Michael Wear is a former staffer at the White House Faith-Based Office during President Obama’s first-term and director of faith outreach for his re-election campaign. He is the author of Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America, from which this article is adapted.

The issue of abortion has roiled American politics for decades because the issue raises potent political ideas and values: life, liberty, privacy, autonomy and power. It brings to mind inherently personal questions: Who deserves a future? How far into our personal lives should the values and ethics of our community reach? For many people, abortion makes us think of our families, and of the family members who were or were not born. We think of our own existence, and whether there is inherent value in that alone. At what point did I matter? At what point did you?

Given the personal nature of these questions, it should be of little surprise that as politics have become more tribal, the politics of abortion have become more polarized—something I observed as a staffer in The White House Faith-Based Office during President Barack Obama’s first term and director of faith outreach for his reelection campaign.


Obama launched his political career with a speech in 2004 that decried political divisions and attested, in the face of some liberals’ squeamishness over religion in politics, that “we worship an awesome God in the blue states.” In the early days of his presidency, and in keeping with this spirit of collaboration, Obama also pursued an initiative across ideological lines to reduce abortions. This effort at bipartnership failed. The story of that failure is a window into some of our ugliest partisan tendencies: Democrats’ unwillingness to take religious groups’ objections seriously and thoughtfully; Republicans’ unwillingness to let Democrats be known for any progress on an issue so close to their party. It is a window into what, exactly, we’re going up against at a time of deep political division.

This history of abortion politics, national and personal, made what the president did five months into his first term—near the height of his political capital—both surprising and risky. Obama went to Notre Dame University to deliver a commencement address to try to build a bridge. The run-up to the address was tense. I had the sense that many members of the president’s staff viewed the effort as futile at best, and a solicitation of distraction and division at worst. There was some merit to their concerns. Notre Dame’s decision to grant Obama an honorary degree (a conventional thing to do for any commencement speaker) was met with criticism and protest from conservative Catholics and anti-abortion activists. Some called for the president of the university to resign.

Rather than give an easier, predictable speech on an issue where there was more traditional agreement between Democrats and Catholic institutions, Obama decided to address the potential for common ground on abortion. On the way to South Bend in Air Force One, the president reviewed his speech and replaced the compromise language that had become commonplace since it became part of the 2008 Democratic platform—“reducing the need for abortion”— with “reduce the number of women seeking abortions.” It was a small but significant change.

At Notre Dame, Obama told the crowd the story of Farr Curlin, a Chicago doctor who had emailed Obama in 2004 during his Senate campaign and asked the candidate to use “fair-minded words” when discussing the religiously and emotionally complex subject of abortion. He held up that exchange as the moment when he stepped back from demonizing the other side, and prayed “that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.” He continued, “because when we do that … we discover at least the possibility of common ground.” The president was asking anti-abortion Americans to give him a chance.

***

The promise of the speech at Notre Dame was slowly smothered over the course of more than two years of staff work. Before the speech, a senior-level policy process had already been established to carry out the president’s vision of abortion reduction—a mandate the president gave the faith-based initiative when he revamped it at the beginning of his term. The president charged the renamed White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the broader Domestic Policy Council (the faith-based office is a part of the Domestic Policy Council), and the White House Council on Women & Girls with taking on the effort. I was a part of the small team of staff involved in this working group for its duration.

Over the course of the initiative to “reduce the need for abortion,” we met with more than a hundred leaders and advocacy groups, held dozens of internal meetings and spent hundreds of hours on draft documents. The end goal was clear: create a set of common-ground policies and administrative actions that move our politics beyond the zero-sum game of the culture wars, and actually reduce abortion by addressing its root causes.

Our work was focused on identifying policies in five buckets: preventing unintended pregnancies, supporting maternal and child health, opening up pathways of opportunity for women and mothers, promoting healthy relationships and strengthening adoption. There was ample common ground available, and we made great progress in defining it: strengthening enforcement to prevent pregnancy discrimination in employment, combating sexual coercion in relationships, improving access to information regarding prenatal care, and supporting innovative partnerships between adoption service providers. I have no doubt that with the White House’s focused leadership, and a willingness to spend political capital on the effort, the president’s vision could have been realized.

