Posted on 09/08/2008 5:17:29 PM PDT by rhema
During a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania last March, Senator Barack Obama was asked about teenagers and sexually transmitted diseases.
He replied that “the most important prevention is education," including “information about contraception." Then he added: “Look, I've got two daughters - 9 years old and 6 years old. I'm going to teach them first of all about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at the age of 16."
If Obama had deliberately set out to appall antiabortion voters, he couldn't have uttered four words more jarring than “punished with a baby." The equation of any new child with punishment set teeth on edge, and Obama's campaign quickly issued a clarification. The candidate, a loving father of two, believes that “children are miracles," it said; he only meant to underscore the importance of reducing teen pregnancy. But Obama's unscripted words needed no clarifying. They tartly encapsulated the extreme position on “choice” he has staked out in his career.
What brings Obama's revealing turn of phrase to mind, of course, is the pregnancy of Governor Sarah Palin's unmarried 17-year-old daughter.
"Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned," Palin and her husband announced in a statement. “We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support. Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family."
Granted, Obama was engaging in a hypothetical speculation, while the Palins were dealing with a real-life family challenge. Still, what a contrast! To the Democratic nominee, a teenage daughter's unforeseen baby is a punishment to be prevented; to the Republican Veep-designee, it is a blessing to be embraced.
The polarity of the candidates’ reactions would be arresting even if these incidents stood alone. But in both cases they reinforce the record each campaign brings to the emotional question of life in the womb. This is hardly the first presidential campaign to pit an antiabortion Republican ticket against pro-choice Democrats. Never before, however, has the difference been so stark.
Obama advocates abortion rights even more sweeping than those enacted under Roe v. Wade. “The first thing I'd do as president," he assured the Planned Parenthood Action Fund last year, “is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." The measure would not only codify Roe, it would eliminate even restrictions on abortion that the Supreme Court has allowed - the federal ban on government funding of abortion, for example, or the law prohibiting partial-birth abortion.
During last month's forum at the Saddleback Church, Obama was asked when “a baby gets human rights." He fudged: “Answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade." But there is nothing hesitant about Obama's abortion stance. As an Illinois lawmaker, he opposed a bill making it clear that premature babies born alive after surviving a failed abortion must be protected and cannot be killed or simply left to die. Even after virtually identical legislation -- the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002 -- passed unanimously in the US House and Senate, Obama continued to oppose the state version. On abortion, no presidential candidate has ever been so extreme.
And when has a Republican ticket ever been so unabashedly antiabortion? Senator John McCain, long one of the Senate's reliably antiabortion votes, is a father of seven, including an adopted orphan from Bangladesh. His running mate lacks McCain's voting record, yet her bona fides are even more impressive: When Palin and her husband learned last winter that she was carrying a baby with Down syndrome, they never considered not having him. More than 90 percent of pregnant American women in the same position choose abortion. Palin chose life.
"We understand that every innocent life has wonderful potential," she said a few days after Trig Paxson Van Palin was born in April. “I'm looking at him right now, and I see perfection."
Ambiguities may muddle the 2008 campaign, but not when it comes to abortion. The next president and vice president will be the most pro-choice in US history. Or the most pro-life.
“but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16.”
What happened to cause and effect, wrong choices and logical consequences? To me, this is the fundamental problem with the left’s arguments.
Let's keep it that way.
“The next president and vice president will be the most pro-choice in US history. Or the most pro-life.”
And it’s not likely to matter. The end of prenatal infanticide will come in this country. But not as a result of anything the politicians or judges do.
I never knew this. I guess he didn't want to play that card.
Can someone verify if the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002 was put forward because a Down Syndrome baby was left to die after an abortion?
A Supreme Court (with one or two McCain-appointed justices) that overturned Roe would send the decisions about abortion back to the states, where things could change rapidly.
Roe's overdue to be trashed. It's so laughably unconstitutional, even pro-choice legal scholars deride Blackmun's feeble reasoning:
"One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found." Laurence H. Tribe, "The Supreme Court, 1972 Term--Foreword: Toward a Model of Roles in the Due Process of Life and Law," 87 Harvard Law Review 1, 7 (1973).
"As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe's author like a grandfather." Edward Lazarus, (former clerk to Harry Blackmun) "The Lingering Problems with Roe v. Wade, and Why the Recent Senate Hearings on Michael McConnell's Nomination Only Underlined Them," FindLaw Legal Commentary, Oct. 3, 2002
"Blackmun's [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference." William Saletan, "Unbecoming Justice Blackmun," Legal Affairs, May/June 2005.
