Des Moines, Iowa, Feb 5, 2020 / 10:00 am (CNA).- While some Iowa Democrats pushed back against the presidential candidates’ strong support for abortion at Monday’s state caucus, other “moderate” pro-life voters backed pro-abortion candidates anyway.
With recent polling suggesting that there are as many as 21 million pro-life Democrats in the country, their support, and how they prioritize life issues, could play a key role in picking the Democratic candidate for this year’s presidential election. CNA spoke to Democratic caucus goers and precinct captains to find out how pro-lifers lined up for Monday’s Iowa caucus.
Iowa, the first of the states to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, held its caucuses on Monday evening. Due to systemic failure of electronic tallying software, no official winner was declared and precinct results were not released until Tuesday afternoon. Final results had still not been issued by Wednesday morning, but preliminary returns and in-house predictions from candidates’ campaigns suggested a win for Pete Buttigieg, with Sen. Bernie Sanders in a close second.
Kathy Richardson, a pediatric nurse practitioner in Carroll, Iowa, and a precinct captain for Joe Biden, said the issue was still being brought up to her in last-minute canvassing for Biden on Monday.
The life issue, she told CNA, is extremely important to everyone in the state, Catholics in particular. While some national campaigns have encouraged women to “shout your abortion,” Richardson said she doesn’t know anyone who favors abortion.
“It’s awful,” she said, telling CNA that as a nurse practitioner she believes that life begins at conception.
Nevertheless, Richardson said she believed that the state “shouldn’t be telling women what to do for their body and health,” and that the adult mother should have greater rights than an embryo who is not yet viable.
Recent polling shows that 44% of Democrats nationally support a ban on abortion after the first trimester of pregnancy.
Democratic presidential candidates like Andrew Yang, Buttigieg, and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have explicitly said that, even in late-term abortion scenarios, the decision should be up to the mother and not lawmakers.
Late-term abortions are “horrifying,” Richardson said, but are rare and usually done for the health of the mother. They should be restricted only to cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at stake, she said—a formula considered a “traditional” Democratic position for moderate voters in west Iowa.
In the current Democratic presidential lineup, every candidate supports taxpayer-funded abortion—which many Democrats used to oppose, including Joe Biden before he reversed his position last summer. And while “safe, legal, and rare” used to define the abortion stances of many politicians, Sanders in a recent debate challenged “the men of this country” to support abortion, and called the practice “healthcare,” while Warren said that “abortion rights are human rights.”
The 2016 DNC platform called abortion “core to women’s, men’s, and young people’s health and wellbeing” and advocated for taxpayer-funded abortion.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the right to life must be recognized by civil society. Pope St. John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae that “a law which violates an innocent person’s natural right to life is unjust and, as such, is not valid as a law.”
Two precinct captains for Biden and Buttigieg in Carroll County justified their support for the pro-abortion Democrats by pointing to Republicans, who, Richardson claimed, “don’t care about the child when it’s born,” citing proposals to cut to food stamps and pediatric education.
“What this administration has done to the children at the border,” she asked of Trump policy which separated migrant families. Richardson said the policy “breaks [her] heart” and could cause lasting trauma for children.
Buttigieg’s precinct captain Kyle Ulveling, who is also chair of the Iowa Board of Medicine, estimated that voters in Carroll were “moderate” on the abortion issue and that around 60 of the 81 caucus-goers at the Ward 1 precinct were “pro-life.”
Illustrating the gap between voters and candidates, each of the candidates that received first-ballot votes at the precinct—Yang, Warren, Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar— has come out in support of codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law, and enshrining taxpayer-funding for abortion. Three of the candidates support making abortion-inducing drugs available over-the-counter. Warren and Sanders would have abortion and contraception covered under their Medicare-for-All plans.
Some pro-life Democrats, however, are actively pushing for change within the party and won’t support the presidential front-runners.
One week before the caucuses, at a Des Moines townhall, Kristen Day asked Buttigieg point-blank if he wanted the support of her and other pro-life Democrats.
“I am pro-choice,” Buttigieg responded. “And I believe that a woman ought to be able to make that decision [on abortion].” He added that if pro-life Democrats wouldn’t support him for that, he understood.
