Monday, December 15, 2008

Obama's Abortion Socialism

By Paul Kengor

Conservatives rightly fear that President Obama will produce the Democrat Party's third great expansion of the welfare state, extending Leviathan beyond FDR's and LBJ's most fertile imaginations. Yet, Barack Obama constitutes an altogether different danger: expansion of federal power into cultural areas -- with an economic justification -- where previous Democratic presidents would have never considered going.

Barack Obama is seeking to nationalize certain cultural areas as an entirely new means of redistribution to the masses. Historically, the left has endeavored to nationalize specific, say, industries. Obama, however, envisions the nationalization of something wholly unique -- namely, abortion policy.

As any college student ought to learn in PoliSci 101, communism and socialism view the world through the prism of economics. The communist and socialist thrust nearly every conceivable idea in front of an economic lens, even those that don't belong there. Everything becomes an income or class issue.

Obama sees "abortion rights" in several ways, but, principally, he perceives abortion as a matter of economic fairness. For Barack Obama, abortion is not merely a Constitutional right; it is a matter of social justice. He believes it is patently unfair that some women struggle to afford an abortion, or cannot purchase the procedure at all. Consequently, the state -- meaning a single federal state -- should seize that right and ensure its equitable distribution to every (female) citizen. This is spreading the wealth -- on the skin of America's unborn.

What you have here, remarkably, is a kind of abortion socialism, utterly unprecedented in the history of America.

Read more here.

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