Washington D.C., Apr 17, 2008 / 00:55 am
Senator Robert Casey, Jr., a pro-life Democrat representing Pennsylvania, has defended his decision to endorse Senator Barack Obama, a staunch advocate of abortion rights, in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Cybercast News Service reports.
“Some might characterize it as a [pro-abortion] vote, but I don’t think it is,” Senator Casey told Cybercast News Service. Casey said he has a long pro-life record, “and it’s a lot harder for me. It’s much easier to be a Republican and have that position.”
The Illinois Senator Barack Obama has supported permissive abortion laws, even opposing legislation when he was in the Illinois State Senate that would have protected babies who survived late-term abortions.
"We have a definitive and certain disagreement on abortion," Casey said, according to Cybercast News Service. "I'm pro-life. [Obama] is pro-choice. I have supported legislation to outlaw partial-birth abortion. He doesn't agree with that."
"I think it's possible in the next term of the president that they will directly or indirectly confront the issue of abortion, but they may not," Casey said. "But I'm certain that they will confront the issues,” which he described as the war in Iraq, a $10 trillion national debt, health care, and economic recession.
"You need to try to elect someone who you think can deal with a whole set of broad-based challenges," Casey said.
The senator said he believed all people could agree to give support to pregnant women, support that he called a “moral obligation.”
In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the “Gospel of Life,” Pope John Paul II wrote that abortion is a crime “which no human law can claim to legitimize,” saying there is a “grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection.”
It is never licit to obey or to take part in a “propaganda campaign” for laws permitting abortion, the Pope wrote.