First Things: At Long Last: Obama, Abortion, and the Courts

By Richard John Neuhaus
Friday, October 17, 2008

I admit to being more impressed than most commentators, including those with whom I usually agree, with the Wednesday night debate between Senators Obama and McCain. Political punditry is not my main shtick, and I have no idea whether the debate will contribute significantly to, as the pundits say, “turning this around.” But it seemed to me that McCain was sharp, on point, and playing offense, while Obama was for the first time on the edge of losing his famed cool and, at points, was floundering. McCain’s quip about the comparative merits of “eloquence” and paying attention to “words” seemed to hit home.

This was strikingly evident in the responses to the abortion question, which, for the first time, was directly posed in these debates. McCain’s effort was to depict Obama as an abortion extremist, and he succeeded. On partial-birth abortion and providing medical care for infants who survive abortion, Obama was reduced to muttering about a “health exception,” which, as he surely knows, means that the abortion license is, in fact, totally unlimited since the denial of a woman’s desire to terminate the life of the infant is construed as a violation of her “psychological health.”

As abortion extremists put it, the woman has a right to a dead baby. Obama apparently agrees, even saying that it is a constitutional right. In this he goes farther than almost any reputable constitutional scholar, claiming that the abortion license is covered by a right to “privacy” that is found not only in the “penumbra and emanations” of the Constitution but in the Constitution itself. the rest

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