Day said she received encouragement from nearby audience members for her question, but Buttigieg was also greeted with loud applause for his answer upholding legal abortion.
“We’ve had enough,” Day told CNA afterwards, calling on pro-life Democrats to hold candidates accountable on the issue.
“We are told time and time again that it is not the right time to fight for what we believe in,” Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, stated in a Facebook post on Tuesday. “We believe that life in the womb is worthy of protection. Our party does not.”
“Too many people whisper, ‘I am a pro-life Democrat too. Keep up the good work.’ But they fear the repercussions of stating this position in public,” Day said, adding that “our party can and should do better, and we will not be silent.”
Lizzy Dowd, a Catholic student at Drake University in Des Moines, was present that evening. She planned to advocate for pro-life language in the party’s platform at her neighborhood precinct on Monday night.
“I am not trying to infiltrate this party with my pro-life views. Rather, I would love to just see a positive change, I’d love to see people’s minds and hearts be opened,” Dowd told CNA on Monday.
She credited her pro-life views to growing up in a household that emphasized “the mentality of the sanctity of life in action.”
“If we as Democrats are going to uphold the dignity of the person at the border, and inmates on death row, and the homeless and those struggling in poverty, then it only makes sense to uphold the life and the dignity of that child in the womb as well,” she said.
“I would love to take that one step further and respect every life.”
Another Democrat did not caucus on Monday night. Jim Plew, who attended Mass on Tuesday morning at St. Mary of Nazareth parish in suburban Des Moines, told CNA he identified as a Democrat did not caucus on Monday because of the candidates’ uniform support of abortion. Plew told CNA he was still undecided in the election.
Another Catholic CNA spoke with, after daily Mass on Monday in St. Anthony’s parish in south Des Moines, said she would be voting for Trump and named the life issue as her first issue. Another Trump supporter in Carroll, Dennis Ritchie, gave as his first reason of support that Trump “is against abortion.”
“Nobody else talks about the children,” Ritchie told CNA.
In the more heavily-Catholic Dubuque, on the eastern edge of the state, one Catholic college student caucused for Sanders and pleaded with other Catholics to do the same.
Carlos Garrido—a Catholic student at Loras college in Dubuque—supported Sanders because he saw his mother forego medical treatment for a condition to spare the family from medical debt. He thinks Sanders’ advocacy for Medicare-for-All is part of Catholic Social Teaching, along with his opposition to “war,” support for affordable education, and other issues.
Sanders’ proposal would have abortions and contraceptives covered in Medicare-for-All, and he said more abortions and contraceptives should made available for women in poor countries in response to a townhall question about population control as a means to slow climate change.
Garrido acknowledged Sanders’ abortion support wouldn’t square with Church teaching but said that the provision of contraceptives in Sanders’ health plan would reduce abortions. The Catholic Church teaches that contraception is immoral.
“I realize that that’s not ethical,” Garrido said of abortion, “but I think it’s important to address the problems of the human beings that are here now that are suffering, and then to focus on the problems of beings that have the potentiality of becoming human beings.”
“Maybe I divert a little bit from the Church on that aspect,” Garrido said, citing his concern with addressing “suffering that is here now” and that “29,000 kids are still dying every day from preventable causes.”
According to the World Health Organization statistics from 2010-2014, around 56 million abortions were conducted per year, or more than 150,000 per day.
The U.S. Catholic bishops, in a letter accompanying their document “Faithful Citizenship,” called abortion a “preeminent” priority among other important issues, a priority underscored recently by Pope Francis.
In eastern Iowa, “the Catholic community here has suffered from immense propaganda that makes them become one-issue voters,” Garrido said, claiming that Sanders “checks off every one of” the boxes of Catholic Social Teaching. “Maybe not the abortion one, but if he’s checking off everything else except for one, I think that’s a lot better than a candidate who only checks off one,” he said.
Dowd, meanwhile, expressed her frustration that pro-life Democrats would support a pro-abortion candidate because of another issue.
