For two weeks on Friday afternoon the Clinton Library released public documents belonging to President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Writings from her time in the Clinton White House are quite troubling. Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network has written extensively concerning the documents and posted summaries here and here. Catholics and people of faith should be concerned about these points:
Abortion. Kagan helped President Clinton articulate his position against the Hyde Amendment and in favor of federal funding of abortion. She corresponded with the Legal Director of NARAL regarding trying to slow the progress of passage of the Child Custody Protection Act which would have made it a federal offense to transport a minor across a state line for an abortion to avoid parental consent laws.
On the other side of the issue, Kaganrecommended for political reasons that President Clinton sign a partial birth abortion ban with Daschle’s amendment for a health exception, despite his own Department of Justice advising him that such a law would be unconstitutional and his administration’s general opposition of the law. Of course the breadth of the term “health” as legally interpreted is sufficient to make any ban on partial birth abortion practically meaningless, and in 2007 the Supreme Court found that even a ban of the procedure without a health exception was constitutional.Kagan believes the constitution contains a nearly unfettered right to partial-birthabortion, an extreme position the Supreme Court ultimately rejected. She opposed a ban on partial-birthabortion, even one with an exception for the mother’s health, because she believed it took away one “safe” abortion technique from abortion providers and thus burdened the right of women to abort their pre-viable children for literally any reason they pleased. The Supreme Court, by contrast, upheld a partial birth abortion ban even without a health exception and cited the state’s substantial interest in “promoting respect for human life at all stages in the pregnancy” by not allowing “a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of [a mother’s] unborn child, a child assuming the human form.”Religious language. Kagan was asked to clean up a video-taped speech given by the President commemorating the 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. She appears to have recommended deleting the “God bless you” salutation at the end of the speech.
