George Weigel on Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
For whatever reasons — New York state politics and fear of the then-influential New York Times likely high among them — Pat did virtually nothing about the great civil rights issue of the late twentieth century: the defense of the right to life. He famously said that, while everyone is entitled to their own opinion, no one is entitled to their own facts. And no one as intelligent as Daniel Patrick Moynihan could have been ignorant of the scientific facts about the product of human conception, the moral facts about the ethical status of the pre-born child, and the jurisprudential facts about the travesty of legal reasoning that produced Roe v. Wade. Yet, until an end-of-career vote against partial-birth abortion, Pat Moynihan was not a happy warrior for life, as he had been a happy warrior for other great causes.
This was more than a sadness, a failure of insight and nerve. It marked, I believe, the greatest lost opportunity to bring the full range of Catholic insights to bear in public life in my lifetime.