Notre Dame, Abortion, and the Jewish Question
/If you let the Jews in, they take over.”
– Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, CSC
On November 3, 2022, the University of Notre Dame hosted a debate between College Democrats and College Republicans which suddenly and unexpectedly turned from contentious to nasty when the question of abortion arose. Blake Ziegler, spokesman for the College Democrats, opened the abortion segment of the debate by saying, “I proudly affirm the women’s right to choose.”1 “For nearly 50 years,” he continued, “our nation recognized this fundamental right. Dobbs will impose significant burdens on women’s health care,” and “force teenage girls to carry their pregnancies to term. That’s the result of their culture wars rhetoric. Dobbs must be overturned.”2 At another point, Ziegler characterized the Republican position on abortion as: “Tell that teenager in Texas that even though she was raped by her uncle and is 12 years old, she still has to carry that baby to term.”3
Abortion has been a contentious issue at Notre Dame for almost 60 years. This story began in 1962 when then President Theodore Hesburgh sponsored a series of conferences funded by John D. Rockefeller’s Population Council. Those conferences were a closely guarded secret because their purpose was to overturn the teaching of the Catholic Church as a prelude to striking down this country’s laws prohibiting the sale of contraceptives, which occurred during the spring of 1965, when the Supreme Court handed down Griswold v. Connecticut.
During the summer of 1965, Father Hesburgh arranged a meeting between John D. Rockefeller 3rd and Pope Paul VI during which Rockefeller, flush from his Supreme Court victory, volunteered to write the pope’s birth control encyclical for him. For some reason the pope declined this honor, setting the stage for Humanae Vitae, which set off a revolution in the Catholic Church when it was promulgated in 1968. Hesburgh had a bad habit of ingratiating himself with the rich and famous and then betraying them when the association threatened his career. He did this to Richard Nixon, and this is what Hesburgh did to Pope Paul VI when he sided with the revolutionaries and betrayed the pope who needed his support in the looming war over human sexuality that came to be known as the sexual revolution. Pope Paul VI was infatuated with Hesburgh to the point of giving him his ring and seeing him as a spiritual heir who, as a cardinal in Rome, could assist the pope in battling the forces then threatening the Church, but the feelings were not mutual. Hesburgh callously threw Montini’s ring into a drawer with his cigar cutter knowing that a Catholic with Rockefeller backing was more powerful than any cardinal in Rome. In 1967, in the wake of the Charles Curran tenure crisis at Catholic University and the bishops’ capitulation, Hesburgh stole Notre Dame University from the Catholic Church, knowing that he had the full support of the Vatican and the pope, whom he would betray one year later.
For the next decade, as more and more Catholic women neutered themselves with contraceptives, it seemed that abortion would be the next domino of Catholic doctrine to fall. That is the thesis of Ralph McInerny’s novel The Priest, which portrayed the moral rot spreading through Notre Dame in graphic, albeit fictional, detail. Widespread Catholic acceptance of abortion seemed inevitable, but it never happened. Thus, Hesburgh’s decision to accept the chairmanship of the Rockefeller Foundation on January 14, 1976 unleashed a storm of indignation by prolife activists across the country. Stung by their criticism, Hesburgh responded in ND’s student newspaper The Observer by claiming that his critics were misinformed about the Rockefeller Foundation’s stand on abortion. “The foundation has nothing to do with abortion,”4 Hesburgh opined. “In fact, you’ll never find the word ‘abortion’ in the report.” Father Hesburgh concluded his article by opining that his critics should know the facts before they made inflammatory accusations.
In an article published in the same student newspaper on April 20, 1977, the late Professor Charles E. Rice of the Notre Dame Law School proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that the word ‘abortion’ did in fact rear its ugly head in the reports of the Rockefeller Foundation, forcing Rice to conclude that the Rockefeller-funded James Madison Constitutional Law Institute, “which handled the entire appeal for the abortion side in Roe v. Wade,” was “the legal spearhead of the abortion movement” in America. When the National Catholic News Service asked for a clarification after Rice effectively called him a liar, Hesburgh declined further comment.5
Despite massive Rockefeller funding for front groups like Catholics for Free Choice, the abortion domino never fell, forcing Notre Dame to accept grudgingly the presence of a Notre Dame Right to Life movement on campus. The university then tried to co-opt that movement by having ND President John Jenkins make a token appearance at the National Right to Life March in Washington. The idea that Jenkins was prolife ended when he gave an honorary doctorate to the notoriously pro-abortion Barack Obama, showing that he was even handed or duplicitous, depending on your point of view.
The carefully worked out modus vivendi on abortion at Notre Dame ended when Roe v Wade got overturned on June 24, 2022 and 140 Jewish organizations announced that abortion was “a fundamental Jewish value.”
By September, Notre Dame decided that it would be pulling out of the local prolife organization, Right to Life Michiana, it had sponsored for years, in which Ben Shapiro would be the keynote speaker, and would instead be hosting the Gender Studies program pro-abortion event “Post-Roe America: Making Intersectional Feminist Sense of Abortion Bans” in which “a panel of local health care providers and reproductive care advocates” would come to Notre Dame “for a teach-in"5a on the very same day as the significant prolife event.
During the run up to Roe, when Jews like Bernard Nathanson and Lawrence Lader were leading the abortion crusade in New York, the word Jew never got mentioned in the New York Times, which had become an aggressive organ of abortion advocacy. The only religious group identified in the abortion wars was the Catholics, specifically Catholic bishops, who were accused of imposing their views on everyone else.
