Pro-Life Leader Says Obama and Biden Couldn’t Answer Abortion Question
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
November 4, 2008
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — As voters head to the polls today to determine the next president and perhaps the fate of abortion for the next 35 years, a leading pro-life advocate says he’s disappointed that presidential candidate Barack Obama and his running mate Joe Biden couldn’t answer an easy question about abortion.
Father Frank Pavone visited the Washington offices of members of Congress six weeks ago to confront elected officials and their staff about abortion.
Pavone quoted descriptions of how abortion procedures are performed, and using the words of abortion practitioners in their medical textbooks and court testimonies, as well as the words of the US Supreme Court.
He then asked elected officials and their staff, "When you say ‘abortion,’ is this what you mean?"
Pavone tells LifeNews.com that Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden were among a group of senators "who could not bring themselves to answer a simple question."
The head of Priests for Life says he and Dr. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. and someone who accompanied him to Congressional offices, gave the senators six weeks to give a response.
But Pavone says he never heard back from Obama or Biden or their staff about a response.
"To vigorously support the right to choose abortion, as these Senators do, and then to be unable to admit what it is, demonstrates a gross failure either in understanding what they support or in being honest with the American people about it," Pavone said. "In other words, it’s a gross failure of leadership."
In asking about abortion, Pavone cited a quotation from Harlan Raymond Giles, an abortion practitioner who told the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin in 1999 that "the heart of a fetus or embryo" can "still be beating during a suction curettage abortion as the fetus or embryo comes down the cannula."
He also cited sworn testimony from Martin Haskell, an Ohio abortion practitioner, who described a second trimester abortion.
"We would attack the lower part of the lower extremity first, remove, you know, possibly a foot, then the lower leg at the knee and then finally we get to the hip. …Typically the skull is brought out in fragments rather than as a unified piece," Haskell explains.
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