PrintOctober 19, 2008
Obama's other Big Lie in the Debate
When he was a state senator Barack Obama voted three times against the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (IBAIPA). He has claimed over and over again that the reason he voted against IBAIPA was because the bill was unnecessary -- that then existing law already protected the babies' lives. He said as much in the last presidential debate. He is lying.
In an excellent article in Public Discourse, by Robert George and Yuval Levin, the truth behind Obama's tireless efforts to stop passage of the IBAIPA is told:
Obama's case against the bill did not revolve around existing state law, as he seemed to suggest last night. The law Obama referred to in the debate was the Illinois abortion statute enacted in 1975. But at the time of the debate about the Born Alive Act, the Illinois Attorney General had publicly stated that he could not prosecute incidents such as those reported by nurses at Christ Hospital in Chicago and elsewhere (including a baby left to die in a soiled linen closet) because the 1975 law was inadequate. It only protected ''viable'' infants-and left the determination of viability up to the ''medical judgment'' of the abortionist who had just failed to kill the baby in the womb. This provision of the law weakened the hand of prosecutors to the vanishing point. That is why the Born Alive Act was necessary-and everybody knew it.
Why did Obama really oppose this bill to save the lives of newborn infants? The new law would have required the consultation of an objective physician, not the abortionist, to determine treatment of a baby born alive after an attempted abortion. When he debated against the bill on the floor of the Illinois State Senate Obama, for once, told the truth. Obama stated he did not want to see these babies given objective medical consultation and care because this could:
"burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.''
That's right. Obama argued that a little thing like the life of a newborn child shouldn't stand between the decision of the woman and the doctor to kill the baby -- whether that baby was inside of the womb ... or not! (Remember, we are talking, not about a fetus, but about a human being independently existing outside of the mother's womb.)
Here is a little off teleprompter quote from Obama during that senate debate on what he really thought about a helpless newborn baby: He stuttered:
"nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child -- however way you want to describe it"... "let's say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they're not just coming out limp and dead."
As a state senator, Obama voted three times to deny newborn infants a fighting chance at life. There is no other way to honestly describe this portion of Obama's record: These were votes for infanticide.
