In February 2004, US Senate candidate Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, sent a fund-raising letter with the "alarming news" that "right-wing politicians" had passed a law stopping doctors from performing p/b abortions (stabbing half-born babies in the neck with scissors, suctioning out their brains and crushing their skulls).
Michelle Obama considers partial-birth abortion "a legitimate medical procedure," and asked supporters for $150 to attend a luncheon for her candidate husband, b/c he would fight against "cynical ploys" to stop p/b sbortions.
(NOTE: nurses at an Illinois hospital in 1999 discovered babies were being aborted alive and placed on shelves in soiled utility rooms to die unattended.)
BACKGROUND Legislation was presented on the federal level and in various states called the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. It stated all live-born babies were guaranteed the same constitutional right to equal protection, whether or not they were wanted.
BAIPA sailed through the U.S. Senate by unanimous vote. Even Sens. Clinton, Kennedy and Kerry agreed a mother's right to "choose" stopped at her baby's delivery. The bill also passed overwhelmingly in the US House.
NARAL went neutral on it. Abortion enthusiasts publicly agreed that fighting BAIPA would appear extreme. President Bush signed BAIPA into law in 2002.
But in Illinois, the state version of BAIPA repeatedly failed, thanks in large part to then-state Sen. Barack Obama. It only passed in 2005, after Obama left. Obama articulately asserted that legislation protecting live aborted babies might infringe on women's rights or abortionists' rights.
In 2003, as chairman of the next state Senate committee to which BAIPA was sent, Obama stopped it from even getting a hearing, shelving it to die much like babies were still being shelved to die in Illinois hospitals and abortion chambers.
(NOTE As chair of that same committee, state Sen Obama once abruptly ended a hearing early, right before the parents of six children killed as a result of Illinois' drivers licenses-for-bribes scandal, were to testify in favor of Choose Life license plate legislation. Obama stalled. He later killed the bill when no one was around.)