When Obama Voted For Infanticide By
Andrew C. McCarthy February 9, 2012 5:20 P.M. Comments 28
Peter has beaten me to the punch. What I personally find most offensive about the HHS mandate is the shock with which it has been met. Why? This is who Barack Obama is. There is no reason to be surprised by this. He is not being pulled to extremes by his base —
he is the one doing the pulling.
Obama’s abortion extremism is such that, as a state legislator, he opposed protection for — I’ll use his words here — “that fetus, or child — however way you want to say describe it” when, contrary to the wishes of the women involved and their abortionists, there was “movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead.” Babies were inconveniently being born alive, self-styled
health-care providers carted them off to utility rooms where they would be left to die. That is infanticide, plain and simple. In Illinois, people tried to stop this barbarism by supporting “born alive” legislation. Barack Obama fought them all the way.
That is not a secret. The Obamedia, of course, refused to cover it while they were running down Sarah Palin’s third-grade report card. The clueless John McCain failed to bring any attention to it. But it was far from unknown. I wrote about it in August 2008, and I was far from alone — at least among conservatives. My column was called, “Why Obama Really Voted For Infanticide: More important to protect abortion doctors than ‘that fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it’”:
There wasn’t any question about what was happening. The abortions were going wrong. The babies weren’t cooperating. They wouldn’t die as planned. Or, as Illinois state senator Barack Obama so touchingly put it, there was “movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead.”
No, Senator. They wouldn’t go along with the program. They wouldn’t just come out limp and dead.
They were coming out alive. Born alive. Babies. Vulnerable human beings Obama, in his detached pomposity, might otherwise include among “the least of my brothers.” But of course, an abortion extremist can’t very well be invoking Saint Matthew, can he? So, for Obama, the shunning of these least of our brothers and sisters — millions of them — is somehow not among America’s greatest moral failings.
No. In Obama’s hardball, hard-Left world, these least become “that fetus, or child — however you want to describe it.”
Most of us, of course, opt for “child,” particularly when the “it” is born and living and breathing and in need of our help. Particularly when the “it” is clinging not to guns or religion but to life.
But not Barack Obama. As an Illinois state senator, he voted to permit infanticide. And now, running for president, he banks on media adulation to insulate him from his past.
The record, however, doesn’t lie.
>Infanticide is a bracing word. But in this context, it’s the only word that fits. Obama heard the testimony of a nurse, Jill Stanek. She recounted how she’d spent 45 minutes holding a living baby left to die.
The child had lacked the good grace to expire as planned in an induced-labor abortion — one in which an abortionist artificially induces labor with the expectation that the underdeveloped “fetus, or child — however you want to describe it” will not survive the delivery.
Stanek encountered another nurse carrying the child to a “soiled utility room” where it would be left to die. It wasn’t that unusual. The induced-labor method was used for late-term abortions. Many of the babies were strong enough to survive the delivery. At least for a time.
So something had to be done with them. They couldn’t be left out in the open, struggling in the presence of fellow human beings. After all, those fellow human beings — health-care providers— would then be forced to confront the inconvenient question of why they were standing idly by. That would hold a mirror up to the whole grisly business.
Better the utility room. Alone, out of sight and out of mind. Next case.
Stanek’s account enraged the public and shamed into silence most of the country’s staunchest pro-abortion activists. Most, not all. Not Barack Obama.
My friend Hadley Arkes ingeniously argued that legislatures, including Congress, should take up “Born Alive” legislation: laws making explicit what decency already made undeniable: that from the moment of birth — from the moment one is expelled or extracted alive from the birth canal — a human being is entitled to all the protections the law accords to living persons.
Such laws were enacted by overwhelming margins. In the United States Congress, even such pro-abortion activists as Sen. Barbara Boxer went along.
But not Barack Obama. In the Illinois senate, he opposed Born-Alive tooth and nail.
The shocking extremism of that position — giving infanticide the nod over compassion and life — is profoundly embarrassing to him now. So he has lied about what he did. He has offered various conflicting explanations . . .
There is more
here, including the relevant portion of the legislative record, in which Obama makes his position, and his extremism, crystal clear.
Again, this is not new news. The transcript is from ten years ago. He has done nothing since but confirm — by his positions, speeches, associations, and presidential appointments — that he is still exactly the same guy. Obama’s horrifying stance in favor not only of abortion but of infanticide was known when 54 percent of Catholics and 53 percent of Protestants
supported him for election in 2008, and when such leading Catholic institutions as Notre Dame and Georgetown welcomed him with open arms.
That is what we ought to find shocking. Obama, by contrast, should no longer shock anyone. Obama is simply doing what he came to do; what he said he was going to do when he promised to “fundamentally transform the United States”; and what anyone with a shred of common sense would have predicted he’d do upon scrutinizing his record.
