This is the fourth in a series of articles concerning issue involved in the presidential race.
WASHINGTON (CNS) – Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump issued a specific document about his pro-life positions with the formation of his 34-member Catholic Advisory Group, whose members include Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life.
On Oct. 5, the Trump campaign sent a letter to members of the Catholic Leadership Conference meeting in Denver pledging his support for pro-life issues. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was invited to address the group, but her campaign declined.
As recently as the Oct. 9 town hall debate with Trump, Clinton said she wants “a Supreme Court that will stick with Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose.”
How prominent a role have life issues – abortion but also capital punishment and assisted suicide – really played in the 2016 presidential elections?
“It’s about personality, mostly,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University. He called the presidential campaign “morally confusing. The voice of the values voters, especially on abortion, is not as important as it used to be.”
Clinton’s running mate, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, also supports the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized abortion virtually on demand in 1973. As a practicing Catholic, Kaine says he is personally opposed to abortion, but that as a public official he cannot impose his views on his constituents.
The Democratic National Platform, endorsed by Clinton and Kaine, opposes “Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood health centers” and seeks to overturn federal and state laws and policies that impede a woman’s access to abortion, including by repealing the Hyde Amendment.” This represents a shift by Kaine, who has supported the Hyde Amendment.
Trump’s document makes four promises: that as president, he would nominate pro-life Supreme Court justices; that he would sign into law a 20-week abortion ban known as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act; would support stopping federal dollars from going to Planned Parenthood “as long as they continue to perform abortions”; and support making the Hyde Amendment permanent law. Each year the ban on using federal funds for abortions must be approved as a rider on the appropriations bill.
In the vice presidential debate, Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian, remarked, “I think if you’re going to be pro-life, you should be pro-adoption.” Kaine said he believed that women should make their own decisions about pregnancy.
On the issue of the death penalty, the Democratic Party’s platform calls for its abolition. The Republican Party platform calls it “firmly settled” as a constitutional issue, and additionally, condemns the U.S. Supreme Court for what it calls the “erosion of the right of the people to enact capital punishment.”