The following is a reply by Robert P. George and Gerard V. Bradley to Mark Roche's editorial from the October 11, 2004 edition of the New York Times. Mark Roche is Dean of the College of Arts and Letters here at Notre Dame. George's and Bradley's response originally appeared on National Review Online. Dean Roche's editorial can be found here.

"History will judge our society's support of abortion in much the same
way we view earlier generations' support of torture and slavery." These
words appeared Monday in an essay published in--are you sitting
down?--the New York Times.

You can get back up. There is an explanation. The point of the piece
was to explain to Catholic citizens why they can in good
conscience--indeed, why they should--vote for John Kerry.

But, you may be asking, isn't John Kerry in favor of legal
abortion? Indeed, doesn't he support the public funding of
abortions? Hasn't he consistently voted against efforts to prohibit
partial birth abortions? Didn't he even vote against the Unborn Victims
of Violence Act that would have held murderers of pregnant women and
their unborn children liable for both deaths?

Doesn't John Kerry vigorously support embryo-killing for biomedical
research? Doesn't he condemn those who oppose this killing for putting
"right-wing ideology" ahead of curing people? Indeed, going beyond the
killing of embryos currently stored in assisted reproduction clinics,
hasn't Kerry proposed to create, at public expense, massive numbers of
embryonic human beings by cloning in order to use them as disposable
research material?

Hasn't John Kerry voted against every effort to place meaningful
restrictions on the practice of abortion or embryo-destructive
research? And hasn't he attempted to implicate Catholics and other
pro-life citizens in the slavery-like evil of these practices by paying
for them with tax payer dollars?

By what logic, then, does the author of the New York Times essay conclude
that Catholics should vote for the United States Senate's most faithful
supporter of what he says ought to be regarded, and some day will be
regarded, as an injustice on a par with the evils of torture and slavery?

The answer: He reaches his conclusion by very shoddy
logic. Having conceded the gravity and scope of the evil of
abortion, the author, Mark W. Roche, dean of the College of Arts
and Letters at Notre Dame, unwittingly makes the decisive case for
re-electing George W. Bush the candidate who will be vindicated by
history for his opposition to injustice on the scale of slavery prior to
its abolition by the Thirteenth Amendment.

Dean Roche opens his case for Kerry by saying that while President Bush
and the Republicans have the superior position on abortion and embryonic
stem-cell research, "the Democrats are close to the Catholic position on
the death penalty, universal health care, and environmental protection."

This argument doesn't work. Neither candidate would abolish the death
penalty, though Kerry would invoke it in fewer cases than Bush. But even
assuming, as we are willing to do, that Catholics should oppose the death
penalty on the basis of the Pope's recent development of the Church's
historical teaching, no one can say that this teaching has the same
status or urgency as the Church's teaching against the direct killing of
the innocent, whether in abortion, embryo-destructive research,
euthanasia, or the deliberate targeting of civilians in warfare. Nor is
the degree of injustice the same or even close to the same. Nor is the
scale of the wrong anything approaching 1.3 million deaths per year by
abortion plus thousands more, if Kerry gets his way, in
embryo-destructive research.

On questions of universal health care and environmental protection, the
Church does not presume to bind its members to specific policies as
matters of strict justice. True, the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops has developed policy proposals on health care,
environmental protection, agricultural policy, immigration, tax policy,
the minimum wage, and a host of other issues; but the bishops fully
acknowledge that reasonable people of goodwillincluding faithful
Catholics may legitimately reject these proposals in favor of
alternatives. Many bishops themselves reject them. No Catholic is bound
by them in the way that every Catholic is bound to oppose policies that
license the injustice of deliberately taking innocent human life.

Roche's next move concerns the war in Iraq. He suggests, without ever
quite saying so, that President Bush's decision to use military force to
remove Saddam Hussein violates "the Catholic doctrine of 'just war.'" It
is true that the Pope opposed the use of force. But he did not declare
the war to be unjust; nor did he forbid Catholics from supporting it or
Catholic soldiers from fighting in it. He respected the teaching of the
Catechism and the entire tradition of Catholic thought about just
war: it is up to the leaders of nations, and not to Church officials, to
make the crucial prudential judgments as to whether a threat is
sufficient to warrant the use of military force, and whether the
legitimate alternatives to force are exhausted or will prove
unavailing. Of course, Catholics needn't think that President Bush made
all the right prudential judgments, nor need they agree with the
President's strategic conduct of the war. But no one can legitimately
claim a moral equivalence between Bush's decision to go to war against
Saddam Hussein, and Kerry's efforts to preserve, pay for, and even extend
the practice of killing innocent human beings in utero and in vitro.

