Vice President Kamala Harris will be nominated by the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States this week. In the few weeks since President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the race, she has not only united the party but also generated enormous enthusiasm.
Partly because of the urgent need to prevent former President Donald Trump from returning to power, but also because of the political climate after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Democratic National Convention will focus repeatedly on the party’s commitment to abortion rights. The question is whether there will be any room left for the Democrats’ pro-life activists.
Harris has made “freedom” a central theme of her campaign message, which she uses in ads and campaign videos, and reproductive rights are explicitly included. Freedom is at the heart of American history, from the Pilgrims who sought religious freedom, to the Founding Fathers who made liberty the very goal of our constitutional order, to the civil rights activists of the mid-20th century who demanded that our nation live up to the true meaning of its creed. American history can largely be viewed as our collective successes and failures in embodying freedom.
Those who support abortion rights understand abortion rights as part of this broader story of emancipation, particularly of women. Our constitutional republic began with a narrow commitment to liberty that ignored the country’s original sin, slavery, and also failed for more than 125 years to extend the right to vote to women. In the second half of the 20th century, after fascism was defeated in World War II, a series of movements – for civil rights, for women’s rights, for gay rights, and for disability rights – were often seen as a grand, multifaceted effort to expand human freedom.
Some of us understand abortion rights differently. We see them as part of a narrative that Pope Francis has called the “globalization of indifference.”
Just as early 20th-century liberalism was blind to the evils of eugenics, pro-life Democrats see abortion rights as a kind of indifference to the moral significance of the unborn child. We can easily empathize with the plight of a woman faced with an unexpected or crisis pregnancy. We all know someone who has had an abortion, and we know these individuals to be good, decent, and caring people. But we cannot simply ignore the moral fact that a decision, an exercise of freedom, that involves the destruction of human life or potential human life is, at the very least, morally problematic.
For Catholics, freedom is a complicated issue, one of the main goals of civil society. Our understanding of freedom is not rooted in Locke’s ideas about a social contract, much less in contemporary libertarian ideas that see any interference with personal choice as impermissible. For Catholics, freedom, even religious freedom, is rooted in human dignity and the need to seek truth. As the Second Vatican Council in Dignity of humanity:
In accordance with their dignity as persons – that is, as beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility – all human beings should be at the same time naturally impelled and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also obliged to follow the truth once they have discovered it and to conduct their whole lives according to the demands of the truth. However, human beings cannot fulfil these obligations in a manner consistent with their own nature unless they enjoy immunity from external coercion and psychological freedom. Therefore, the right to freedom of religion has its basis not in the subjective disposition of the person but in his nature itself. Consequently, the right to this immunity continues to exist even for those who fail to fulfil their obligation to seek and follow the truth, and the exercise of this right must not be hindered, provided that just public order is maintained.
The Council’s teachings on religious freedom also apply to other freedoms.
Freedom is not ambivalent, but neither is it the only value in civic life. Human dignity and the common good also make demands on the state. We Catholics support workers’ rights because the dignity of workers demands it, even if it compromises the freedom of businesses. We Catholics support the right of migrants to assistance and shelter because their human dignity demands it, even if the host country must provide resources to meet their needs. We Catholics support a fair distribution of societal resources because the common good demands it, even if taxes are inherently confiscatory. We support action to combat climate change because the common good and concern for human life demand it, even if such a confrontation will entail significant changes to our common life. On all these issues, Democrats eschew the libertarian position. On abortion, they endorse it.
As Democrats gather in Chicago for their convention this week, pro-lifers worry there may be no place for them in the party we are committed to. The big tent approach of the 1970s is over. The days when Bill Clinton said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” seem like a lifetime ago.
It is still possible for pro-life Democrats to vote for Harris in good conscience this fall, especially given the alternative, but I fear the time will come when their conscience will compel them to leave the party. Or to acknowledge that it has left us.
