Joe Biden’s awkward position
Abortion and the us election
Could the former American Vice President Joe Biden have been nominated as the Democratic candidate for November’s election for the next President of the United States if he had promised to make unyielding opposition to abortion his number one priority? The answer is obviously no. Yet the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops insists that this is the only option for any Catholic seeking public office. Mr Biden has been criticised within the Catholic community in the US – vitriolically by supporters of Donald Trump – for adopting what might be called a nuanced pro-choice position on this vexatious issue, which has including saying he wants the Supreme Court judgement in Roe v Wade turned into statute law by federal legislation.
Mr Biden has said repeatedly that he personally opposes abortion but does not wish to see his personal views imposed on those who do not agree with him. That is a very common position for Catholic legislators to take, but it sits very awkwardly with church teaching. Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom notwithstanding, the Church’s pronouncements on the issue, especially in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae of 1995, have not hesitated to say that the moral law applies to everyone whether they agree with it or not, and “Thou shalt not kill” rules out all deliberate interruptions of a pregnancy by anybody for any reason at any stage.
Polling suggests that Mr Biden’s position is widely shared by Catholics in the United States and Europe. Abortion is an evil. The gap is between the absolutist position maintained by church teaching and the more pragmatic view taken by some Catholics that abortion may in certain circumstances be the lesser of two evils – and that the person making that calculation ought to be the pregnant woman herself.
Pragmatism is not lacking from the official Catholic side: Evangelium Vitae allows Catholic legislators to vote to lower the number of weeks of pregnancy at which abortion may be permitted, even if that appears to condone abortion in some cases.
It is surely legitimate to argue that there are other more effective ways to lower the abortion rate, such as ensuring good maternal healthcare and tackling poverty. There are prudential judgements that a Catholic politician should be able to make. The debate cannot be reduced to a simple binary alternative between pro-life and pro-choice positions.
This is not to deny that there are ethical problems with the position Mr Biden and most Catholic legislators take. They would never be allowed to declare that while they were against racism, say, or against domestic violence, they “did not wish to impose their views on others”. The underlying issue, to which the Church has given insufficient thought, is the tension between insisting that Catholics seeking election to public office take an absolutist approach to its teaching on abortion, including the commitment to make access to legal abortion impossible in all circumstances, and the demands of the democratic system itself.
Mr Biden has been justifiably praised for his decency and his strength of faith. If elected he would be only the second Catholic president of the United States, after John F. Kennedy. It is a sound Catholic principle never to let the best be the enemy of the good. And in the present circumstances in the United States, the election of Joe Biden would indeed be good.
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