Obama’s Executive Order on Abortion

Friday afternoon, President Barack Obama signed an executive order which, in combination with other family planning measures, will provide U.S. greenbacks for abortions performed on citizens of other nations as a means of birth control.

One of the controversies surrounding this action was that, as reported in the Washington Post on Saturday, “The . . . order was signed late in the day yesterday without any reporters, news photographers or television cameras present, in marked contrast to elaborate ceremonies highlighting orders Obama signed earlier in the week.”

While campaigning for the Oval Office, Obama made it clear that “We will make government open and transparent.” Apparently, this guideline does not apply when it comes to a potentially incendiary topic such as abortion. Obama’s signing of the executive order is controversial, because it reverses a prior order signed by former President W. George Bush in 2001 which eliminated that practice.

The original prohibition against U.S abortion funding in foreign lands had been initiated by Ronald Reagan in 1984. It became known as the Mexico City Policy, the location where he signed it into law. When Bill Clinton came to the White House, he saw the matter differently and, in 1993, reversed Reagan’s action by issuing his own executive order.

And so it went. Each of these presidents has, according to his own political and presumably moral compass, countermanded the other on this divisive practice which provides U.S. funds to other nations for abortion counseling and for recommending the practice to their own citizens as a means of birth control. Obama is merely the last president to append his personal signature to the controversy.

Our new president should have had the courtesy and fortitude to have signed his order and to comment on its justification in the “open and transparent” light of the public square. That is what he promised and that is what he did for the other executive orders which he executed in his first week of office. But not for this one. Journalists should have been inside the room, and the cameras should have been rolling to record the event.