TO STOP ABORTIONS, VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN OVER DONALD TRUMP

This Blog promised to give our views on the abortion issue. Because it is such an important issue, we decided to wait until closer to the election. Our readership has been growing and growing and we thought this issue deserves a larger audience.

We feel now is the time. Everyone on this Blog’s team is pro-life. We certainly admire and support those who take a broad view of pro-life. Our faith commands us to support life at all of its stages. But the bloggers here are firmly pro-life in the sense we strongly oppose abortion. Having carefully considered the issue, we have concluded that a JOE BIDEN administration would better protect unborn life than a TRUMP administration. Here is our reasoning:

The experience of nations across the globe show a strong co-relation of a robust safety net to low abortion rates. There is almost no co-relation of laws against abortion to the abortion rate. The Netherlands has one of the most permissive abortion laws in the world. It also has one of the lowest abortion rates of any nation outside the Muslim world. Brazil, the Philippines and Mexico have strict laws against abortion yet some of the highest abortion rates in the world. The Blogger Team here does support laws to restrict abortion. We disagree with Joe Biden on that issue (though we note Biden has voted for late term abortion restrictions). But we also reject the position that restrictive laws by themselves sufficiently protect the unborn. Those conservatives who oppose social initiatives while only advocating for restrictions are only half hearted in their opposition to abortion. They have compromised and negotiated down their anti-abortion principles. Here are the programs Biden supports that have proven to reduce abortion:

• The Affordable Care Act. The signature Obama-Biden legislation has resulted in ONE MILLION fewer abortions since enacted. Prior to ACA, the abortion rate had been declining by a steady 2% decrease each year starting with the Clinton administration and somewhat stalling during the Bush Administration. In each year since the implementation of ACA, the abortion rate has declined 3-6%, a remarkable improvement. The data goes up to the end of 2016. By 2017 the United States had an abortion rate of only 14.6 per 100,000 fertile women. On the eve of Roe v. Wade, it was 16.3. Thanks to ACA we now have an abortion rate LOWER than it was before the Roe decision. The data here is indisputable but it is open to discussion as what it is in Obamacare that leads to this sharp decline in abortion. Evidence suggests that women who have health insurance feel more secure with their future as are more likely to choose life. ACA also mandated coverage for the unborn in all insurance plans, something the Trump Administration is trying to eliminate. Prior to ACA almost all individual insurance plans included abortion coverage. ACA mandated that people buying insurance in the marketplace have the right to choose a pro-life plan and that states (which many have) could require all plans to exclude abortion coverage. ACA also greatly expanded access to birth control. The data only compares the abortion rate to ACA implementation. It can be expected that good maternal health care achieved through the reduction of the uninsured also reduces miscarriages, so here are additional unborn lives not counted in the abortion data.

• Paid Parental Leave. Laws that allow mothers to take paid time off after the birth of a newborn help women choose life. Biden supports paid parental leave. Trump made vague promises during his 2016 campaign but in four years has failed to follow through with a plan. Nancy Pelosi pushed through paid parental leave benefits for federal employees while Trump offered no assistance.

• Pregnant Worker Fairness Act. This was recently passed by the House of Representatives and supported by Joe Biden. Trump has not supported this important anti-abortion legislation nor asked McConnell to bring it to a Senate vote. This long-overdue bill would direct employers to provide reasonable accommodations for workers carrying an unborn child, much as they would for a worker with a disability – say, shifting them to an assignment with reduced heavy lifting during pregnancy, if available. A New York Times investigation of working conditions for women warehouse workers at New Breed Logistics (that’s right, the company founded by Postmaster General Frank DeJoy) and its successor firm, XPO found that multiple women there experienced miscarriages attributed to their work duties. In a particularly notorious incident, a pregnant warehouse worker who asked for light duty was told by a supervisor that she should get an abortion if she wanted to keep her job.

The above policies result in fewer women seeking abortions by significant numbers, likely greater numbers than a reversal of Roe would. Defense of the unborn must not only include threats from surgical abortions but abortions caused against the will of the mother, often politely called miscarriages. But when clear actions lead to the death of unborn life, it is morally an abortion regardless of what polite terms others prefer. We are speaking of the Trump rollback of EPA standards of dangerous chemicals in the workplace, agricultural fields and environment. Millions of unborn deaths will occur because of Trump rollbacks on the chemical Chlorpyrifos, Mercury, trichloroethylene (which causes fetal heart attacks), methane gas and other pollutants. These may cause health problems for adults but with fragile unborn life, it has been fatal for millions of unborn babies. Additionally, maternal health is a factor in a successful pregnancy. Programs for maternal nutrition face cuts in the Trump Administration but funding would be restored by Joe Biden. Biden supports abortion reducing initiatives such as prenatal care, postnatal care, and access to child care for working mothers.

