The National Right to Life's Douglas Johnson provided more details about Barack Obama's record:
As the legislative director for National Right to Life, I can provide some additional details regarding Barack Obama's appalling record on the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA). This is just a summary. A detailed count-counterpoint paper refuting Obama's disinformation on this issue -- including links to the actual bills at issue (each bill is only three sentences long), and other primary documents --is found here: http://www.nrlc.org/ObamaBAIPA/WhitePaperAugust282008.htmlAs an Illinois state senator, from 2001-2003, Obama led the opposition to the Illinois BAIPA. The bill, only three sentences long, simply recognized any infant who was completely expelled from the mother, and alive, as a legal person. Obama was the chairman who presided over a March 13, 2003 committee meeting at which he killed an amended version of the bill that was virtually identical to the federal BAIPA that had been enacted the previous year without a dissenting vote in either house of Congress. (The complete text appears at the bottom of this posting.) From 2004 until a few weeks ago, Obama insisted falsely that the state and federal bills were very different, a claim swallowed unskeptically by some protective Chicago newspapers (which the Obama operation then cited for years as "proof" of the claim).
On August 11, 2008, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) released recently uncovered documents that proved that Obama had misrepresented the state bill. When Obama was asked about our assertion in a televised interview on August 16, 2008, he said (three times) that we were "lying." After an investigation, Annenberg's independent FactCheck.org concluded: "Obama's claim is wrong . . . The documents from NRLC support the group's claims that Obama is misrepresenting the contents of SB 1082 [the 2003 Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act]."
So why did Obama oppose the BAIPA, and why he so persistently misrepresent the content of the bill?
Obama explained in 2001, and has never recanted, that he opposed this bill because he believed it was unconstitutional to define a "previable fetus" to be a legal person ? even though the bill only applied if the baby had achieved "complete expulsion or extraction from its mother," and was alive.
I am a critic of Roe v. Wade -- but even among persons who defend Roe v. Wade, most consider that ruling to confer a right to terminate the lives of unborn humans inside the womb, and do not believe that it diminishes the legal status of a baby who is fully born. (Indeed, a bill virtually identical to the one that Obama opposed passed the U.S. Senate 98-0.) Yet, there really are some people who believe that Roe v. Wade goes further, and requires that a "previable fetus" (Obama's term) who is the subject of an abortion must remain classified as a non-person no matter where that "previable fetus" is located. In this vision, the so-called "previable fetus" who happens to be outside the mother is still in the process of being aborted, and that entire process (which Obama regards as constitutionally protected) will end only with the death of the newborn. By his actions and his explanations of those actions, Barack Obama showed himself to be among those who hold this expansive vision of the "right to abortion." In Obama's view, to declare the fully born and living but "previable" human to be a legal person does indeed interfere with "abortion" and does indeed conflict with the full and proper application of "Roe v. Wade."
Thus, in Obama's view, even a live birth is not enough to confer "human rights," in the abortion context at least. If not then, when? At the August 16, 2008, Saddleback Forum, when Pastor Rick Warren asked Sen. Obama, "At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?", Obama responded that "answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade." In a Sept. 7 interview, Obama further explained that it was a "theological question."
I think it is not just a theological question, and it is not a merely theoretical question. In testimony on the legislation, one nurse testified regarding "induced-labor abortions" performed at the hospital which employed her: "It is not uncommon for a live aborted babies to linger for an hour or two or even longer. At Christ Hospital one of these babies once lived for almost an entire eight-hour shift. Last year alone, of the 13 babies that I am aware of who were aborted at Christ Hospital, at least four lived between 1-1/2 to 3 hours, two boys and two girls." The nurse testified that another aborted baby "was left to die on the counter of the Soiled Utility Room wrapped in a disposable towel. This baby was accidentally thrown in the garbage, and when they later were going through the trash to find the baby, the baby fell out of the towel and on to the floor." Another nurse testified that she "happened to walk into a 'soiled utility room' and saw, lying on the metal counter, a fetus, naked, exposed and breathing, moving its arms and legs."Where these human persons, worthy of protection by law? Or were they merely the products of not-yet-completed abortions?
Obama's commitment to defend the practice of abortion without qualification was so absolute that it led him to reflexively view the issue of babies born alive during abortions through the prism of his concept of Roe v. Wade, and worse, to conclude that a breathing, squirming, fully born pre-viable human baby is still covered by Roe v. Wade. But when he ran for higher office (U.S. Senate) in 2004, he realized how difficult that position would be to defend in the world outside the halls of the Illinois Senate. That is when he began to misrepresent the contents of the bill that he had opposed.
Here's the entire text of the bill that Obama voted against, and killed in the committee he chaired, on March 13, 2003.
AN ACT concerning infants who are born alive. Be it enacted by the People of the State of Illinois, represented in the General Assembly:
Section 5. The Statute on Statutes is amended by adding Section 1.36 as follows: (5 ILCS 70/1.36 new)
Sec. 1.36. Born-alive infant.
(a) In determining the meaning of any statute or of any rule, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative agencies of this State, the words "person", "human being", "child", and "individual" include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development.
(b) As used in this Section, the term "born alive", with respect to a member of the species homo sapiens, means the complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of that member, at any stage of development, who after that expulsion or extraction breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.
(c) Nothing in this Section [the bill] shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being born alive as defined in this Section.
Section 99. Effective date. This Act takes effect upon becoming law.
Douglas Johnson
Legislative Director
National Right to Life Committee
Washington, D.C.full documentation at
http://www.nrlc.org
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