Obama’s view on abortion may divide Catholics

Archbishop Chaput, who has stopped short of telling his flock how to vote, has called abortion a “foundational issue.” He has said that a vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights or stem-cell research, like Mr. Obama or Senator John Kerry in 2004, was a sin that must be confessed before receiving communion. Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain, an opponent of abortion rights, met last week in Denver with Archbishop Chaput.

The archbishop declined an interview request but his spokeswoman, Jeanette DeMelo, said that his views had not changed. In a column this year, Archbishop Chaput wrote that Catholics could support a politician who supported abortion only if they had a “compelling proportionate reason” to justify it. “What is a ‘proportionate’ reason when it comes to the abortion issue?” the archbishop wrote. “It’s the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life — which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.”

That is a tough standard for Mr. Obama, or any supporter of abortion rights, to meet. Republicans are gearing up campaigns to depict Mr. Obama as a radical on the question of abortion, because as a state senator in Illinois he opposed a ban on the killing of fetuses born alive.

Mr. Obama has said he had opposed the bill because it was poorly drafted and would have threatened the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established abortion as a constitutional right. He said he would have voted for a similar bill that passed the United States Senate because it did not have the same constitutional flaw as the Illinois bill. Mr. Obama has opposed the federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortions for similar legal and constitutional reasons.

That explanation did not wash with many abortion foes and most Republicans.

“When you look at his opposition to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act in Illinois and the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, which many Mass-attending Catholics view as bans on infanticide, Obama’s more extreme than any other Democratic presidential candidate,” said Leonard Leo, who directed Catholic outreach for Republicans in 2004, and is an informal adviser to the party and the McCain campaign.

Mr. Leo also said that the appearance of Mr. Casey on the dais at the Democratic convention would not be enough to address the concerns of faithful Catholics.

“He might get a slight bump from Casey among Catholics generally, but it doesn’t get him all the way there because Casey-the-Younger isn’t his father, and Mass-attending Catholics have figured that out,” Mr. Leo said.

William A. Galston, a domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Catholics were the quintessential swing voters. Mr. Galston said they were roughly a quarter of the electorate but lived in disproportionate numbers in the swing states of the Midwest. Polls show them closely divided between the two candidates. Mr. Galston said Mr. Obama could improve his standing with Catholics by, like Mr. Clinton in 1992, conferring with a group of Catholic leaders and then giving a substantive speech at Notre Dame or another Catholic institution.

Mr. Obama should also speak out in favor of legislation now before Congress to provide financing for alternatives to abortion like free prenatal care and adoption assistance, Mr. Galston suggested. Mr. Obama should also invite Mr. Casey to speak at the convention, he said.

“I spend a lot of time with Catholic intellectuals, and no matter how liberal they are and inclined to support Democrats, they speak with vehemence about the exclusion of Casey’s father from the 1992 convention,” Mr. Galston said. “They don’t accept any of the explanations. I think it would be a dramatic act of historical rectification that would resonate with Catholics.”

This article, "Obama's View on Abortion May Divide Catholics", first appeared in The New York Times.

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