The preceding speaks to positive program of Biden and the Democrats that could reduce the abortion rate down to the miniscule levels of Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Portugal. Now let’s look at the weak Trump record.

The Trump campaign appears to reprint a National Right to Life Committee flyer on his abortion stance. Since both groups use the same actions, let’s look at them:

• Defunded Planned Parenthood and issued the Mexico City Policy. Neither of these actions can be shown to have prevented a single abortion. Federal funds cannot be used to pay for elective abortions. The assertion by the Trump campaign is that monies are fungible. This is highly doubtful and the Administration has every right to review the proper spending of government grant money. As much as they want to claim this, certainly no Catholic has any obligation to believe that government grant money is fungible. That would be a matter of private judgment. In fact, many Catholics (including us) reject the claim by some secularists that aid to parochial schools is unconstitutional as it is fungible and could subsidize worship and evangelization. Catholics Charities and Catholic Relief Services receive millions in government funding and sign sworn statements that they are using the grants properly. Can the Church swear under oath that grant money is not fungible when she receives it but require Catholics to believe so when other organizations receive it? We also note that Trump carefully limited these proposals to only apply to social welfare programs, something Republicans show a hostility towards anyway. This is further evidence of a right wing deal between the RTL Establishment and anti-social welfare Republicans. The MCP was carefully written to apply only to overseas social welfare organizations. Had Trump not carefully written it but just applied it to all overseas aid, it would have cut off the largest recipient of US aid, the state of Israel, where abortions are paid for by the government.

• The second item the Trump campaign and NRTLC cite was Trump’s speech at the March for Life. Personally, we applaud his presence there, a first for an American President. But certainly this symbolic action does not bind any person, including Catholics, to vote for him. But in this, the right wing asserts that it is appropriate to consider intangibles. With that on the table, we believe Trump grossly fails the issue of protection of unborn life. His womanizing, general immorality, crudeness on issues of sexual morality all point to the behavior that promotes what St. John Paul II called a culture of death instead of a culture of life. Every Catholic and every voter has the right to make a judgment on the sincerity of a politician. From Trump's 1999 statement that he is "strongly pro-choice" to his womanizing lifestyle, Catholic voters might conclude in good conscience that he is not sincerely anti-abortion. Further, his comments that pregnancy is an “inconvenience” for employers and his comment "what are we going to do about it?" to his then girlfriend Marla Maples when she told him she was pregnant does not suggest a solid opponent of abortion.  We believe Donald Trump promotes an abortion culture.  

• As to the appointment of judges, some people may feel they received a "wink and nod" or have inside information. But few if any of Trump's judicial appointments have publicly said they would rule to repeal Roe. The GOP record on what were sold to the pro-life movement as anti Roe judges has not been good. Here again, each Catholic voter is free to decide for themselves how much value and trust to put in these nominations. It should be noted in the Presidential Debate, Trump suggested Roe was not in danger of being overturned.

Some readers, like this Blog Team, might believe that we should have both effective social programs and environmental health standards that protect unborn life AND legal restrictions on abortion. Given that neither of the two candidates hold both of those, such readers might ponder the question of which to give greater weight. We are convinced that the legal restrictions are less effective. Donald Trump himself stated that reversal of Roe would mean the question of abortion “would go back to the states,” to Lesley Stahl of CBS News during a conversation on “60 Minutes.” Ms. Stahl asked him what would become of women seeking abortions in states that banned the procedure. “They’ll perhaps have to go — they’ll have to go to another state,” the then president-elect replied. For one of our Blog Team, he only recently reached the conclusion legal restrictions have limited value. His mind was changed by Raymond Cardinal Burke, a churchman who speaks frequently on abortion. Cardinal Burke once wrote in a heartfelt way of his mother, whose doctor had indicated she could have an abortion when she was pregnant with the future Cardinal. Mrs. Burke of course chose life, explained her loving son. But what struck our Team Member is that he was born a few miles from where Cardinal Burke was born. Knowing that part of rural, conservative 1950s Wisconsin, populated by devout Catholics and Lutherans and at a time before Roe when abortion was illegal in Wisconsin, he found it an education to learn from Cardinal Burke himself that the laws at time didn't seem to stop the availability of abortion. 

This is our longest essay in the Blog. We might further develop it. But we believe our readers are due for the reasons why we think even being a single issue abortion voter, Joe Biden is the preferred candidate.