Did you hear Barack Obama wants to kill babies in the womb? It’s true! In the way that it’s NOT.
The issue came up during the primaries when Senator Clinton accused Obama of lacking the backbone to protect abortion rights because he voted “present” instead of “no.” What’s good for the liberal goose is good for the conservative gander, it seems, as right to life groups hit him for wanting to kill babies because he voted present.
At issue is the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, a bill in the Illinois state Senate that sought to protect against bungled abortions by requiring that a fetus that survived an abortion be defined as a person. Fearing that the legislation could be interpreted more broadly to protect fetuses that were not yet viable — thus threatening Roe v. Wade, abortion rights advocates pushed for an amendment that explicitly limited the scope of the bill to infants “born alive.”
It’s a complicated issue, spanning several years worth of bills in the Illinois State Senate. Lucky for me, The Chicago Tribune did the leg work.
The history makes it clear that Obama’s role in delaying “born-alive” legislation was minor and based on very understandable reservations of many pro abortion rights legislators in Springfield. There is simply no way to paint him as an “extremist” when multiple versions of this same legislation failed in both chambers, often over bi-partisan concerns
What does Obama have to say for himself? Check out this interview he gave to The Christian Broadcast Network.
I hate to say that people are lying, but here’s a situation where folks are lying…. What that bill was doing was trying to undermine Roe vs. Wade. By the way, we also had a bill, a law already in place in Illinois that insured life saving treatment was given to infants.
So for people to suggest that I and the Illinois medical society, so Illinois doctors were somehow in favor of withholding life saving support from an infant born alive is ridiculous. It defies commonsense and it defies imagination and for people to keep on pushing this is offensive and it’s an example of the kind of politics that we have to get beyond. It’s one thing for people to disagree with me about the issue of choice, it’s another thing for people to out and out misrepresent my positions repeatedly, even after they know that they’re wrong. And that’s what’s been happening.
So no, he doesn’t want to kill babies. He loves babies!