But zero-sum politics won. Anti-abortion groups, most of which might as well be legally incorporated into the Republican Party, did not want to give a pro-abortion rights president the victory of leading the charge to reduce abortions. Moreover, they had already warned the country that the president would be the “most pro-abortion president in history,” thus making it difficult to partner with him.

One of our early outreach meetings was with a conservative women’s anti-abortion group that staunchly opposed the president in the 2008 campaign. I was proud we were meeting with them. The president committed to listen to all Americans, and this was a concrete way he was keeping that promise. The meeting was cordial—at least from our side. In the run-up to the meeting, the organization’s leader went on a media tour hyping up the meeting. This was highly unusual—organizations do not typically publicize private outreach meetings with the White House—and it drew attention and criticism from some quarters that suggested we should not have met with the group in the first place.

The meeting itself went smoothly: It was a listening meeting on our part, so our primary goal was to hear their perspective and see if there was any proposal we might be able to consider. At the end of the meeting, the organization’s leader asked if she could pray for us. The prayer was essentially that God would change the president’s mind on the issue of abortion. The meeting wrapped up, and within hours the prayer was public knowledge.

To me, generating self-serving publicity around a meeting intended to explore ways to reduce abortion was a cheap ploy. These types of antics on the right worked to confirm the doubts of our friends on the left. The White House and progressive allies weren’t always constructive either. After eight years of President George W. Bush, who opposed abortion and spoke about a “culture of life,” pro-abortion rights activists (and policymakers) were looking to advance their views on women’s rights; they decidedly did not want to use political capital on an initiative that ceded an inch of rhetorical or policy ground.

The ideology, the skepticism and the defensiveness of progressives, even some of the president’s own staffers, were a roadblock. In one meeting we received a memo back from the Oval Office that included a note from the president asking about an abstinence-only program that had been reported on the front page of the New York Times earlier that week. The program was evaluated to be promising, and the president had made a commitment to consider all programs—even abstinence-only programs—that proved to be effective. I was proud and in awe to see this memo with the president’s note in the margin, visible proof once again of his earnestness in seeking common ground. He at least wanted to run the story to the ground to see if the program was legitimate. But when the note came up in a meeting, eyes rolled, and one staffer even commented with a sigh, “Does he read everything?” Usually, this comment would be in unreserved admiration, since we Democrats pride ourselves on caring about the latest research and “evidence-based policies.” But in this case, it sounded more like a complaint. In 2016, some progressives celebrated the Obama administration zeroing out the budget for abstinence-only education programs.

The president’s desire to consider policy options without ideological blinders on was a problem in other areas too. There are two ways to put together a common-ground proposal: First, you can only include lowest-common-denominator policies—policies all of the major players agree on wholeheartedly. Second, you can put together a package that makes both sides uncomfortable, but achieves enough that each side is willing to agree to something it considers less than ideal. Unfortunately, opposition to policies supported by the anti-abortion community—opposition grounded sometimes in real policy concerns, other times in cultural or ideological reaction—would prevent these policies from receiving full consideration.

By the end of 2011, hopes of following through on the president’s commitment were virtually slashed. Any trust that existed between sincere anti-abortion actors and the White House had eroded due to our unwillingness to take taxpayer funding of abortion off the table as a part of the Affordable Care Act. We knew the bill would not pass without doing so, but in order to delay disappointing women’s groups, the White House waited until the pressure built to the extent that anti-abortion Democratic members made public promises to vote against the ACA. The president ultimately signed an executive order addressing abortion that committed to uphold the Hyde Amendment banning the use of federal funds for abortion through health care reform, but the damage was done. We had strained relationships with faith-based allies who did not understand why we did not take funding for abortion off the table at the outset, and Democrats sacrificed over a dozen anti-abortion Democrats in the midterm elections.

It was the ultimate demonstration of why political loyalties always win out over common-sense policy changes—especially on topics like abortion that are so contentious and provide such lucrative fodder in fundraising campaigns and attack ads. This political math judges the alienation of a political ally as far more damaging than the alienation of a delicate partnership that’s been built, however cautiously, in order to make a good-faith effort of making real reforms. To actually make bipartisan progress, you’ve got to risk it with some of the groups that have long been an asset to your partisan success—and neither party, in this case or in most others, was willing to do that. Partisan self-preservation in the long run was judged more valuable than the success of this particular initiative.

