Infanticide, Obama revisited

Barack Obama wants to move closer to Catholics, or more accurately, wants Catholics to move closer to him. Despite a track record of abandoning all limits for on-demand abortion, Obama plans to argue that he actually is a moderate on the topic. He has repudiated criticism for his vote on an Illinois bill that would have required practitioners to give normal medical attention to infants born alive during an attempted abortion by claiming that it lacked a pre-birth neutrality clause that was included in a bill adopted unanimously by the US Congress in 2002.

The National Right to Life Committee now claims that Obama lied about the bill in order to provide cover for his support of infanticide:

When Obama was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, his Republican opponent criticized him for supporting “infanticide.” Obama countered this charge by claiming that he had opposed the state BAIPA because it lacked the pre-birth neutrality clause that had been added to the federal bill. As the Chicago Tribune reported on October 4, 2004, “Obama said that had he been in the U.S. Senate two years ago, he would have voted for the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, even though he voted against a state version of the proposal. The federal version was approved; the state version was not. . . . The difference between the state and federal versions, Obama explained, was that the state measure lacked the federal language clarifying that the act would not be used to undermine Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court opinion that legalized abortion.”

During Obama’s 2008 run for President, his campaign and his defenders have asserted repeatedly and forcefully that it is a distortion, or even a smear, to suggest that Obama opposed a state born-alive bill that was the same as the federal bill. See, for example, this June 30, 2008 “factcheck” issued by the Obama campaign, in the form that it still appeared on the Obama website on August 7, 2008. The Obama “cover story” has often been repeated as fact, or at least without challenge, in major organs of the news media. (Two recent examples: CNN reported on June 30, 2008, “Senator Obama says if he had been in the U.S. Senate in 2002, he, too, would have voted in favor of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act because unlike the Illinois bill, it included language protecting Roe v. Wade.” The New York Times reported in a story on August 7, 2008 that Obama “said he had opposed the bill because it was poorly drafted and would have threatened the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established abortion as a constitutional right. He said he would have voted for a similar bill that passed the United States Senate because it did not have the same constitutional flaw as the Illinois bill.”)

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/08/11/infanticide-revisited/

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