No ‘Hope’ for Born or Unborn in Obama’s Brave New World

Today, NRO exposes the cover-up of Obama’s greatly disturbing record on abortion and infanticide. 

In 2000, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA) was first introduced in Congress.  This was a two-paragraph bill intended to clarify that any baby who is entirely expelled from his or her mother, and who shows any signs of life, is to be regarded as a legal “person” for all federal law purposes, whether or not the baby was born during an attempted abortion.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, as a member of the Illinois State Senate, actively opposed a state version of the BAIPA during three successive regular legislative sessions.  His opposition to the state legislation continued into 2003 — even after NARAL had withdrawn its initial opposition to the federal bill, and after the final federal bill had been enacted in August 2002.

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.”

…

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.

The documents prove that in March 2003, state Senator Obama, then the chairman of the Illinois state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, presided over a committee meeting in which the “neutrality clause” (copied verbatim from the federal bill) was added to the state BAIPA, with Obama voting in support of adding the revision.  Yet, immediately afterwards, Obama led the committee Democrats in voting against the amended bill, and it was killed, 6-4.

The bill that Chairman Obama killed, as amended, was virtually identical to the federal law; the only remaining differences were on minor points of bill-drafting style.  To see the language of the two bills side by side, click here.

Alan Keyes warned us all of this months ago.