What's more, his record shows that he opposes any discouragement of abortion at all, under any circumstance. He voted against banning partial-birth abortions. He also voted against
notifying parents of minors who go out-of-state for abortions to avoid their own State's parental notification law (see
http://www.issues2000.org/social/Barack_Obama_Abortion.htm). He boasted on his campaign web site of being
"a leader in the Illinois legislature in the battle to protect a woman's right to choose" abortion.
Speaking at a Planned Parenthood Action Fund event on July 17, 2007, Obama said that the Supreme Court's
Gonzales v. Carhart decision (upholding the ban on
partial-birth abortions) was part of a
"concerted effort to steadily roll back the hard-won rights of American women." [That's quoted from his
barackobama.com campaign web site.]
Obama is also a
co-sponsor of the so-called Freedom of Choice Act (
FOCA), which would abolish almost all constraints on abortion. It would forbid "right to know / informed consent" laws (which typically require that women be given information about alternatives to abortion at least 24 hours before an abortion is done). It would forbid parental consent and parental notification laws (which apply when a minor daughter is pregnant and considering abortion). It would legalize partial-birth abortion (which is now illegal). Obama
says that,
if elected, one of his first acts as president will be to sign FOCA.
(He makes it sound like passage of FOCA by Congress is a done deal;
fortunately, that isn't true.)
What's more, as McCain correctly pointed out on Wednesday, Obama defended even infanticide of living, already-born infants, who were born accidentally alive during an attempted abortion. Despite hearing testimony from a local nurse about how such babies were being purposfully neglected until they died, in Obama's own city of Chicago, he used his authority as a committee chairman to kill a bill which would have protected them.
Read all about it below.
For the babies that our Savior loves,
Dave
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Fw: www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2008.10.16_George_Robert_Obama%20and%20Infanticide_.xml
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2008/10/282/
Obama and Infanticide
by Robert George & Yuval Levin
Oct 16, 2008
Obama's latest excuse for opposing the
Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is that the law was
''unnecessary'' because
babies surviving abortions were already
protected. It won't fly.
In last night's presidential debate, Sen. John
McCain finally found an opportunity to confront Sen. Barack Obama
on
his vote against protecting children who were born alive after an
attempted abortion. Obama's response followed
the pattern of his approach to this subject throughout the campaign:
deny the facts and
confuse the issue. He said:
''There was a bill that was put forward before the Illinois Senate
that said you have to provide lifesaving treatment
and that would have
helped to undermine Roe v. Wade. The fact is that there was already a
law on the books in
Illinois that required providing lifesaving
treatment, which is why not only myself but pro-choice Republicans and
Democrats voted against it.''
But the facts of the born-alive debate tell a different story.
A few years ago, after it became clear that some infants who were born
alive in the course of an attempted induced abortion
at Christ Hospital
in Chicago and elsewhere were being left to die without even comfort
care, Republicans and Democrats
around the country united in an effort
to make the practice illegal and declare that any child outside the
womb, even if she
was an abortion survivor whose prospects for
long-term survival might be in doubt, was entitled to basic medical
care.
Even the most ardent advocates of the pro-choice position agreed
that a child born alive, even after an attempted abortion,
deserves
humane treatment.
The tragic stories of infants being left to die moved
legislators to act at both the state and federal levels.
In Washington,
D.C., consensus can be a rare commodity, and never more so than on the
issue of abortion. But the
Born-Alive Infant Protection Act of 2002 was
just such a rarity. The bill passed both houses of Congress without a
single dissenting vote-it was 98-0 in the Senate-and numerous
states
then proceeded to enact similar measures.
In Illinois, however, a
series of efforts to pass ''Born-Alive'' legislation from 2001 to 2003
met with stiff resistance from
legislators concerned the measure would
constrain the right to abortion in the state. Prominent among these
opponents,
and the only one to actually speak in opposition to the bill
when it was debated in 2002, was state Senator
Barack Obama.
Obama's case against the bill did not revolve around existing
state law, as he seemed to suggest last night. The law
Obama referred
to in the debate was the Illinois abortion statute enacted in 1975. But
at the time of the debate about
the Born Alive Act, the Illinois
Attorney General had publicly stated that he could not prosecute
incidents such as those
reported by nurses at Christ Hospital in
Chicago and elsewhere (including a baby left to die in a soiled linen
closet)
because the 1975 law was inadequate.
