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The University of Notre Dame made headlines across the nation this month after students constructed an ice chapel on campus, where nearly 2,000 students braved the cold and dark to attend Mass. Outside. In northwest Indiana. In February.
The inspiring images of so many young people proudly celebrating their faith contrasted sharply with other discouraging news from Our Lady’s University: that professor Susan Ostermann, an outspoken advocate of legal abortion, had been tapped to become the new director for the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies within Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.
Ostermann’s appointment to such a prestigious role at a Catholic university, despite her well-documented support for elective abortion, is a contradiction to Notre Dame’s deeply Catholic legacy. Yes, some political issues are nuanced or less morally absolute, or what the church would call “matters of prudential judgement.” But the church is clear that her teaching on abortion is “unchanged and unchangeable” — unequivocally a grave sin that no Catholic can morally support, participate in, or advocate.
And so it is the hill upon which Notre Dame must die.
It’s not the first time that the abortion issue has thrust the university into the national spotlight.
In September 1984, when my husband was a sophomore at Notre Dame, New York Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo gave a speech on campus that set the tone for abortion discourse in the United States, especially for Catholic politicians, for the next 40 years. Cuomo titled his talk, “Religious Beliefs and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective” and noted that, “As Catholics, my wife and I were enjoined never to use abortion to destroy the life we created … but not everyone in our society agrees with me and Matilda.”
While the origin of this “I am personally opposed, but,” rhetoric is not Mario Cuomo — that dubious distinction goes to Stephen Douglas and his “pro-choice” slavery argument at the Lincoln-Douglas debates — Notre Dame nevertheless became associated with the Catholic politician’s iteration of it, and elected officials and candidates on both sides of the aisle have used Cuomo’s formulation to sidestep their ethical responsibility for the abortion issue ever since. They insisted that while they would never personally support aborting an unborn child of their own, they could not make that decision for others and subsequently have no business imposing their personal morality or religious beliefs on society.
And in 2009, Notre Dame incomprehensibly awarded then-President Barack Obama, who earned a 100% approval rating from the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, and who opposed a ban on even the gruesome partial-birth abortion procedure, with an honorary doctor of laws degree. That decision was so divisive that Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal honoree that year, and Obama’s own former constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, refused to share the stage with the president and ultimately declined the award.
Glendon’s public comments on the matter warned against Catholics, and especially premier Catholic universities, compromising on key moral issues such as abortion to please the secular world. Glendon condemned the “very serious problems raised by Notre Dame’s decision” to “honor an uncompromising opponent of the Church’s position on issues involving fundamental principles of justice.”
Of course, over the years, Notre Dame and many who wish to secularize it have responded to these claims by touting “free speech” and “academic inquiry,” although no one questioned Obama’s right to speak nor opposed a genuine Socratic give-and-take with scholars where Obama’s views would have been put to the test. It was the bestowal of an award upon the president to which faithful Catholics objected.
In fact, Glendon and the many faithful Catholics, such as my husband, who love Notre Dame, support the university’s role in fostering robust speech and academic inquiry and are not at all opposed to inviting people to campus who may foster such healthy discussion or debate. They agree that even people with ideas they consider wrong or bad should have the right to make their claims — if for no other reason than to expose their irrationality. Debate and discussion are how those who might be unclear about a controversial topic come to learn the truth. In fact, listening to Cuomo at Notre Dame that night back in the fall of 1984 only strengthened my husband’s anti-abortion convictions. “What a weak argument,” he told me later.
However, a Catholic school, or a Catholic entity such as an archdiocese, crosses a well-established line when it chooses to bestow an award, honor, or platform, such as directing the Liu Center, on a public supporter of that which the church deems gravely sinful: in this instance, legal abortion. Decades ago, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops instructed Catholic institutions “not to honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles,” and specifically notes that such people “should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”
Notre Dame’s appointment of Ostermann, who openly rejects church teaching, brazenly blazes past that line. Large swaths of Ostermann’s academic work and beliefs undermine the church’s teachings on the dignity of the human person.
Among the most shocking examples of her abortion advocacy is her virulent campaign against pregnancy resource centers. Without presenting a shred of unbiased evidence — she laughably cites a study from former Planned Parenthood affiliate Guttmacher Institute to shore up her claims — Ostermann falsely accuses PRCs of “misdating pregnancies” and engaging in “deceptive practices,” even though the centers themselves have persuasively proven those claims to be false.
Ostermann’s fictional narrative in the Chicago Tribune describes a woman who visits a PRC, is told by a staffer with “no medical training” that “she is 12 weeks pregnant and that it’s too late to have an abortion,” at which point she “offers her diapers and sends her home.” No former pregnancy center client is quoted. No actual center is named.
Missing from Ostermann’s breathless account of “deceptive medical care” for pregnant women are the factual stories of those who have been injured in one of many U.S. clinics that are not subject to regular medical inspection. Instructive here is the case of a black woman from Indiana who traveled to Illinois, where there are no legal gestational limits on abortion and where only a small handful of clinics are subject to regular medical inspection, for a late second-trimester abortion. The woman visited the Champaign County Equity Clinic, where, after allegedly perforating her uterus, the abortion provider, Dr. Keith Reisinger-Kindle, left up to two-thirds of the fetal remains inside her abdomen, then put her in a car and sent her back across state lines. According to the lawsuit filed by the woman, when she called Reisinger-Kindle to complain of severe pain, he suggested she take a laxative.
The woman told her harrowing story to a Notre Dame graduate, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Melinda Henneberger, who, compassionately and without judgment, made her case known to the public.
And it was another Notre Dame graduate, now a surgeon, who assisted in the emergency procedure that became necessary to preserve the woman’s life. It was that surgeon who removed the mangled and dismembered unborn child’s body from her abdominal cavity, saving the mother from the extensive physical damage caused by the botched abortion.
That is the type of selfless, life-affirming care for others that Notre Dame represents, and the good example that Notre Dame should be rewarding and platforming. Not the work of a professor who disparages the sacrificial work of pregnancy centers and argues that abortion is “healthcare.” Where was Ostermann when the abortion provider at the Equity Clinic successfully, as it turns out, argued that his injured patient should be “outed” to the public, by name? Where was her concern for vulnerable women of color then?
St. John Paul II noted that abortion represents “the supremacy of the strong over the weak.” Our Lord Himself declared, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40).
Through Ostermann’s appointment, what is the sentiment that the university will convey to those 2,000 students who prayed and sang hymns in the ice and snow? That there are “academic exceptions” to defending the weak? The vulnerable? The unborn child? An injured mother?
I hope not.
Notre Dame has rightfully earned its place among the leading academic institutions in the country, if not the world. Now, it has an obligation to use that prestige for the glory of its namesake, and her Son — not to hand over its weapons before the battle is even begun.
Mary Fiorito is a senior fellow at the Catholic Association.
