Take a look at Sargent Shriver, suggests this writer.

The social conservatives’ concern was warranted. On Jan. 22, 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that states could not restrict the right of a woman to abort a fetus in the first trimester of pregnancy. To Catholics who believed that the soul is formed at conception, the idea that a fetus was not a person under the Constitution was morally repugnant. During his 1976 campaign for president, Shriver would declare that “the reasoning of the majority of the Supreme Court decision [in Roe v. Wade] was neither convincing nor even in accord with contemporary scientific information about genetic and biological beginnings of life and its developmental process.”

Significantly, however, Shriver also said that although he was “strongly opposed to abortion — ethically, morally, intellectually, emotionally,” as president he would be oath-bound “to uphold the laws the land.”

Shriver’s skillful balancing of faith and politics did not go unnoticed. “Sargent Shriver is a Roman Catholic candidate of an unfamiliar sort,” a reporter commented in 1972, “a man who slips quietly out to Mass many mornings of the campaign and works a little harder because of the thought that a good day’s effort can be a form of prayer.”