Monday, October 20, 2008

Obama: Against Born-Alive Infants Legislation

Rather than promoting a discussion of Obama's abortion stance, it is my contention that the more universal "flaw" in his position is his failure to support (late-term aborted) Born-Alive Infants Protection legislation. To speak against this legislation, which he did, is to literally endorse infanticide -- the willful murder of new-born infants.

In the selection below, authorities address Obama's response in the last Presidential Debate:

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.

~~~~~~~~
The Catholic Vote video "Life, Faith, Family" is in the sidebar.



Allowing late-term abortion "survivors" who breath and cry to be left in a laundry room to die alone without comfort or sustenance? No, Senator. That is not the type of change we need ..... Indeed, Senator Obama --- the issues of humanity and decency are well above your pay grade.

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