New Documents: Barack Obama Misrepresented Support for Abortion-Infanticide
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 11, 2008
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — When Barack Obama opposed a bill to stop infanticide as a member of the Illinois legislature, he said he did so because it reportedly contained language that would have contravened the Roe v. Wade decision. However, new legislative documents show Obama has misrepresented his position.
Obama, as a member of the Illinois Senate, opposed a state version of the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, a measure that would make sure babies who survive abortions are given proper medical care.
It also protected babies who were "aborted" through a purposeful premature birth and left to die afterwards.
On the federal level, pro-abortion groups withdrew their opposition to the bill after a section was added making sure it did not affect the status of legal abortions in the United States. Ultimately, the bill was approved on a unanimous voice vote with even leading pro-abortion lawmakers like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry backing it.
When Obama was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, his opponent criticized him for supporting infanticide by voting against the Illinois version of the bill.
Obama countered this charge by claiming that he had opposed the state bill because it lacked the neutrality clause found in the federal version.
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."
During Obama’s 2008 run for President, he has repeated those claims.
Now, documents obtained by the National Right to Life Committee show Obama’s claim that he would have voted for the bill had it been Roe-neutral is a false argument.
According to the documents from the Illinois legislature, Obama, as the chairman of the Illinois state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, presided over a committee meeting concerning neutrality language that was an exact duplicate of the clause in the federal bill.
During the March 2003 committee, Obama voted in support of adding the neutrality clause, but then led his colleagues on the panel in voting down the anti-infanticide bill on a 6-4 vote.
"Barack Obama, as chairman of an Illinois state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion," NRLC legislative director Douglas Johnson told LifeNews.com.
Johnson said Obama did so "even after the panel had amended the bill to contain verbatim language, copied from a federal bill passed by Congress without objection in 2002, explicitly foreclosing any impact on abortion."
"Obama’s legislative actions in 2003 — denying effective protection even to babies born alive during abortions — were contrary to the position taken on the same language by even the most liberal members of Congress," Johnson continued.
"The bill Obama killed was virtually identical to the federal bill that even NARAL ultimately did not oppose," he concluded.
Related web sites:
National Right to Life – https://www.nrlc.org
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