Obama is Far, Far Left on Abortion

Every pro-life voter should know about Senator Obama’s positions on abortion. The short version is that he is very, very strongly pro-choice and will fight very hard against any proposal to limit abortion in any way. But here’s some details:

From his own website:

[Obama] has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as President. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in that case.

Obama is endorsed by NARAL. If you want to see NARAL’s summary of Obama’s stand on abortion, just follow the link. It's written from a pro-abortion viewpoint, of course, but there's still a lot of good information in there.

What about partial-birth abortion? Well, here's what Obama said last April when the Supreme Court upheld the federal partial birth abortion ban:

I strongly disagree with today's Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women. As Justice Ginsburg emphasized in her dissenting opinion, this ruling signals an alarming willingness on the part of the conservative majority to disregard its prior rulings respecting a woman's medical concerns and the very personal decisions between a doctor and patient.

I am extremely concerned that this ruling will embolden state legislatures to enact further measures to restrict a woman's right to choose, and that the conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law and a matter of equal rights for women.

It actually gets worse--even if the baby survives an attempted abortion and is alive outside the womb, Obama doesn't think he or she has a right to life. As a state senator, Obama opposed a bill modeled after the federal Born Alive Infant Protection Act. Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum comments:

That bill was the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. During the partial-birth abortion debate, Congress heard testimony about babies that had survived attempted late-term abortions. Nurses testified that these preterm living, breathing babies were being thrown into medical waste bins to die or being "terminated" outside the womb. With the baby now completely separated from the mother, it was impossible to argue that the health or life of the mother was in jeopardy by giving her baby appropriate medical treatment.

The act simply prohibited the killing of a baby born alive. To address the concerns of pro-choice lawmakers, the bill included language that said nothing "shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand or contract any legal status or legal right" of the baby. In other words, the bill wasn't intruding on Roe v. Wade.

Who would oppose a bill that said you couldn't kill a baby who was born? Not Kennedy, Boxer or Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not even the hard-core National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Obama, however, is another story. The year after the Born Alive Infants Protection Act became federal law in 2002, identical language was considered in a committee of the Illinois Senate. It was defeated with the committee's chairman, Obama, leading the opposition.

Let's be clear about what Obama did, once in 2003 and twice before that. He effectively voted for infanticide. He voted to allow doctors to deny medically appropriate treatment or, worse yet, actively kill a completely delivered living baby.

Arguably, one of the ways in which a president can most influence the abortion issue is through the appointment of Supreme Court Justices and lower court judges. It’s quite likely that the next president will appoint 3 or 4 justices to the Supreme Court--and possibly even as many as 6. So, what kind of justices would Obama appoint? Here’s an excerpt from an article by Jennifer Rubin--the first paragraph is Obama himself speaking, the second is some analysis from the article:

Now there’s going to be those 5 percent of cases or 1 percent of cases where the law isn’t clear. And the judge then has to bring in his or her own perspectives, his ethics, his or her moral bearings. And in those
circumstances, what I do want is a judge who is sympathetic enough to those who are on the outside, those who are vulnerable, those who are powerless, those who can’t have access to political power and as a consequence can’t protect themselves from being -- from being dealt with sometimes unfairly. That the courts become a refuge for justice. That’s been its historic role. That was its role in Brown v. Board of Education.

Steven Calabresi, professor of law at Northwestern University and co-founder of the Federalist Society (who also serves on John McCain’s legal advisory committee), says “I think it means he has completely the wrong idea of what a judge is supposed to do.” He notes that since the first Congress all judges have taken an oath to “do equal justice unto the rich and the poor,” but, by asking judges in essence to side with the less well off, Obama is “calling on judges to disregard this.”

If you’re a pro-life conservative, you probably think that unborn children are exactly the kind of vulnerable, powerless people a judge should protect--but you also recognize that the sort of liberal judge being described here doesn’t think that unborn children, even those old enough to survive outside the womb, are people.

By now you should be getting the idea that Obama is, as columnist Amanda Carpenter put it, “more pro-choice than NARAL.” So just one final quote, from an article about an Obama campaign stop during the Pennsylvania primary:

And now Obama has oddly claimed that he would not want his daughters to be "punished with a baby" because of a crisis pregnancy -- hardly a welcoming attitude toward new life.

Granted, virtually no one wants their child to experience a teenage pregnancy. But the phrase “punished with a baby” seems to me to betray a rather negative view of the miracle of life.

Check back in a couple of days for a look at John McCain's pro-life record.