The Democrats' takeover of the Congress in this year's elections has prompted a curious line of thinking in pro-life circles. I suspect that you have heard one version or another of it. We are being told that the new status quo may actually be better for those seeking an end to legal abortions. In what way?
The argument is that the number of pro-life Democrats among the new representatives heading to Washington will open doors for us. The most prominent names on that list are Bob Casey, Jr., the newly-elected senator from Pennsylvania, and Heath Shuler, the new member of the House of Representatives from western North Carolina. But there are others. So many, in fact, that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been arguing emphatically that "conservatives won" the last election, even though "Republicans lost."
This case is based on the belief that the shift in the political terrain in Washington gives pro-life movement leverage within the Democratic Party; that leading Democrats such as Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, who led the effort to recruit pro-life Democrats to run for Congress this year, did so because they recognized the strength of the pro-life vote. Some also make the point that the Republicans had been taking pro-life voters for granted and that they will now have to do more than pay lip-service to the pro-life cause if they expect to win back the pro-life voters who switched to the Democrats this time round. The result is a win-win situation for pro-lifers, they tell us; that the pro-life vote is now "in play" and that both parties will have to shape their platforms to take that reality into consideration.
Sorry, I don't buy it. From where I sit, the pro-life position has been dramatically weakened by the last elections. It has been split, diffused. The political landscape on abortion has been muddied. Whatever Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton are, they are not dummies. I submit that what they have accomplished is to significantly disarm the pro-life movement, at least in the short run, and maybe longer than that. When they made the decision to recruit pro-life Democrats such as Bob Casey to run for Congress, there was no implicit concession on their part that the Democrats' position on Roe v. Wade was a subject for reconsideration within the Democratic Party. Far from it. The goal was to diminish the clout of the pro-life movement, not give it a potential home in the Democratic Party.
Placing a woman's "reproductive rights" up for grabs was not part of the equation when the Democratic leaders made the decision to recruit pro-life candidates such as Casey. They were confident that electing even a dozen or more pro-life Democrats to the Congress would not come close to tipping the balance in the party toward an anti-abortion position; that the new pro-lifers would be vastly outnumbered by the "pro-choice" Democratic majority. That was the sine qua non of the decision to seek pro-life candidates in this year's election.
It was a clever strategy. Consider the results: the Democratic Party will still be militantly in favor of legal abortions, but it will be harder for the Republicans to portray it in that way. That is all that has changed. If the Republicans try to make abortion an issue in future elections, Schumer and Hillary will be able to rattle off a list of "prominent pro-life Democrats." Voters leaning toward the Democrats, but troubled by the thought that they will be voting for the party of abortion-on-demand, will have their consciences soothed.
Am I saying that the newly elected pro-life Democrats such as Casey and Shuler were part of a strategy to split the pro-life vote; that the Democratic leaders sat down with them and made clear that their pro-life views were never to be heard from again once the election was won? Am I implying that a deal of sorts was struck insuring that they would vote with the Democratic leadership on key abortion issues? No; I have no way of knowing those things. (More cynical things have happened in Washington, however.) But it will be interesting to watch voting patterns over the next few years to see if these "pro-life Democrats" are willing to buck the Democratic leaders when issues such as partial-birth abortion and stem-cell research reach center stage.
We may get a test case before then. There should be a Supreme Court vacancy before long. Will Bob Casey vote for a Supreme Court nominee cut from the same cloth as John Roberts or Samuel Alito? Chuck Schumer has already stated that he will seek to block a nomination that will tip the court toward the Alito-Roberts-Scalia-Thomas camp. Will Casey vote with him to accomplish that goal, especially if the vote is close? (If it is not a close vote, of course, we will not be able to tell much. It is commonplace for party leaders to permit individual members of Congress to "vote their conscience" when it will not effect the outcome of the vote.) It is difficult to see how a sincere pro-life Catholic could justify a vote against someone like Scalia or Roberts. But my hunch is that Bob Casey will do just that, bobbing and weaving and reciting lines prepared for him by someone like James Carville. We'll see.
This is an ironic turn of events. The critics of the late Cardinal Bernardin's "Seamless Garment" proposition used to argue that the Cardinal had created a moral equivalence between pro-life legislation and issues such as poverty and the death penalty. Many argued that this was precisely Bernardin's objective; that he was seeking to provide Catholics who wanted to vote Democratic with a justification to do so; that these Catholics, because of the Seamless Garment proposition, could claim they were "with the Church" on poverty and capital punishment, even though they were voting for candidates who opposed the Church on abortion – and thus no different in loyalty to the Church from conservative Catholics who were "with the Church" on abortion, but in dissent on capital punishment and Great Society programs.
Whatever Bernardin's intention, Hillary and Schumer have made that debate moot. A voter leaning toward a Democratic candidate will no longer have to ponder the implications of voting for a member of a pro-abortion party. He will be able to deny that the Democratic Party is pro-abortion. It does not matter if the number of pro-life Democrats in Congress is small. There will be enough of them to blur the image of the party on the abortion question, especially for voters who do not follow these things closely until the last few days before an election. Hillary and Schumer have not surrendered ground by backing pro-life Democrats. They have defused the issue for Democrats. There is no way to picture that as a favorable state of affairs for the pro-life cause.
