New evidence has surfaced this week that the junior senator from Illinois has been misrepresenting his voting record on the Illinois Born Alive Infants Protection Act.
New Evidence Shows Obama Cover-up on BAIPA
Our good friend Jill Stanek writes:
Last week Doug Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee drew my attention to a previously unnoticed January 2008 article by Terence Jeffrey stating Barack Obama actually did vote against a version of the IL Born Alive Infants Protection Act that was identical to the federal version, contrary to multiple public statements Obama or his surrogates have made to rationalize his opposition to the IL bill for the past 4 years.
Since then we have found 2 separate documents proving Barack Obama has been misrepresenting facts.
National Right to Life Committee spokesman Douglas Johnson summarized the findings:
Newly obtained documents prove that in 2003, Barack Obama, as chairman of an IL state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion – 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. The bill Obama killed was virtually identical to the federal bill that even NARAL ultimately did not oppose.
Stanek comments:
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, 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 August 7, 2008.
The Obama “cover story” has often been repeated as fact, or at least without challenge, in major organs of the news media.
NRLC and other pro-life observers have always regarded Obama’s “defense” as contrived, since the original two-paragraph BAIPA on its face applied only after a live birth; the “neutrality clause” added in 2001 merely made this explicit, and therefore the new clause did not change the substance of the original bill.
Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who supported the bill, and who described himself as “as pro-choice as anybody on Earth,” argued that under his understanding of Roe “if an abortion is performed, or a natural birth occurred, at any age, [even] three months, and the product of that was living outside the mother, and somebody came and shot him, I don’t think there’s any doubt that person would be prosecuted for murder.”
When the original bill – with no “neutrality clause” – came up on the House floor on September 26, 2000, it passed 380-15.
These facts should give pause to those who have unskeptically accepted Obama’s claim that the IL BAIPA bills that he opposed in 2001 and 2002, which were modeled on the original federal BAIPA, were crafted to attack Roe v. Wade.
For the moment we can set that debate aside, however, for this reason: Documents obtained by NRLC now demonstrate conclusively that Obama’s entire defense is based on a brazen factual misrepresentation.
New York Abortion Rate Sky High; Officials Call for More Contraception
In other news, an article in Crain’s New York Business reports that in New York, 72 babies are killed by abortion for every 100 live births—a rate three times greater than the national average of 24 abortions for every 100 live births.
Lest we forget, New York State last year rejected federal abstinence funding. And, not to be outdone by the bureaucrats in Albany, the powers that be in New York City itself also last year sponsored a campaign to distribute 26 million free condoms (to both adults and kids)—which drew a strong rebuke by Edward Cardinal Egan and Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio.
It’s also worth noting that New York state currently offers free or low-cost contraception through 59 taxpayer-funded programs at over 200 sites, most of which are in the five boroughs.
And so, what does Deborah Kaplan, deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, say is the answer?
Why, more contraception, of course: ‘If we improved access to contraceptives, there would be a reduction in abortion.’
Ah, yes—the Bullwinkle Approach.
Some people never learn.
It seems the tired old talking point of, ‘More contraception = less abortion’ just refuses to die—despite the fact that even intellectually honest so-called ‘pro-choice’ advocates (like Rutgers sociobiologist Dr. Lionel Tiger, who spoke at our Contraception Is Not the Answer conference two years ago) acknowledge that contraception contributes to more abortion, not less.
On this subject, Mary Eberstadt, writing in the current issue of First Things (in an article titled ‘The Vindication of Humanae Vitae’) ably demonstrates that some of the clearest and most current confirmations of Pope Paul VI’s predictions made about contraception 40 years ago have come from secular researchers (like Tiger) who don’t necessarily have a problem with contraception from a moral standpoint, but are simply reading the handwriting on the wall.
So if New York City decides to throw more condoms at the problem, don’t expect the abortion rate to fall any time soon.
