Obama Votes to Withhold Care from Abortion Survivors

by David Kilpatrick

The more we learn about this junior senator, who would be president, the more unsettling he becomes. He carefully dances around questions with a style and grace that momentarily leaves us with a feeling of satisfaction, but that satisfaction is short-lived when we ask the dangerous question, "What did he really say?"

Obama says he is a long-practicing Christian with strong family values and an all-around good guy with a sense of morality, making him a good judge of what would be right and wrong. We should feel safe putting him in charge of the free world, making him the most powerful man on the planet and allowing his moral compass to direct the winds of change that blow across our country, but when we look at the positions he has taken, we don't see the moderate bridge-builder that he wants to brand himself as.

Obama, as an Illinois state senator, voted against a state version of the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which passed the U.S. Senate in 2002 by a unanimous vote. The law prevents the killing of infants, usually by denying them medical care, when they are mistakenly left alive, outside the mother's womb after an abortion.

When Obama was speaking against this measure, he was particularly convoluted and vague in comparing as similar the "pre-viability" status of a fetus and a very viable, breathing, thinking infant with his words, "Number one, whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the Equal Protection Clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we're really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a child, a 9-month-old child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it -- it would essentially bar abortions, because the Equal Protection Clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this were a child, this would be an anti-abortion statute."

His statement makes perfect sense, except for the fact that it was issued on a measure that was not addressing extending rights to a "pre-viable fetus". It would be easy to write off his statement as a simple mistake made by a junior senator who slept too late and hadn't read the measure. When confronted with his position on the measure, Obama replied that he would support the measure if language would have been included in the bill specifying that it would not encroach on a woman's right to choose an abortion.

When given the opportunity to clarify his position, critics note that in 2003, when an Illinois lawmaker again introduced a state Born Alive Infant Bill, it came with a proposed amendment that included language on protecting abortion rights identical to the federal version. The bill was never brought up for a vote in the Health and Human Services Committee, which Obama chaired because in Obama's view, it was not important enough an issue to spend the committee's time by voting on.

Obama's vote against the measure still stands and he made no effort at all to clarify his stand when given the opportunity. The current procedure supported by Obama is to take the living infant to another room and leave it there to die on its own. Is this a "mainstream" position? Is this a "Christian" position? Is this a "good morals" position? I would venture to say that even the most heartless and cruel among us would find it difficult to stand in a room with a dying infant under orders to do nothing, except let it die.

Followers of Obama will not want to think about this, of course, but as more of Obama's positions become known, we will all be asked to "not think about" more and more of them. It would be crazy to imagine that any presidential candidate would ever match any one of us on every issue and there are many more issues that will confront us over time, BUT we need to examine them all and consider each one as a piece of the puzzle which makes up the man who wants to lead our country and too many conflicts in his position still exist. He talks about extending medical care to all uninsured and includes illegal immigrants in his numbers, yet he doesn't support taking an abortion survivor to the nursery. Regardless of your politics, those are difficult positions to reconcile.

Obama has demonstrated time and again that he does not wish to govern for all, but only for those who are on the far left of the political spectrum. He has never worked in a bi-partisan way and to assume he would suddenly start would be irrational. Obama very rarely lets his rhetoric influence his actions and while he speaks well, he needs to know that the man who would be president needs to be president of all, not just his followers. The survival of our union depends on it.

On this issue, Obama demonstrates a VERY dangerous position. He has decided not to represent the interests of ones who cannot speak for themselves, when those are the ones who would need him the most.