Unaware that the world had changed, Blake Ziegler took this tack in his response to the abortion question in the debate. Responding to College Republican Shri Thakur’s claim that “Abortion is murder and except in cases to save the mother’s life it should be illegal nationwide,” and that “corporations are paying women to kill their children and come back and be a good cubicle worker in the office,”6 Ziegler claimed that Republicans wanted “to impose [their] world view on the rest of the country. That’s what Republicans believe forcing their own beliefs, their own religion on other people instead of letting others pursue their life plan.” Ziegler went on to say: “The rhetoric from the Republicans is inherently baked into religion” without understanding that what was true for Christians was a fortiori true for Jews. If Dobbs imposed Christian values on Jews, then Ziegler by his own logic had to admit that Roe imposed Jewish values on Christians for almost 50 years. “It’s inherently baked into people’s previous life values that should come into policymaking. Policymaking is about pragmatism; it’s about adhering to everyone’s interests. It’s not about imposing your own personal or religious views on others. I’m Jewish. I shouldn’t have to listen to Christianity to tell me when life begins.”7
Taken aback by Ziegler’s sudden injection of the Jewish question into a debate on abortion, Thakur responded by saying:
First of all, I have not invoked religion once during this debate. He’s the one who just brought religion into this debate. You don’t need to be religious to understand the fact that human life begins at conception, and that we should not be killing innocent human beings. And just because his religion—I don’t know about Judaism—just because his religion supports abortion doesn’t mean abortion should be legal. The Aztecs supported child sacrifice. Should we allow that? You cannot play these morally relativist games with people’s lives.8
Incapable of understanding the point Thakur just made, Ziegler doubled down and played the Jewish card once again.
“He literally just equated Judaism to Aztec child sacrifice,” Ziegler whined. “That’s what you get with the Republican Party. And I just want to point out how demonstrably offensive that is.”
At this point the student crowd booed Ziegler, proving that they were also anti-Semitic.
Not content to leave it at that, Ziegler followed up with an article in The Observer, which appeared on November 10, 2022, in which he again blamed the “Religious Right” for the booing because they “frequently reference Christian values and religious teachings to support their position against abortion.” Ziegler opined that Supreme Court Justice Alito’s decision was “rooted in some religious traditions’ view of when life begins” without mentioning that his own position is equally religious because 140 Jewish organizations have affirmed that abortion is a fundamental Jewish value. Without once referring to the 140 Jewish organizations, Ziegler deflected the reader’s attention away from the issue at hand to “how some anti-abortion rhetoric is embedded in the blood libel accusation often levied against Jews.” Blood libel had nothing to do with the debate at Notre Dame, but Ziegler dragged it into the discussion because it is an ADL talking point. The same is true of “identifying abortion as ‘child sacrifice.’” At this point my name entered the discussion as an example of “dangerous rhetoric” because “Following the Dobbs decision, writer E. Michael Jones equated child sacrifice to Jews.”
It’s difficult to discern what Ziegler meant to convey in his awkward sentence, other than my name, but that brings up an interesting question: how did Ziegler learn about me? Was it from other Notre Dame students? That seems unlikely. More likely is that he went to the ADL website. If that is the case, did the ADL coach him before he engaged in the debate or wrote his article attacking me? The sentence is meaningless but typical of someone who thinks that ADL talking points are a substitute for rational argument.
When I shared the link to Ziegler’s article in The Observer with an ND alumnus who has a daughter at Notre Dame, I was told that “the memo” to argue abortion as a religious liberty issue for Jews has “even trickled down to hick places like Jefferson City, Missouri,” where sophomores at Notre Dame are encouraged to:
debate bills in the fake house and senate, then pass some and the mock governor signs them. One bill would permit abortion in Missouri. The bill’s sponsor argued that she was Jewish and she did not want the views of Christians forced on her because that was against her religion to be banned from having an abortion. (My sophomore) immediately raised his placard and quoted Exodus, with citation, and read “Thou shalt not kill.” He said that Jews follow the Old Testament but before he could get any words out, the teenage Lt. Governor pointed at him and said he had to sit down because he did not give a “trigger warning” on the word “kill.” You see, there is this rule that if you are going to say something that might cause another to experience some sort of mental anguish, you have to say “Trigger warning – sexual assault” for example. It is so stupid [that it was] beyond comprehension. So, the girl did not get in trouble for failing to say “trigger warning – abortion” when she presented her bill, but (my sophomore) got in trouble for not saying trigger warning before reading directly from the Bible off his phone. This is the world in which we currently live. So sad.
Unless we believe that great minds all run in the same circles, it is impossible to believe that these young Jews haven’t been coached to inject the Jewish question into the abortion issue. By dragging the fact that he is Jewish into the argument, Ziegler was telling the crowd that he had Jewish privilege, which exonerated him from the necessity of being rational or persuasive.
Sensing that the audience had turned against him, Ziegler doubled down again and dragged the Holocaust into the abortion debate. Like Hate Speech which was created by the ADL to derail any discussion of Jewish power, the Holocaust can be brought into any discussion which had not been terminated by the claim “I’m Jewish.” In this instance, Ziegler attempted to derail the prolife appropriation of the Holocaust. Comparisons between the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust and the number of babies who died because of abortion:
are antisemitic because of their underlying effect of distorting the reality of the tragic event. The Holocaust was the systematic extermination of six million European Jews and was the result of Nazi rhetoric meant to dehumanize the Jewish people. Any effort to liken the Holocaust to another event, no matter what it is, diminishes the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors. It ignores their suffering for political gain through cheap talking points. At the same time, it undermines efforts to emphasize the seriousness of the Holocaust. We should care about the Holocaust because it was the Holocaust, not because some other issue appears similar to it….
[…] This is just an excerpt from the January 2023 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
(Endnotes Available by Request)
