There's been a lot said about Obama's “Catholic problem.” In polls and in the primaries he has done poorly with the Catholic vote, but also with evangelicals and other people of faith. His belittling of rural folks who cling to their God and their guns certainly didn't help.
But many feel that it's Obama extremism on abortion that really turns the religious and many who aren't so religious off. He isn't "just" pro-choice. There is no one in the U.S. Senate (perhaps in American public life) who is more pro-abortion than Obama. He has opposed all efforts to end partial birth abortions. He fiercely criticized the Supreme Court decision upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortions passed by Congress and signed by the President. 70% of all Americans oppose partial-birth abortions, so as Linda Chavez notes, “Obama’s views put him in a distinct minority.” He has promised that, if elected President, his first act will be to seek to pass a law that will end all restrictions on abortion, including partial-birth-abortions.
If anything, Obama's problem with those who view partial-birth abortion with horror just got worse. Obama, while a state senator in Illinois, singlehandedly blocked a bill which provided that, should a baby be born alive as the result of a failed abortion, all possible steps must be taken to keep the baby alive. This week it was disclosed he has been lying about what he did.
When he was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004 Obama was criticized by his opponent for supporting infanticide. Obama at that time said he had opposed the bill to preserve the lives of babies who survive abortions because it lacked language that was in the federal bill stating the bill did not affect the status of a fetus. Now Illinois state records show that what Obama said was not true.
As an Illinois state legislator Obama actively and vocally opposed the bill – the so-called “Born Alive” legislation. He spoke out against (and/or voted "present" as he often did) the bill in 2001 and 2002 and in 2003 chaired the subcommittee handling the bill and made sure the bill never got out of committee to the floor for a vote, where it was sure to pass. (With Obama out of the Illinois legislature, the bill passed in 2005.)
In 2002, when President Bush signed the similar federal Born Alive Act, it had passed both houses of Congress without a dissenting vote. Even the extreme pro-abortion group NARAL did not oppose the federal bill. But Obama was opposing the Illiinois companion bill at the very same time.
[D]ocuments 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."
For more background on Obama's actions and new disclosures -- which so far the mainstream media continues to cover up, go here, here, here and here. A chronology can be seen here.
The nurse who first testified before Obama at the Illinois legislature about babies born alive after surviving abortion being allowed to die and thrown in the trash is Jill Stanek. To this day she continues the battle.
. Daniel Allott, writing in the Wall Street Journal, asks
If partial-birth abortion is, as Democratic icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan labeled it, "too close to infanticide," then what is killing fully-birthed babies?
UPDATE: Amanda Carpenter adds her thoughts.
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin weighs in.