“We can’t continue to allow these extremist pro-abortion candidates into office, and keep thinking they’re going to make our culture more pro-life, because you can’t make the culture more pro-life while still allowing these very extreme abortion policies like late-term abortion and partial-birth abortion,” she said.
“We have to have those laws in place in order for life to be truly respected at every stage,” she said.
[…]
No comment from the archdiocese? Dolan is worthless. This screams for disciplinary action and a swift condemnation. The Mass is not an ideological plaything, most especially not for the woke fake Catholics who misuse worship as an opportunity to virtue signal to their friends and to brainwash or coerce people into compliance with their preferred political positions that have no relevance to Catholic faith nor the purpose of the Mass. What that Jesuit pastor did to the liturgy is analogous to what rioters and looters have done to businesses. The pastor looted the Mass of its holiness and rioted with words to make congregants who disagree with him feel unsafe.
The term “systemic racism” is accurate in so far as it describes disparate treatment sanctioned in law be it the old, long repealed “Jim Crow” laws, or there modern day equivalent of court mandated racial set asides and quotas, or publicly or privately mandated”sensitivity training” and the like. The imposed notion that only certain racial groups can be “racist” but not others is a like manifestation. It is a term that should be discarded altogether.
It is my belief that the term “white privilege” is a negative term as it portrays an entire group of humans with a negative brush. Any time a groups is singled out like this priest did with a negative term that its intention is to coerce a capture audience to comply to a belief that they nay not agree with is right out of the Marxist or Nazi play book.
I believe the priest changed the Mass and that is not allowed by Church doctrine. He needs to be disciplined or at severally admonished. I for one go to Mass for the grace, not to hear a priest perform a political rally.
If the Priest want to hold a political rally, let him do it off Church grounds. This kind of behavior can drive parishioners to relocate to another parish.
M. Rose
M. Rose
I agree with you 1,000%. Do not tamper with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. We already renew our baptismal vows each year. We know right from wrong. We do not need or want adherence to Marxist playbook or their divisive name-calling. This priest had better not be the new role model. The parishioners should be wary not complicit.
I will never apologize for how god made me. Shame on my Catholic Church.
I’m of mixed race
Am I require to recite this pray
Maybe half of it?
Father Z has a posting about this incident, complete with video (1 min. 32 sec.) and a transcript of the travesty:
Wacko New York City Jesuits
On his program on Fox News on September 2, Tucker Carlson (a protestant) thought it worthwhile to express his dismay, right before he interviewed Eric Metaxas.
A Catholic priest gets a pledge from a Unitarian Church and has everyone recite it at Mass. Any more brilliant ideas where this one came from?
I am a catholic, a eucharistic minister and Confirmation PSR teacher at my local parish and this sickens me. This church is straying off the lesson plan of Jesus. To back a group that will not recognize that all life matters is a disgrace. I listened to the video of this pledge and it was like hearing lambs going off to slaughter.
Even if white privilege was a real word it would be those hard working white people that risked their lives to hide slaves, free slaves, created affirmative action bills to be passed in congress and make up the 90% of monies donated to black communities, programs and lives today. Separate church and state!
This is disgraceful and a very bad idea in a church that is already struggling for it’s life due to the damage it’s clergy has caused in the past. I wrote to the Archdiocese…didn’t get a response yet.
Thank you for having the courage to soeak up. As a devout Catholic and former President of a Boston A.O.H. division #6 I was sickened and shocked by that phony clerics abomination of Mass. He needs to take an oath and a stand against his own prejudices. Is white privilege working 2 jobs to support my family? Missing kids events to give my world of family and friends a better life? An absolute disgrace. Do they wonder why families like mine are going to Real Christian churches in droves. It is so uplifting and truly spiritual. They librralism and their pedophilia culture have destroyed a BEAUTIFUL 2000 and 20 year religion. They have the audacity and contempt to cajole some innocent believers into an oath. When they take an oath against pedophilia and acknowledge they destroyed our lovely faith with their cover-up..Then ask your hypocritical oath of us…
Today is 10/3. Has there been any corrective action taken by our Catholic leaders? Of not, why not. Shame on the church for letting this go untouched!