Was Joe Biden insufficiently pro-abortion?

That would seem to be Carlos Lozado’s conclusion about the former president.  Writing in the New York Times last week, he suggests Democrats lost the presidency in 2024 because they were stuck with Biden, who was not pro-abortion enough.

Apparently it’s not sufficient that the Biden administration did everything it could after the 2022 Dobbs decision to push abortion and that pre-presidential Biden did everything he could to protect abortion (most obviously by pushing Supreme Court nominees who would uphold Roe). Biden even switched to rejecting the Hyde Amendment after 45 years of federal policy not to fund abortion. Nevertheless, Lozado concludes, “The cradle Catholic ambivalently support[ed] abortion rights.”

Lozado’s thesis is that Democrats lost the presidency in 2024 because they were not sufficiently disengaged from Biden. Lozado blames Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden for various failings, the most curious of which is inadequately attacking the Dobbs decision and defending abortion “rights.”

According to Lozado, Biden acolytes such as Vice President Kamala Harris “could not adequately articulate — either as vice president or as last-second nominee — what she would do about the matter, other than run on it.”

This is disingenuous. It was pretty clear that Democrats would have liked to have statutorily codified abortion on demand through birth — the real holding of Roe v. Wade and especially Doe v. Bolton — if they could have managed to do so.  The refusal of Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to kill the Senate filibuster, and not Biden-Harris qualms, is why that didn’t happen.

Democrats believed abortion would carry the 2024 election for them. As a pro-lifer, I regret abortion didn’t have that decisive impact, but it didn’t have it on either side of the debate. One cannot say Harris was insufficiently committed to abortion. The truth is the election did not turn on that issue. Those who were committed to Roe had already cast their lots with Kamala. Those who were undecideds decided on other criteria.

Americans remain divided about abortion. With Roe’s artificial constitutional barricades against abortion limitations gone, American opinion remains divided.  Americans are ambivalent about abortion but hesitate to outlaw it at large. That ambivalence gives pro-abortionists a window to play the “moderate” and enact abortion on demand by subterfuge.

Had Joe Biden or Kamala Harris by some miracle been elected in 2024, there is no doubt they would have pushed for abortion on demand through birth. That threat is gone. Whether Catholics and others have done all they can to rebuild a culture of life is another question; one cannot underestimate what almost half a century of Roe’s abortion absolutism wrought, especially in policymaking and elite circles.  That will not be undone by mere judicial fiat.

Every year, when attending the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life at Georgetown, I am used to making my way through crowds of pro-abortion protestors chanting, “Keep your Rosaries off our ovaries!” That a Catholic and Jesuit university allows students to demonstrate for what Vatican II called an “unspeakable crime” against God and man says something about the state of Catholic and especially Jesuit universities, but that’s not the issue.

The issue here is Lozado’s assumption that Rosary-fingering Joe Biden was an inadequate vessel to promote full-throated Democratic pro-abortionism. He clearly did not fully absorb the new theology of St. Mario of Albany, otherwise known as New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who taught that Catholics should be schizophrenic about pro-life issues, dividing their “personal convictions” from their “public responsibilities” (a split that he apparently never applied to capital punishment for killers).

As the old saw goes: Catholicism remains the most abiding American prejudice. No Catholics, even bad ones, need apply here.