By Dave Andrusko
As you read earlier today, President Obama made clear in unequivocal language Wednesday that he will veto a bill that provides protection for babies who are born alive during late abortions – because he thinks the bill (HR 3504) “would likely have a chilling effect” on access to late abortions .
I mistakenly went to the whitehouse.gov. website to find Obama’s veto threat (it was actually on the webpage of the Office of Management and Budget). But when I put in “Born Alive,” there was a link to 2002, the administration of pro-life President George W. Bush.
There you read, “The Administration strongly supports enactment of H.R. 2175, a bill that would ensure that infants who are born alive, at any stage of development, are individual human beings who are entitled to the full protections of the law.”
The law that subsequently passed said that “every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development” is a ‘person’ for all federal law purposes.” The 2002 law defines “born alive” in terms of traditional criteria – the presence of a beating heart, respiration, or definite movement of voluntary muscles. Note: This law passed Congress without a dissenting vote.
Moral of the story? Elections do matter.
Should we be surprised by President Obama’s heartless response? In one [limited] sense, yes.
The president of the United States is so wedded to unfettered abortion that should a baby survive an abortion, he would stand athwart a bill requiring an abortionist to afford “the same degree” of care that would apply “to any other child born alive at the same gestational age,” including transportation to a hospital.
This is astonishing. But maybe it isn’t, given the president’s track record.
By that I do not mean only his arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder relationship with Planned Parenthood, although that certainly is important and explains a lot.
There is also Obama’s opposition, as an Illinois state senator, to recognizing babies born alive during abortions as legal persons. (A 2008 NRLC “white paper” examined this is great detail here.)
That notwithstanding, when running for president in 2008, Obama insisted that if he’d been in the U.S. Senate in 2002, he too would have voted for this law – that is, he would have voted to recognize every born-alive baby as a “person,” whether before or after the point of “viability” (“at any stage of development”).
“So now we know – President Obama agreed that these born-alive babies are legal persons — but he is also fine with allowing them to be killed because, gee whiz, to forbid killing them might ‘chill’ the availability of late abortions,” said Douglas Johnson, NRLC legislative director.
Is the law needed? To quote from NRLC’s statement
There is substantial evidence that some abortion providers do not treat such born-alive infants as legally protected persons, and although in theory they are protected by state homicide laws, enforcement of such laws in the abortion context is rare. Longstanding concerns about the fate of infants born alive during abortions have been revived by troubling passages in the hidden-camera videos released by the Center for Medical Progress, some of which were cited by NRLC General Counsel James Bopp, Jr., during his September 9 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.
Pro-abortion apologists, such as Laura Bassett of the Huffington Post, maneuver around what has and is taking place. She wrote “there is no documented evidence of legal, regulated abortion clinics slaughtering newborns.”
This artful language is to get around the reality that abortionist Kermit Gosnell killed an untold number of babies born alive. He is serving three consecutive life sentences for murdering (“slaughtering”?) three of them by severing their spinal cords.
But HR 3504 is not only about deliberating killing the baby. It’s also about neglect–wanton neglect. The bill requires that babies born alive during abortions are treated in the same manner as those who are spontaneously born prematurely, which does not require futile measures nor dictate bona fide medical judgments.
But it is likely that President Obama is a charter subscriber to the ultra-cynical worldview of Planned Parenthood.
In a memo about how to oppose HR 3504, The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, Planned Parenthood encouraged House Democrats to assert that “This bill would interfere with the sacred doctor-patient relationship and substitute a physician’s best judgment with that of a group of politicians.”
“The sacred doctor-patient relationship”! You kill a live born baby on the table or shove the child off in a corner somewhere to die, alone and unattended.
To any morally sentient human being on this or any other planet, this is not “sacred,” but diabolical.
No wonder it is the default position of Barack Obama and Planned Parenthood. The question is how many other Democrats will join them.
To quote Mr. Johnson,
Congressional Democrats who follow the president into this extreme territory will have many future opportunities to try to explain why they voted against making it a crime to snip the spine of a born-alive baby, or to harvest that baby’s liver while her heart still beats.”