Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Holding Obama's Pro-life Supporters Accountable

Here is an open letter to Obama's pro-life supporters from the website "Moral Accountability." The website was set up to hold Obama and his supporters for living up to the claims made for him to the effect that he was the real pro-life candidate in the last election and would work for abortion reduction. Without this key support from Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, Obama might not have been elected. Splitting the pro-life vote was a keystone of his electoral strategy. We must not forget and we must face the facts as they emerge. It is early yet in the Obama presidency, but it is looking very bad so far. The letter begins:

"We share with you a commitment to the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every member of the human family. It is for this reason that we oppose abortion, embryo-destructive research, euthanasia, and every other form of direct killing of innocent human beings. We believe that these practices are grave injustices that no society should promote, facilitate, or even permit.

Despite Barack Obama’s record of support for legal abortion and its public funding, and his pledge to lift President Bush’s limitations on the federal funding of embryo-destructive research, you felt that Obama would, all things considered, make a better president than John McCain, and you encouraged your fellow pro-life citizens to join you in voting for him. Some of you argued that Senator Obama, despite his vocal support for legal abortion and equally vocal opposition to pro-life legislative initiatives, was actually the superior candidate from the pro-life point of view. His economic and social policies, many of you said, would strike at the causes of abortion and reduce its incidence. You predicted that lives would be saved.
When it came to embryo-destructive research, many Obama supporters argued that there was no difference between their candidate’s position and the position of Senator McCain. Both, unfortunately, proposed to lift President Bush’s restrictions on federal funding of this lethal research. So that issue was a “wash.”

We have always feared that your hopes and expectations would prove to be unfounded. We have never found it plausible to think that Obama’s policies will reduce the number of abortions. Indeed, we suspect that the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, to mention just one of pro-life laws Obama pledged to eliminate, will (as the abortion lobby itself has predicted) increase the number of abortions in the United States, perhaps by as many as 300,000 per year. But the jury is still out on that one, so let’s lay it aside for the moment.

On March 9, however, the verdict came in on the issue of embryo-destructive research, and the news is very bad."

Read the rest here:
http://www.moralaccountability.com/mission/an-open-letter-to-president-obamas-pro-life-supporters/

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