Obama presidency:
the worst of the worst

Analysis Paul Tuns
Editor

On Nov. 4, Barack Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, was elected president of the United States. Conservative political commentators and pro-life leaders consider Obama the most pro-abortion major party presidential candidate and many worry about the changes that are in store with four years of Obama in the White House and his fellow Democrats controlling both houses of Congress.

Obama won the presidency in a landslide, with 67,981,686 votes (nearly 53 per cent) and 365 electoral votes, winning typically Democratic states such as New York and California, but also swing-states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. The only "swing state" - the 10 states that have been the most closely contested over the past three presidential elections - won by Republican John McCain was Missouri.

Obama holds extreme pro-abortion positions. As a state senator, he opposed the born-alive infant protection act - a law that not even NARAL Pro-Choice America opposed. He has indicated he will appoint only pro-abortion judges and has said one of his priority pieces of legislation is the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate federal and state-level restrictions on abortion.

FOCA would rescind the federal partial-birth abortion ban and all prohibitions on taxpayer funding of abortion. But it also dictates that states cannot restrict a "woman's right to abortion" and if this part of the act survives legal challenges, would rescind state-level restrictions such as parental notification or informed consent laws. The Democrat-controlled Congress will almost certainly pass FOCA early in 2009. Pro-life groups are ready to wage battle over the issue in the political and legal arenas right away.

Obama is also expected to sign two executive orders to rescind pro-life presidential orders signed by President George W. Bush: nixing the Mexico City policy, which prohibits the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide or promote abortion overseas, and reversing Bush's 2001 executive order restricting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to a set number of existing stem cell lines.

The Centre for Reproductive Rights, a pro-abortion law outfit, has already called upon Obama to reverse the Mexico City policy, or as they call it, the global gag rule. In 1992, Bill Clinton rescinded the policy on his first day in office, reversing the restrictions inaugurated by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Bush re-instituted the policy in 2001 after assuming the presidency.

Obama is also a supporter of the Prevention First Act, a supposedly neutral effort to reduce abortions. It is widely supported by pro-abortion politicians, and would increase federal funding for family planning (contraception) and sex education (abstinence and "safe sex" counseling), require insurance comapnies to cover contraception and increase "awareness" of emergency contraception. Pro-life leaders see radical consequences to the moderate sounding agenda supposedly designed to reduce the "need" for abortion. Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, said, "What this reasonable-sounding language disguises, of course, is the ugly reality that the Prevention First Act would actually force insurance companies to fund, doctors to prescribe and pharmacies to dispense, abortifacient contraceptives."

Democrats - who increased their majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives - may pass the Prevention First Act to camouflage their less popular pro-abortion agenda.

Pro-life leaders spoke out against the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, said Americans do not share Obama's abortion extremism and that the next four years will see a growing gap between the public and the person who holds the highest elected office on the issue.

Pavone said, "The pro-life movement has made significant gains in the courts and in the law in these last eight years. For the next four, the movement will work to prevent the erosion of that progress."

During the Bush administration, many pro-life leaders had access to the White House. They helped craft important legislation that reduced abortion (the partial-birth abortion ban) or were common sense, life-affirming laws (unborn victims of violence). As Pavone noted, the pro-life movement will be forced to play defence.

Bradley Mattes, executive director of the Life Issues Institute, said, "Our job of protecting innocent human life has just gotten harder," but it is not hopeless. Setbacks might only be temporary, he said, reminding pro-lifers they "endured the dark days of the Clinton administration." Mattes said of the 2008 election: "We have only lost the battle, not the war."

Pavone reiterated the battle to protect innocent life continues: "Together we will work, we will protest, we will defend, we will intervene, we will educate and we will win this struggle for the lives of our unborn brothers and sisters."

But Focus on the Family founder James Dobson was more melancholic, saying the Obama victory sets the pro-life movement back to 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided. Speaking of the Freedom of Choice Act, Dobson said: "I mean it would set back to 1973 the efforts to have parental notification and waiting period - all those things that have been done in various places - gone, because he wants no restriction on abortion whatsoever."

For the international pro-abortion community, the clock will be reset to 2000, before the Bush administration. The United Nations stopped holding major international conferences in recent years because the U.S. delegation frustrated the efforts of radicals to have abortion declared a human right and the anti-family agenda of gay rights and contraception promotion from being advanced. Ruse, whose organization monitors the United Nations, predicts the UN will resume its radical social agenda with a flurry of new international conferences announced in early 2009 to take advantage of the new, friendly administration.

Obama's early appointments reinforced his pro-abortion priorities. Former senator Tom Daschle, appointed to secretary for health and human services as well as "health czar," has a 50 per cent lifetime rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America, but much of his "opposition" to abortion stems from support for the partial-birth abortion ban and support for unborn victims of violence laws. He is expected to liberalize abortion restrictions and push for embryonic stem cell research.

Ellen Moran, executive director of EMILY's list (a feminist group that funds pro-abortion women candidates), was named White House communications director. National Review Online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez responded to the announcement by declaring the move established "the Obama administration as the voice of the pro-abortion left."

Finally, while she had not accepted the position at press time, Senator Hillary Clinton was offered the post of secretary of state. Clinton's pro-abortion bona fides are undisputed, but she cemented them in 1994 at the Beijing conference where she fought to make abortion as a human right. Pro-lifers worry about the damage she can do at the international level. Jim Hughes, vice-president of the International Right to Life Federation, told The Interim that she is a "nightmare" for the pro-life movement, because she will "actively push the pro-abortion, pro-‘safe-sex' message at the United Nations and around the world."