Catholics Praise Obama As Pro Life, Hamburgers Will Now Eat People

by evanmcmurry

A writer for the National Catholic Reporter on the abortion politics of the two candidates:

There is no doubt Obama is pro-choice. He has said so many times. There is also no doubt Romney is running on what he calls a pro-life platform. But any honest analysis of the facts shows the situation is much more complicated than that.

For example, Obama’s Affordable Care Act does not pay for abortions. In Massachusetts, Romney’s health care law does. Obama favors, and included in the Affordable Care Act, $250 million of support for vulnerable pregnant women and alternatives to abortion. This support will make abortions much less likely, since most abortions are economic. Romney, on the other hand, has endorsed Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s budget, which will cut hundreds of millions of dollars out of the federal plans that support poor women. The undoubted effect: The number of abortions in the United States will increase. On these facts, Obama is much more pro-life than Romney.

Makes sense to me. Via Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel, it’s about time some on the right started realizing that the frequency of abortions is exacerbated, not eliminated, by prohibition:

Thinking you can reduce the number of abortions by making abortion illegal and then making life extra crappy for women so they’d be more likely to want to have abortions is sort of like a pitcher walking all of the batters in baseball so none of them hit home runs and then acting all confused when the score keeps increasing. Sure, some abortions will always be matters of “convenience” or “lifestyle,” two reasons for terminating a pregnancy often sneered at by the anti-abortion rights set, but many of those “convenience” abortions occur because it’s not very “convenient” when you’re a single woman trying to live on a minimum wage income and you’re not getting any help from anyone.

That it was a Catholic newspaper that brought this up—one that just finished up its defense of some of Catholicism’s less-defensible practices—is something. As Balloon Juice points out, you know you’re pitching something foul when an institution that backs pedophile-employers doesn’t want anything to do with you:

That’s some good reasoning, but it’s preceded by a defense of Cardinal Dolan that includes Canon Law justification of Dolan paying pedophile priests. In a way, that makes it even more remarkable, since even someone who can defend Dolan for that kind of stuff sees through the Romney/Ryan bullshit.

(via The Non Sequitur, with criticisms)