This gutting of anti-abortion Democrats in the House, as well as the big Republican victory overall, made it even less likely we would be able to move forward with the common-ground effort. By the end of 2011, the contraception mandate controversy was in full swing, and our work was swamped by that tide.

Finally, the Department of Health and Human Services denied the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops a grant to serve trafficking victims solely because the conference would not perform abortions. This decision was made even though the conference scored highest in evaluations as the country’s most effective service provider and even though it had previously received the grant. The president was not happy about the process that led to the decision, but it was clear evidence that his temperament and judgment on these types of issues did not filter down to his staff.

By the time of the president’s reelection campaign, Democrats were running against the Republican “war on women.” In his second term, he opposed a ban on abortion after 20 weeks. The ban, the White House suggested, threatened the health of women. In the president’s entire time in office, the White House did not propose one restriction on abortion, even though the president stated he was “completely supportive of a ban on late-term abortions” in the final presidential debate in 2008 and he repeated his openness to restrictions on abortion throughout the 2008 campaign.

That he never took any action to propose or actively support such a restriction as president suggests that either those statements were little more than political posturing, or his intentions were overwhelmed by political calculation and compromises once he became president. Pressed on all sides, the president’s grand vision from Notre Dame was overwhelmed by culture war politics.

***

Importantly, although the president never did have that magic moment of breakthrough on abortion—imagine, for instance, a news conference where he was joined by the head of Planned Parenthood and prominent anti-abortion religious leaders to announce a robust policy package to reduce abortions—the fact of the matter is that by the end of his second term, the abortion rate in this country was the lowest it had ever been since Roe v. Wade.

New Window This article was excerpted by Michael Wear's book, Reclaiming Hope, out this week from Thomas Nelson.

And it should be noted that many of the policies that were under consideration as part of the common ground effort were enacted, albeit not under the banner of reducing abortion. Adoption, for instance, was a particular bright spot: When I arrived at the White House in 2008, there were 463,792 children in foster care and 79,392 children legally separated from their parents and waiting for adoption. When I left in 2012, there were 397,122 children in the system, and 58,625 waiting for adoption. This progress was the result of efforts by state and local governments, advocates and adoption agencies, as well as the federal Administration for Children and Families—and it was an honor to support this progress from the White House, to shine a spotlight on it and assist where we could. That assistance included multiple years of staff work in support of making the Adoption Tax Credit permanent, which the president signed into law in January 2013. The adoption tax credit helps families cover the costs—which can be expensive—of pursuing adoptions. It makes adoption possible for thousands of families who would otherwise never consider it.

In addition to progress on adoption, other important policies that fell in the common ground “buckets” also advanced. Senator Bob Casey’s Pregnant Women Support Act, which provided important supports for maternal health, was included in the Affordable Care Act and signed into law. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stepped up enforcement of pregnancy discrimination cases. The Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, bipartisan tax policies that help support low-income families, were expanded.

Again, one would think that those who believe abortion is the taking of an innocent life would be the loudest people celebrating these accomplishments. But politics too often get in the way of applauding what is good. Anti-abortion Americans should ask why prominent anti-abortion groups decided to target anti-abortion Democrats rather than focus their efforts on pro-abortion rights politicians in both parties.

The Democratic Party has moved to the left on abortion in recent years for many reasons, including political calculations and ideological consolidation, and the Obama administration has unfortunately provided justification for anti-abortion groups’ skepticism. In 2014, a government report found that the administration has failed to enforce, or not even tried to enforce, the president’s executive order regarding federal funding for abortion through the Affordable Care Act. The anti-abortion Democrats in Congress lost their seats defending what turned out to be a lie—the president’s commitment that health care reform would not result in federal funding for abortion. In this case, the Obama administration proved the cynics right. In 2016, the Democratic Party took the unprecedented step of calling for a repeal of the Hyde Amendment in its party platform. This made support for taxpayer funding of abortion party dogma.

As important as it was to enact key policies like the adoption tax credit, and as promising as it is that the abortion rate has fallen, I cannot help but think about what could have been if the Notre Dame vision had become reality. Imagine if after 40 years of intractable, tit-for-tat politics, our political and cultural leaders had managed to join hands to take concrete action together on this issue. Imagine if this issue that divides us so powerfully had been transcended by shared purpose. I often wonder what it will take to get there.