On January 17, 1982, a young and not-yet-elected Richard J. Durbin served as the master of ceremonies for the Springfield Right to Life committee’s annual March for Life event in Illinois’s capital city. Presumably, Durbin was being highlighted as the pro-life candidate in the local congressional race. His opponent was the incumbent—a pro-choice Republican.
Durbin, a Catholic, was ultimately elected and served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a self-proclaimed supporter of the right to life. On more than one occasion, he stated on record that he opposed abortion on demand and believed Roe v. Wade should be overturned.
But even as early as 1985, Durbin was already showing signs of betrayal. He claimed to oppose federal funding of abortion but voted against a provision to the Equal Rights Amendment that specified that abortions not be funded by the taxpayer. And in the fall of that year, he refused to support the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, which would have excluded groups performing or referring for abortions from receiving federal funding. In fact, Durbin went so far as to introduce his own amendment—called the Durbin Amendment—that actually required groups to refer or perform abortions in order to be eligible for funding at all.
In 1986, the National Right to Life printed a letter in the Herald & Review, a Decatur newspaper, clarifying Durbin’s approach to abortion in Congress.
The respected National Right to Life Committee—which issues an annual compilation of congressional votes on abortion—reported that during 1985, Durbin voted anti-abortion on only three out of seven votes (on the House floor and in the Appropriations Committee). Durbin voted pro-life on the least controversial votes. On the “hot” issues where the outcome was in doubt, Durbin voted against the pro-life position.
So, what happened? In 2005—more than twenty years after appearing on stage at Springfield’s March for Life—Durbin answered this question. In an interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press, Durbin laid out his personal evolution on the issue of abortion.
I came to Congress not having seen what I think is the important part of this debate and not understanding, if you will, really what was behind it. You know, it’s a struggle for me. It still is. I’m opposed to abortion. If any woman in my family said she was seeking abortion, I’d go out of my way to try to dissuade them from making that decision. But I was really discouraged when I came to Washington to find that the opponents of abortion were also opponents of family planning. This didn’t make any sense to me. And I was also discouraged by the fact that they were absolute, no exceptions for rape and incest, the most extraordinary medical situations. And I finally came to the conclusion that we really have to try to honor the Roe v. Wade thinking, that there are certain times in the life of a woman that she needs to make that decision with her doctor, with her family and with her conscience and that the government shouldn’t be intruding. It’s true that my position changed, but as Abraham Lincoln said when they accused him of changing his position, “I’d rather be right some of the time than wrong all the time.”
At best, his response is troubling. At worst, it’s a reflection of the lack of catechesis of his generation—“family planning” often being a euphemism for contraception—and, some could argue, the materialization of the prophetic concerns that Pope Paul VI laid out in his papal document on the regulation of birth, Humanae Vitae: “Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for . . . a general lowering of moral standards.”
Pope John Paul II went even one step further in Evangelium Vitae, describing contraception and abortion as “fruits of the same tree.”
It is true that in many cases contraception and even abortion are practiced under the pressure of real-life difficulties, which nonetheless can never exonerate from striving to observe God’s law fully. Still, in very many other instances such practices are rooted in a hedonistic mentality unwilling to accept responsibility in matters of sexuality, and they imply a self-centered concept of freedom, which regards procreation as an obstacle to personal fulfillment. The life which could result from a sexual encounter thus becomes an enemy to be avoided at all costs, and abortion becomes the only possible decisive response to failed contraception.
We see clearly how the Church has both anticipated and addressed exactly the conflict that Sen. Durbin claims to struggle with: One cannot consent to the use of contraception and also wholly oppose abortion. The two are inextricably linked.
We can also assume based on more recent votes that the senator’s conundrum continues to influence him. As recently as 2022, he voted to codify Roe v. Wade—an explicit contradiction of his former stance.
In November, the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Office of Human Dignity and Solidarity plans to honor Durbin with a “lifetime achievement” award, which will be presented by none other than the cardinal archbishop Blase Cupich.
My organization, Illinois Right to Life, has stood alongside Springfield Bishop Thomas Paprocki to vehemently oppose this choice by the cardinal. The scandal of giving such an award notwithstanding, the senator’s soul hangs in the balance. Durbin’s “personal evolution,” as many in Illinois refer to it today, is a conundrum that’s played out in his life very publicly for more than thirty years.
One cannot help but call to mind the words of Pope Paul VI on the concern of the Church: “It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. . . . But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a ‘sign of contradiction.’ She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.”
Image by White House (Pete Souza), licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
