<The question was not justifying abortion but justifying voting for Democrats when they support abortion rights.>

That's not the way R&R framed the question, and I don't think that's what s/he meant:
<Cardinal Bernardin's opened the door to the proposition that abortion can somehow be justified until all social and political ills are removed.>

In certain corners of the church there lives, more than twenty years after his death, a peculiar preoccupation with Cardinal Bernardin.  We see the same phenomenon with Fr. Ray Brown, who has also been gone for many years.