The University of Notre Dame’s Alarming Pro-Abortion Appointment

At the University of Notre Dame this week, students constructed a model of the campus’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart out of ice and snow — and 2,000 students congregated outside in the cold to celebrate Mass beside the sculpture.

This incredible display came just weeks after the university announced that Susan Ostermann — a vocally pro-abortion professor — will become an institute director in the university’s Keough School of Global Affairs.

Ostermann, who was appointed to lead the Keough School’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, has previously argued that “abortion access is freedom-enhancing, in the truest sense of the word” and that abortion is “consistent with integral human development that emphasizes social justice and human dignity.”

Her appointment points to the question at the heart of the ongoing debate over Notre Dame’s Catholic identity: How can a school where a quarter of the undergraduate population shows up for Mass beside a basilica made of ice also be a school with leaders who publicly repudiate fundamental aspects of Catholicism?

If Ostermann’s appointment remains in place, it would be the first time that Notre Dame has had a leader known for contradicting the school’s Catholic mission. The dignity and sanctity of every human life, from conception to natural death, is not a matter for prudential disagreement — it’s a foundational and nonnegotiable tenet of the Catholic faith.

As a matter of school bylaws, this appointment — made by Keough Dean Mary Gallagher and approved by Provost John McGreevy — should not stand. In a recent article, Notre Dame Professor Emeritus Father Wilson Miscamble noted:

[Ostermann’s appointment] has now been placed before the university president [Father Robert Dowd], but he seems reluctant to overrule the provost and dean. I have now brought the matter before the Board of Fellows at Notre Dame—six Holy Cross Priests and six laypersons—who have the fiduciary responsibility to maintain the university’s “character as a Catholic institution of higher learning.” I have requested that they intervene to support Fr. Dowd in rescinding this appointment.

Thus far, the university has responded to the ongoing controversy by defending the appointment — despite the fact that its own spokespeople have simultaneously stated that “those who serve in leadership positions at Notre Dame do so with the clear understanding that their decision-making as leaders must be guided by and consistent with the University’s Catholic mission.”

Leaving Ostermann’s appointment in place would set the precedent that Notre Dame’s leaders need not embrace the school’s Catholic mission — indeed, that they can outspokenly disparage nonnegotiable aspects of the religious creed that the university purports to defend and to impart to its students.

Notre Dame has taken a formal, institutional position in defense of the sanctity of human life, and in 2022, then–university president Father John Jenkins publicly disavowed one of Ostermann’s pro-abortion articles, stating that it “[did] not reflect the views and values of the University of Notre Dame in its tone, arguments or assertions.”

Ostermann is not merely supportive of abortion as a matter of personal belief. In recent years, she has written publicly on nearly a dozen occasions championing legal abortion, including with co-author professor Tamara Kay. (Kay recently left Notre Dame after having lost a defamation suit against student journalists who wrote about her offers of providing illegal abortion access to students.)

Ostermann does not confine herself to cheerleading abortion; she also excoriates the pro-life position with what can only be described as malice. She has written publicly in opposition to pregnancy resource centers, which offer abortion alternatives, calling them “anti-abortion rights propaganda sites” that provide “false information” to women.

She has also trafficked in the baseless, ahistorical notion that the pro-life movement has its “roots in white supremacy,” when something close to the opposite is the case. It is the pro-abortion cause that originated in the progressive eugenics and population-control movement — a troubling fact whose effects continue to the present day.

Ostermann’s support for abortion also appears in her academic work. Late last year, she and Kay co-edited an edition of the academic journal Studies in Comparative International Development devoted to “Critical Perspectives on Global Reproductive Health,” which featured articles repudiating Catholic teaching on sexuality and abortion.

In response to the controversy over her selection to lead the Liu Institute, Ostermann has stated, ludicrously, that she is “inspired by the University’s focus on Integral Human Development, which calls upon all of us to promote the dignity and flourishing of every person” and that she “respect[s] Notre Dame’s institutional position on the sanctity of life at every stage.”

Her appointment is especially noteworthy in light of recent news that a record number of Notre Dame students (76) are converting to Catholicism on campus this year. For decades, Notre Dame has been struggling to decide whether it will be a Catholic university in every sense of the word. In many crucial respects, it’s a school with an active Catholic mission.

On campus, every student residence hall and nearly all classroom buildings have chapels where the Eucharist is present at all hours. There are dozens of Masses on campus every day, including in a basilica that sits beside the university’s main administrative building — the famous Golden Dome, topped with a statue of the Virgin Mary.

The university’s leadership ought to take that thriving Catholic life even more seriously than its students do. Such a thing is impossible if Notre Dame elevates leaders like Ostermann.