A Notre Dame Witness for Life

A Notre Dame Witness for Life

William McGurn is a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and an alumnus of Notre Dame University. These are extracts of his address he gave at Notre Dame on April 23, 2009.

Good evening.

“It is an honor to be with you on this campus. It is a joy to be here under the auspices of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture – and the Notre Dame Fund for the Protection of Human Life… The precipitate cause of our gathering tonight is the honor and platform our university has extended to a President whose policies reflect clear convictions about unborn life. These convictions are not in doubt. In July 2007, the candidate spelled them out in a forceful address to a Planned Parenthood convention in our nation’s capital.

“Before that audience, he declared that woman’s “fundamental right” to an abortion was at stake in the coming election. He spoke about how he had “put Roe at the center” of his “lesson plan on reproductive freedom” when he was a professor – and how he would put it at the center of his agenda as president. He invoked his record in the Illinois state senate, where he fought restrictions on abortion, famously including one on partial-birth abortion.

He said that the “first thing” he wanted to do as President was to “sign a Freedom of Choice Act.” And he ended by assuring his audience that “on this fundamental issue,” he, like they, would never yield.

“These were his promises as a candidate. His actions as President – his key appointments, his judicial nominees, his lifting of restrictions on federal funding for abortion providers overseas, the green light given to the destruction of human embryos for research, his targeting of “conscience clause” protection for health care workers – all these actions are fully consistent with his promises. It is precisely this terrible consistency that makes it so dispiriting to see our university extend to this man her most public platform and an honorary doctorate of laws…

“So tonight our hearts carry a great sadness… We come to affirm the sacredness of life. This witness is the only reason for a University of Notre Dame. We believe that there are self-evident truths about the dignity of each human life… For most of her life, Notre Dame has served as a symbol of a Catholic community struggling to find acceptance in America – a yearning to make our own contributions to this great experiment in ordered liberty…

“At a time when we told to “engage” and hold “dialogue,” their timidity [the Notre Dame brand of leadership] thunders across this campus… The discord that this year’s commencement has unleashed – between Notre Dame and the bishops, between members of the Notre Dame community, between Notre Dame and thousandths of discouraged Catholic faithful – all this derives from an approach that for decades has treated abortion as one issue on a political scorecard…

“Maximum determination. Ladies and gentlemen, the unborn child’s right to life represents the defining civil-rights issue of our day – and it ought to be the defining civil-rights issue on this campus… Imagine the that Notre Dame might provide on a fall afternoon, if millions of Americans who had sat down to watch a football game suddenly found themselves face to face with a Notre Dame professor or student standing up to say, “I fight for the unborn.” George H. Kubeck, Jan. 22/11