It only protected
''viable'' infants-and left the determination of viability up to the
''medical judgment'' of the abortionist
who had just failed to kill the
baby in the womb. This provision of the law weakened the hand of
prosecutors to the
vanishing point. That is why the Born Alive Act was
necessary-and everybody knew it. Moreover, the Born Alive Act
would
have had the effect of at least ensuring comfort care to babies whose
prospects for long-term survival were dim
and who might therefore have
been regarded as ''nonviable.''
As Obama and the other legislators
knew, without the Born Alive Act these babies could continue to be
treated
as hospital refuse. That's how the dying baby that Nurse Jill
Stanek found in the soiled linen closet got there.
Obama, who in 2003 became the chairman of the state senate's Health and
Human Services Committee, argued not
that existing law did everything
the newly proposed measure would do, but that the born-alive bill would
put too much
of a burden on the practice of abortion.
''As I understand it,'' Obama said during the floor debate, ''this puts
the burden on the attending physician who has
determined, since they
were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable
fetus; that if that fetus, or child -
however way you want to describe
it - is now outside the mother's womb and the doctor continues to think
that it's
nonviable but there's, let's say, movement or some indication
that, in fact, they're not just coming out limp and dead,
that, in
fact, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and
check off and make sure that this is not
a live child that could be
saved.''
This, he argued, was too much to ask of a doctor performing
abortions, and it could also, as he put it, ''burden the
original
decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an
abortion.''
To address the concern of Obama and others who believed in a
sweeping right to abortion, Illinois legislators in 2003
amended the
bill in Obama's committee, inserting language clarifying that the bill
would in no way affect the legal status
of a human being before birth.
It applied only to a child born alive.
Identical ''neutrality''
language in the federal version of the bill had persuaded every single
pro-choice legislator in Congress
to support the measure. But Obama
opposed the bill anyway, and his fellow Democrats followed their
chairman's lead,
killing the legislation in committee.
When Obama was challenged to explain himself, earlier in this campaign,
he at first insisted that he opposed the Born-Alive
Act in Illinois
because it didn't have a neutrality clause. When critics contended that
this claim was false, Obama accused
them of ''lying.'' But then the
critics produced indisputable documentary evidence that in fact Obama
had voted
against a bill that did include the neutrality clause. Obama
had plainly misrepresented his record.
Now he really had some
explaining to do.
But Obama still did not tell the truth last night. As his
original 2002 statements make clear, he sought to defeat the
Born-Alive
Act because he recognized that it bears at least implicitly on the
larger question of abortion in America.
He seemed to realize that the
logical implication of protecting the child born alive after an
attempted abortion is that
abortion involves taking the life of a child
in the womb, and that acknowledging that, even at the extreme margins
of the
practice of abortion, could put the legitimacy of abortion
itself in question.
Therefore, Obama chose to defend the widest
possible scope for legal abortion by building a fence around it, even
if
that meant permitting a child who survives an abortion to be left
to
die without even being afforded basic
comfort care.
Some of Senator Obama's supporters are now making one last,
rather desperate-sounding attempt to defend his votes
against
protecting infants born alive after unsuccessful abortions.
Their
argument goes this way: Permitting children who survive attempted
abortions to be abandoned is so heinous,
so barbaric, that for someone
to accuse Senator Obama, a decent man who is himself the father of two
daughters,
of supporting what amounts to legalized infanticide is too
outrageous to merit an answer.
There is a problem, though. In light of
the documentary evidence that is now before the public, it is clear
that the
accusation against Senator Obama, however shocking, has the
very considerable merit of being true.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and
Director of the James Madison Program
in American Ideals and
Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the
President's
Council on
Bioethics and previously served on the United States
Commission on Civil Rights. He sits on the editorial
board of
Public Discourse.
Yuval Levin is a Fellow and Director of the Program on
Bioethics
and American Democracy of the Ethics
and Public Policy Center and
senior editor of The New Atlantis.
Copyright 2008 The Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.