One of the frustrating things about the Notre Dame controvesy is that we’ve settled back into the same terms of debate we’ve had for years: whether one is “pro-life” is determined entirely by one’s position on the legality of abortion.
Pro-life Obama supporters during the campaign argued that this approach hasn’t served to reduce abortions as much as possible and that a different approach might do better. What if, they asked, you kept most abortion legal but worked hard to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and gave more support to women who wanted to carry babies to term instead of choosing abortions?

It’s a bit of an untested theory but it’s part of what Obama ran on — and it’s at least part of why one quarter of the Obama coalition was pro-life. That means pro-lifers made up a bigger portion of his electoral coalition than union members, white Catholics, Jews, gays, Latinos or 18-21 year olds.
The problem for Obama is that so far in his young presidency he’s only taken steps reinforcing the legality without doing much to emphasize abortion reduction. He’s started some working groups to hammer out a “common ground” approach but it will take some time before they produce something.
As a result, we’re left with the debate being about whether the church should focus mostly on abortion in deciding it’s speakers — instead of a far more interesting debate: if abortion is central to Catholic teaching, should the church give more tolerance to an approach that keeps abortion legal but reduces its prevalence or pushes towards abortions happening earlier?
I know Obama wants to let his common ground group work its course but given how much attention this speech is giving, this would be a good time to lay out the principles of this new approach.