U.S. Sen. Bob Casey wants it both ways.

Casey contends he’s a pro-life Democrat, just like his late father, the anti-abortion champion former Gov. Robert Casey. But Casey Jr. voted this past week for legislation requiring employers to pay for their workers’ birth control, including so-called “abortifacient drugs”.

The senator says he draws a distinction between contraception — the prevention of a pregnancy, which he supports — and abortion pills and procedures intended to end a conception. As a Roman Catholic, Casey subscribes to a religion that views abortion as the taking of a life.

That’s the exact view of the owners of Hobby Lobby, the retail chain at the center of a legal firestorm over Obamacare’s mandates for health care coverage. Hobby Lobby — which has always provided coverage for contraceptives for its employees — successfully challenged the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to cover all forms of birth control, including abortifacient drugs like the morning-after pill, by arguing before the Supreme Court that abortion procedures violate the religious beliefs of the corporation’s principal shareholders.

It sounds as if Casey and Hobby Lobby stand on common ground. But they don’t.

On Wednesday, Casey voted for a bill that would overturn the Hobby Lobby decision and force most businesses to offer employees the full range of contraceptive coverage. In fact, Casey cosponsored the legislation. In an interview the day before the vote, he explained that he sides with scientists who believe abortifacient drugs are not the same as abortion — even though his bishops say they are the same.

The Senate bill would have made government-mandated contrception and abortion one and the same, or, as one conservative columnist said, would be “all the congressional authorization for an abortion mandate with no religious-freedom protections that any administration would need,” That is, if a future administration decided to extend the “preventative care” mandate beyond abortifacient drugs to surgical abortions.

Happily, the supporters fell short of the 60 votes needed to move the bill forward.

With his vote, Casey toed the Democratic Party line and went along with his party’s argument that they’re protecting women’s right to decide their own health care.

The senator also turns his back on the pro-life legacy of his late father. Gov. Bob Casey established the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act in 1989, placing limitations on abortion such as notification of parents of minors, a 24-hour waiting period, and a ban on partial-birth procedures. A Supreme Court challenge upheld the act and affirmed the right of states to restrict abortions.

Gov. Casey tried to make his anti-abortion belief a plank in the Democrats’ 1992 presidential campaign platform. However, he was denied an opportunity to address the convention. Even then, less than 20 years after Roe v. Wade, abortion had become strongly rooted in Democratic Party culture.

The younger Bob Casey maintains he opposes abortion, just as his late father did. At least he says he still does.