Doug Kmiec, Tell Barack Obama to Stop Taxpayer-Funded Abortions in DC
by Jill Stanek
December 17, 2009
LifeNews.com Note: Jill Stanek fought to stop "live birth abortions" after witnessing one as an RN at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois. That led to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act legislation, signed by President Bush, to ensure that proper medical care be given to unborn children who survive botched abortion attempts. She operates the blog Pro-Life Pulse and writes for WorldNetDaily, where this column originally appeared.
For his phenomenal work convincing just enough Catholic voters that pro-abortion, pro-infanticide, pro-human embryo experimentation Barack Obama was actually pro-life, Catholic law professor Doug Kmiec was awarded an ambassadorship to the country of Malta, a group of Mediterranean islands off the southern coast of Italy.
Kmiec labored hard to earn that plum appointment, going so far as to rustle up a book, “Can a Catholic Support Him?” just seven weeks before the 2008 election.
Sitting in a Panera cafe with winter boots on in the aftermath of Chicago’s first blizzard of the season, let me check Malta’s weather right now. December being one of its coldest months, the daily average temperature is 65 degrees with five hours of sunshine. But I digress.
Of course, Kmiec’s answer was an emphatic, “Yes!” In a May 2008 op-ed in Catholic Online, Kmiec explained (bold emphasis mine):
Not because Sen. Obama’s position on abortion is mine; it is not — but because I believe that my faith calls upon me at this time to focus on new efforts and untried paths to reduce abortion practice in America.
Sen. Obama’s emphasis on personal responsibility … best moves this issue forward. [He] honestly concedes the abortion decision poses serious moral issues which he argues can only be fully and successfully resolved by the mother facing it with the primary obligation of the community seeing to it that she is as well-informed as possible in the making of it.
I do not understand Sen. Obama to be pro-abortion. … But where he looks for the greatest … opportunity to reduce the number of abortions “is on the idea of reducing unwanted pregnancies,” because, he reasons, “if we can reduce unwanted pregnancies, then it’s much less likely that people resort to abortion.”
So, as Kmiec explained it, Obama’s plan to lower the number of abortions if elected president was to pre-empt them by focusing on personal responsibility and education, which he saw as the “primary obligation of the community.”
Kmiec added, in an October 2008 interview for Beliefnet.com (bold emphasis again mine):
[W]hile the senator and I are in disagreement [on abortion], it does not dim my enthusiasm for his presidency since I believe for the first time we will have a president who genuinely intends to address the poverty and anxiety that in the vast majority of cases determines a woman’s decision.
As an aside, Beliefnet.com was one of the pro-Obama Web squads for Protestants during the 2008 campaign. Coincidentally, Beliefnet.com’s editor, Steve Waldman, just accepted Obama’s offer to take a new position created just for him at the Federal Communications Commission: senior adviser to the chairman.
So Kmiec further understood Obama 1) to think poverty creates the perceived need to abort; and 2) to plan to alleviate poverty, thereby lowering the number of abortions.
Which brings us to today and an apparent major misunderstanding.
A bill to allow the District of Columbia to use public funds to underwrite abortions of poor mothers is on its way to President Obama’s desk to sign. Strangely, it was Obama himself who suggested this when submitting his budget proposal in May.
Read the rest of Stanek’s call for Kmiec to tell Obama to stop the abortion funding here.
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