After reading Obama’s speech at Notre Dame on abortion as well as the media coverage of it, a couple things stand out. First, almost every outlet–from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times to the Washington Post and the New York Times–reports that Obama “directly” confronted the abortion issue “head-on”, which is true enough, if you mean he confronted the issue by trying to skirt around it and diminish it by calling for “common ground” to reduce the number of abortions. If you want to see what it actually looks like when a president confronts the abortion debate “head-on”, read Ronald Reagan’s 1983 essay Abortion and the Conscience of The Nation. Second, none of the reports (the aforementioned as well as those by Politico, USA Today, LA Times) actually notes Obama’s very unpopular stances on abortion–that it should be legal throughout all 9 months of pregnancy for effectively any reason and that it should be covered by private and public health insurance. These positions also contradict his call to reduce the number of abortions. How exactly are readers supposed to support Obama’s effort to reach “common ground” on this issue if they don’t know where he stands?
