|
By Douglas Johnson NRLC Legislative Director WASHINGTON (August 18, 2008, Noon)
-- Senator Barack Obama's four-year effort to cover up his full
role in killing legislation to protect born-alive survivors of abortions
continues to unravel. In the most recent developments, Senator
Obama himself, in a video recorded interview Saturday night with David Brody
of CBN News (subsequently broadcast on both CBN and CNN), said three
times that National Right to Life was "lying" in asserting that he
had voted against a state bill virtually identical to the federal Born-Alive
Infants Protection Act. He did not directly address newly uncovered
documents that had been released by NRLC on August 11 -- documents
that proved that he had done exactly that, contradicting four years of
the Obama cover story. In response, on Sunday, August 17th, we issued a challenge to Obama to either declare the newly discovered documents to be forgeries and call for an investigation of the forgery, or admit that he had misrepresented his record on the live-born infants legislation (not just once, but for four years), and apologize to those he's called liars.
Here is a summary of what came before: In Congress, from 2000-2002, while Barack Obama was still a
state senator in See http://www.nrlc.org/Federal/Born_Alive_Infants/NARALonlive-born.pdf Nevertheless, the vast majority of "pro-choice" House
members -- including hard-core pro-abortion leaders such as Jerrold Nadler --
were unwilling to extend the principles of Roe to living babies entirely
separate from their mothers. They rejected the NARAL claim and voted
for the bill; it passed the House 380-15. (Nothing like that had ever
happened to NARAL before.) But the bill was killed in the
Senate by an objection to unanimous consent. In 2001, in Obama voted against this bill in committee. On the floor
he gave a speech attacking it and a couple of other related bills (the
only such speech by any senator). Although the speech was technically
made during consideration of another bill, SB 1093, Obama said that his
reasons applied to SB 1095 (the BAIPA) as well. He then voted
"present." Voting "present" was a tactic recommended by
the local Planned Parenthood lobbyist; under an The core of Obama's speech was the same as the 2000 NARAL attack
at the federal level -- the bill violated Roe v. Wade because it applied to
"a pre-viable fetus." Here is what he said: “Number one, whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that
is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the
Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons
that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a -–
a child, a nine-month-old –- child that was delivered to term. That
determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid
abortions to take place. I mean, it –- it would essentially bar
abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to
kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion
statute.” It did not seem to matter to Obama in 2001 (or to
NARAL, in 2000) that the "fetuses" (sic) in question were entirely
born and alive. Because, you see, they were "pre-viable,"
and these were abortions. The 2001 bill passed the Illinois Senate despite Obama's objections, but died in a House committee. In But in On The very next year, the cover up began. 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." Obama's explanation was false, but the local newspapers
did not uncover the 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 and a lie, 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 On On or about August 14, the Obama campaign submitted to
Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune a "defense," which on August 14 was
posted on Zorn's blog, which mostly repeated the old Obama line
and which did not specifically reference the documents released by NRLC, but
which did contain a new element: a purported side-by-side
comparison of the state and federal BAIPAs. The comparison asserted
that the "immediate protection clause" was still part of the bill
that Obama voted against (it was not -- but why would that clause
bother him?), and asserted that the "neutrality
clause" was merely a "failed amendment, not included in final
legislation" (false - it was adopted 10-0). The posting also
contained many diversionary provisions -- references to an entirely different
bill, misleading characterizations of an old, loophole-ridden On August 16, in a short interview with CBN News's David Brody, Obama was asked about the growing controversy surrounding the National Right to Life release. In his response, Obama asserted three times that we were "lying." See it here: http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/429328.aspx Late on August 17, the New York Sun posted a story by staff political reporter Russell Berman, which said in part: "Indeed, Mr. Obama appeared to misstate his position in the CBN interview on Saturday when he said the federal version he supported 'was not the bill that was presented at the state level.' His campaign yesterday acknowledged that he had voted against an identical bill in the state Senate . . ." The campaign then tried to shift to a new objection to the
"identical bill" -- that it "could have undermined existing Nor does the Sun story indicate that the Obama campaign has issued any apology to NRLC, Bill Bennett, or the others who Senator Obama and his campaign have been calling liars for saying what they now admit was the truth. How to make sense of all this? All of Obama's misrepresentations and contradictions on this issue have one common goal: to obscure the position he actually articulated and acted on in 2001 through 2003. Obama explained in 2001 that he opposed the state bill to protect born-alive infants because it would apply before the point of long-term survivability -- so-called 'viability.' This is the same objection that NARAL originally voiced to the federal bill, in 2000. But that was exactly the point of the bill -- to make it clear that a live-born baby was a legally protected person for as long as he or she lived, whether for a day, an hour, or a minute. Neither the original version of the legislation, nor the final state version that Obama killed in 2003, contained any language to protect babies before the point of live birth. On the 2001 and 2002 state bills, Obama took to a position that already had been rejected by the U.S. House 380-15 (in 2000). In 2003, Obama took a position on the abortion-survivor legislation that was more extreme than any member of Congress of either party. The
Obama campaign and its apologists are now asserting that the state Born-Alive
Infants Protection bill was part of a "package" of bills.
This is an obvious attempt to change the subject and avoid prolonged scrutiny
of Obama's record on the sole bill that has been the focus of the national
debate, that being the bill that was copied from the federal bill. In
2001-2003, there were various bills in the Illinois Senate that dealt with the
procedures to be followed during very late abortions, but those bills each
had separate numbers, were each subject to separate amending processes, and
were (of course) each voted on separately. The 2003 Illinois Born-Alive
Infants Protection bill (SB 1082) could have been passed regardless of what
happened to the various abortion bills -- and SB 1082 would have passed the
Illinois Senate in 2003, if Chairman Obama had not killed it in his
committee. The Obama of 2001-2003 really did object to a bill merely because it defended the proposition, "A live child born as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law." And it is that reality that he now desperately wants to conceal from the eyes of the public. Douglas Johnson Additional Resources: The full
text of the Born-Alive Infants Protection bill that Obama killed on March 13,
2003 "Obama Cover-up Revealed On Born-Alive Abortion
Survivors Bill" ( Timeline of
important events in the history of the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection
Act NRLC
archive on the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act The official report
of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives,
explaining the intent of the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (H.R. 2175),
and explaining why such legislation was necessary (August 2, 2001) To return to the TRL Home Page, click here. |
