How Support for Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma

Anne Hendershott has an article in the on-line Wall Street Journal about Caroline Kennedy and the Kennedy family politicians’ predilection for abortion. She writes of the 1964 meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., the colloquium wherein the Kennedy politicos were coached on the Pharisaical sophistries involved in being pro-abortion as a politician while remaining a faithful Catholic. The lineup of theologians present would indicate that the thing was front-loaded to achieve the desired result (rather like hunting for a confessor who is soft on one’s favorite vice, perhaps because it happens to be his own: “but Father so-and-so said it was OK!”). Writes Hendershot:

The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book “The Birth of Bioethics” (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.

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