Campaign 2012: The Future of the Pro-Life Cause

It’s the economy, stupid!  James Carville’s memorable note-to-self during the 1992 presidential race will be the determining factor in the 2012 campaign, according to the common wisdom.

That may be true. But as Catholics consider their responsibilities between now and Nov. 6, it would be good to remember that the future of the pro-life cause in America is also at stake.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 79. Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are 76. Justice Stephen Breyer is 74. The president elected in November will likely appoint two Supreme Court justices, and may appoint as many as four, over the next presidential term.

If that next president replaces Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy with nominees who think that Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) were wrongly decided, there could conceivably be a 7-2 Court majority to overturn or, in effect, gut those dreadful decisions and return the abortion debate and related life-issues questions like euthanasia to the states.

The pro-life cause would win some states, likely the majority, and lose others. With national opinion polls showing a pro-life majority for the first time in a long time, however, the conditions are right for legally advancing the cause in a dramatic way.

If, conversely, Justice Scalia and Justices Ginsburg and Breyer and possibly Kennedy were to be replaced in the next presidential term by nominees favorable to the Court’s judgment in Roe and Casey, the radical abortion license created by those two decisions might well be set in federal legal concrete for the next 30 years. The pro-life cause would go on, but it would continue under severe federal legal restraints.

That this choice should present itself in partisan terms is a national tragedy.

As the natural successor to the classic civil rights movement, the pro-life cause ought to be a bipartisan cause; it should certainly have been the cause of Catholic progressives. Yet as early as 1967, Richard John Neuhaus, then a Lutheran pastor and a civil rights veteran, warned his fellow-liberals in a Commonweal article that they were betraying the civil rights cause by flirting with “liberalized “ abortion laws.

Neuhaus’s article won a prize from the Catholic Press Association; but that was then, and this is now. The pro-life cause has been abandoned by the old pro-civil rights coalition, even as African-American communities are decimated by the abortion license.

In any case, the pro-life stakes in 2012 could not be greater. Men and women of conscience will form their judgments accordingly.

(George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.)