Roche's final bit of argument is the least promising of all. He says
that "politics is the art of the possible." Then he argues that the best
way to reduce the number of abortions is to elect liberal Democrats like
Kerry the most virulent and uncompromising supporters of this
slavery-like evil because their social policies lead to lower abortion
rates. His main piece of evidence for this remarkable claim is that "the
overall abortion rate was more or less stable during the Reagan years,
but during the Clinton presidency it dropped by 11 per cent." So he
suggests that the pro-life thing to do is to vote against the pro-life
party and in favor of the party that would (1) implicate Catholics and
other pro-life citizens in the evil of abortions by paying for them with
taxpayer's money, (2) make sure that every single one of its Supreme
Court nominees will support the virtually unlimited abortion license
created in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, and (3) create a massive
industry in the production and destruction of embryos for purposes of
biomedical research.

The truth is that Clinton and the Democrats cannot fairly be credited for
the decline in the abortion rate in the 1990s. All that Clinton can
legitimately claim on this score is that he generated a voter backlash
resulting in the seizure of the congress by a pro-life Republican
majority in 1994. Thus, he unwittingly paved the way for actions that
have indeed had a positive effect on both rate of abortions and our
national debate. Above all, by raising the issue of partial-birth
abortion and enacting a ban on this horrific practice (a ban twice vetoed
by Clinton himself--a veto upheld only because of near Democratic
unanimity in its support in the Senate) the Republicans placed the focus
on the victim of abortion, and awakened the conscience of many Americans
to the homicidal nature of the practice. At the very same time,
technological developments--above all prenatal sonography--vividly revealed
to Americans, including expecting parents and grandparents, the beautiful
and undeniably human life of the child in the womb. Clinton didn't
invent the sonogram, nor did he join the pro-life effort to save babies
by distributing sonographic equipment as widely as possible.

Clinton's efforts on abortion were in an entirely different
direction. He supported a so called Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) that
would have overturned even modest state restrictions on abortion, and
proposed federal taxpayer funding of abortions via his wife's planned
nationalization of the health care system.

Near the conclusion of his essay, Roche advises "those who view abortion
as the most significant issue in this campaign" to "supplement their
abstract desire for moral rectitude with a more realistic focus on how
best to ensure that fewer abortions take place."

But would he have said the same thing about efforts to ban
slavery? Would he have lectured those who sought to ban it about "their
abstract desire for moral rectitude"? Would he have proposed economic
policies to reduce the market demand for slaves, as some opponents of
abolition suggested, rather than supporting the party that promised to
extend to all human beings--regardless of race--the equal protection of the
laws? Somehow we doubt that he would have regarded the cause of
abolition as a mere "abstract desire for moral rectitude."

In answering the question about abortion in the second presidential
debate, John Kerry claimed to "respect" the views of pro-life
citizens. He took the occasion to call attention to the fact that he
himself is a Catholic and once served as an altar boy. But Catholic
citizens should remember this: No one in American public life has a
worse record on abortion and embryo-killing than John Kerry. No one--not
even Hilary Clinton--is to his left on these issues. When it comes to
Supreme Court appointments, Kerry has made it clear that no Catholic
lawyer--however superbly qualified--who believes what the Church teaches
about the sanctity of human life need apply. They are ineligible. And
this same John Kerry is proposing to expand embryo-killing far beyond
abortion by funding embryo-destructive research, and even the creation of
embryos by cloning for experimentation in which they are killed.

Roche is right that abortion is in our day what slavery was in
Lincoln's. To vote for John Kerry in 2004, would be far worse, however,
than to have voted against Lincoln and for his Democratic opponent in
1860. Stephen Douglas at least supported allowing states who opposed
slavery to ban it. And he did not favor federal funding or subsidies for
slavery. John Kerry takes the opposite view on both points when it comes
to abortion. On the great evil of his own day, Senator Douglas was John
Kerry-lite.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of
the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at
Princeton University. Gerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at Notre
Dame and recently served as President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.