxpayer funds from paying for research in which embryos are destroyed. The Clinton administration, in its final months, explored the possibility of walking through a loophole in that law by funding everything that followed the destruction of embryos but not paying for the fatal act itself. They never actually went through with such funding. When George W. Bush came into office, he decided that such an approach, by providing a direct incentive for the destruction of embryos, violated the important ethical principle behind the spirit of the law. He proposed instead a narrower loophole of his own: The government would pay for research using lines of cells that already existed at the time of his decision, but not for those created after. That way, the potential of embryonic stem-cell science could be further explored, but federal money would not provide an incentive for the further destruction of embryos.

Bush’s policy was hotly debated throughout his time in office. Congress twice passed, and Bush twice vetoed, a measure that would have replaced it with the more permissive Clinton approach. On Monday, Pres. Barack Obama followed through on his campaign promise to rescind the Bush rules.

Unlike the bills Bush vetoed, however, Obama’s action did not replace the existing policy with another set of boundaries grounded in a different ethical calculus. Instead, Obama eliminated the Bush policy and then took the unusual and provocative step of also rescinding Bush’s 2007 executive order providing support for alternative sources of stem cells — an order that in no way limited embryonic stem-cell research and need not have been retracted. Having lifted these restrictions, Obama put no rules or boundaries of any kind in their place, instructing the scientists at the National Institutes of Health to do so on his behalf over the next few months. Obama’s executive order makes no mention of any moral qualm about the destruction of human embryos — whether left over from fertility treatments or created especially for experimentation, including human embryos created by cloning.

The last time NIH scientists were tasked with developing rules for embryo research, in 1994, they returned with proposals so permissive that Bill Clinton felt compelled to reject them. There is no reason to think the NIH will be any more circumspect this time, but President Obama unfortunately has given us considerable reason to think he will not reject even the broadest possible mandate for the exploitation of nascent human lives. With this week’s executive order, Obama has not so much staked out a position in the embryo debate as dismissed the debate itself as unnecessary.

The embryo debate is among the first real tests of our commitment to the equal protection of every human life in the age of biotechnology. The quandaries of this age will only grow more vexing and complicated. But scientific advances in recent years — especially the development of alternative sources of embryonic-like cells that do not necessitate the destruction of human organisms — appear to offer us a way around the test.

President Obama has turned his back on those advances. He has needlessly and clumsily forced a choice between the promise of progress and the respect for life, and has gone out of his way to ensure that we fail the moral test put before us. Let us hope this failure proves reversible in time and does not set the tone for science policy in the years to come.