Sunday, June 29, 2008

Obama used Partial Birth procedure to eliminate the possibility of Partial Birth survivors

Here's a VFR discussion that I've been following with interest the last couple of days. LA's parenthetical note at the top of the entry pretty much sums up what the discussion entails. But there are a couple of things that I should like to point out. First, in Brandon F.'s initial reply to the article, he states the following:

According to this, while in the Illinois Senate Obama voted against a bill that required health care professionals to give care to babies born alive when a partial birth abortion went "wrong". [emphasis added] So if mommy wants the baby dead, the baby dies no matter what. That is beyond despicable, it's pure evil. McCain might be an irascible gremlin but I don't think he has ever exhibited such moral depravity in his legislative career.

But later on in the discussion Stephen R. puts Obama's position on abortion in these terms:

You wrote:

"As for Obama's vote, how many thousands of Democrats in state legislatures, how many Democrats in the U.S. Congress, have taken similar stands?"

I would like to know the answer to that question, but it must be publicized that it was only because of Barack Obama that a bill to save born alive babies did not make it out of committee in Illinois. [emphasis added]

In 2003 a committee member sponsored an amendment that would adopt the exact same language in Illinois's proposed BAIPA (Born Alive) bill that U.S. Sen. Boxer was satisfied did not curtail any abortion rights in the federal BAIPA. But as chairman, Obama unilaterally killed the bill by never allowing a committee vote, thereby preventing it from being voted on by the full Senate and becoming law. And in 2001 Obama was the only senator to speak against a bill, arguing that extending life protection to any 'preterm babies' could jeopardize abortion rights.

I much appreciate your insights about how this issue relates to the unprincipled exception, but Obama should not get away with being an order of magnitude more malevolent than the average pro-abortion rights person.

At some point in reading the discussion I realized that Brandon's initial complaint had to do with Obama's position on partial birth abortions "gone wrong." This caused me to wonder whether Obama's position might be that saving, or attempting to save infants who'd somehow managed to survive the horrible procedure of partial birth abortion which had "gone wrong", would be the greater evil.

When we consider what partial birth abortion actually is, difficult and painful as this must be for anyone possessing anything close to common morals, then this should give us some indication as to what a survivor of partial birth abortion gone wrong would be generally. But according to Stephen's account, Obama was solely responsible for killing a bill intended to save "born alive" babies. A "born alive" baby I would take to mean a baby who may or may not have been mutilated by the awful procedure of partial birth abortion. So according to Stephen's wording, there seems to be no distinction made between a survivor of partial birth abortion initiated but gone wrong, and a born alive baby who it was intended would be aborted by partial birth procedure but which, for whatever reason, avoided the mutilation of partial birth abortion altogether. In other words, a healthy viable normal baby born whole and complete and unmutilated despite its mother's and the doctor's intent to murder it half born.

Is this the way it is; is there no distinction made between a doctor mutilated born alive baby and an unmutilated born alive baby? Is this what Brandon meant when he said that "if mommy wants the baby dead, it dies no matter what?" Is this the reality of Obama's position?

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