"What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-à-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it. . . . At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking." John Hart Ely, "The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade," 82 Yale Law Journal 920, 935-937 (1973).
Abortion is a cancer on this nation. I believe in choice, a person should be able to choose what kind of birth control to use. This is where Planned Parenthood fails they don't emphasize contraception. Instead they target, the poor, blacks, and teens to fill their abortion mill. Ideally a couple would choose what birth control they are going to use. Too often the woman is left holding the bag. Sadly many don't take the responsibility of birth control and then want a do over in the form of an abortion.
I understand why Democrats fought a ban on partial birth abortions. Someone once told me they were rare. I was researching how rare they were and read what they actually are. I was appalled and shocked actually. It is a grisly procedure and it is undeniably a baby that is murdered. I decided that there isn't much difference between that stage and an earlier stage. Democrats are worried this will put a majority of people on the slippery slope of thinking. If that happens then they will lose this issue.
indeed, should we win in 60 days I think we at least have a grand shot at vacating Roe...that is a great start and will reduce abortions a lot
Barack Soetoro Obama is a far more radical pro-choice candidate than he is trying to portray. Obama has a history of defending infanticide and he tried to conceal it at the Saddleback forum. And he’s still trying to divert attention form his deception.
When Barack Obama made his famous, flippant remark of ‘above my pay grade’, it came after he had skillfully changed the focus of Rick Warren actual question.
When one watches the video, it is clear that Pastor Warren asked, "At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?" Rick didn't ask about a fetus, he asked about a baby, the name given a born infant! Obama changed the focus to create a confusion he assumed would give him wiggle room. But why?
While Barack Obama was in the Illinois legislature, on three separate occasions he worked hard to prevent a bill to come into law that would extend medical attention to infants already born as survivors of abortion attempt. The reality is that abortionists had begun causing premature births to terminate pregnancies.
Instead of killing alive children in the womb, then delivering the corpse, abortionists were causing premature births and leaving the little struggling babies to die unattended, alone. Yes that’s ghoulish, but it is what was happening all over the nation at the time Obama worked to prevent laws from being passed that would force medical attention for the preemies! But why would abortionists do such a cold thing?
There are several reasons, not the least of which is th efetal tissue industry which pays top dollar for pristine baby parts, the sort of parts resulting from allowing a whole alive premature infant to die unattended after being purposely delivered prematurely.
It is also less dangerous to the female from whose body the baby is delivered because no sharp instruments are used to stab into the alive partially born baby’s skull to suck out their brains. And no extremely concentrated salt solution is put into the female’s body to kill the alive unborn child. And no dismemberment is done to the alive unborn child in order to remove them piece by piece from the female’s body, risking some portion being left inside to cause ‘complications’.
Killing alive unborn children in females’ bodies is bad enough, but Barack Obama went even further, to defend the killing via neglect of alive BORN children. It is downright ghoulish that he is proud of that record and is still trying to spin his deceit in the Saddleback interview.
More specifically to you: the abortionists were using a method to kill the alive unborn which amounted to death by neglect, purposely causing premature delivery then leaving the little ones to struggle and die from inattention, alone. It was a national phenomenon that was being addressed. Do a google search on Rep Bob Smith, from I think New Hampshire. He raised this issue in the U.S. House years ago, long before an Infants protection act.
Blackmun had to ignore an earlier federal ruling which recognized the humanity/ personhood of the unborn {Steinberg v Green ? 1970] in order to fabricate this demonically inspired Roe decision which purposely dehumanized the alive unborn.
How many actually know what ‘partial birth’ abortion is?
(don’t look if you’re faint of heart)
http://aggreen.net/pro-life/par_abor.html
How many know how obsessed this monster is with it? How many times he voting against banning it- and how many times he voted against a bill to help those babies who survived a botched abortion?
(instead of shelving them in a dirty utility room to die)
If the general public knew all these things, he would lose plenty of votes.
.
The thing to remember is, the purposely forcing premature birth, without trying to kill the alive child while in the woman’s body, was becoming a more fashionable way to kill the little ones. It was not so much to extend medical help to children prematurely delivered after a botched abortion, it was that the murderers had found a new way to insure dead babies via purposeful premature deliveries then neglecting these infants to struggle alone and die THEN harvest pristine tissues for profits!
While there is undeniably a clear differerence in what the candiates say now, McCain has changed his tune since 1999:
“But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations.”
See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/mccain082499.htm
Is this another Myth Romney thing: I say I’m pro-life because it is what will get me elected? Does anyone know when he changed his view?
The more McCain talks, the less I trust him on anything.
thanks for the info and sites-I have to do some reading!
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