Note from Jeff: Whether you are "Pro-Life" or "Pro-Choice," this issue is really much simpler than many people make it out to be. It all comes down to whether you believe life begins at conception, or only after birth.
If you believe that life only begins after birth, then you must believe that the "fetus" is just tissue, really no different than a tumor. Destroying it and cutting it out has no more impact than having your gall bladder removed. Of course, the fact that is looks and moves like a baby or has the biological makeup of a real baby must be just coincidence or at most an inconvenient fact. At any rate, if you believe this then sure, the mother should be able to "choose" to abort (kill) this inconvenient living tissue inside HER body.
On the other hand, if you believe that life begins at conception, whether created by God or not, then you must acknowledge that HE or SHE is a real, living human being with his or her own body that is dependent on his or her mother's body until they are "born." If you believe this, then you must acknowledge that killing a living human being inside his or her mother's womb is just as wrong as killing a living human being after they are born and out of their mother's womb.
Barack Obama is undecided on whether life begins at conception. He is rated 100% by National Abortion Rights Action League on pro-choice votes in 2005, 2006 & 2007, and rated 0% by the National Right to Life.
He believes the Constitution is a living document and is opposed to strict constructionism, he thinks moral arguments from pro-lifers are counterproductive. He supports Roe v. Wade and will protect a “woman’s right to choose.”
Obama voted NO on defining unborn child as eligible for SCHIP. (Mar 2008)
Obama voted NO on prohibiting minors crossing state lines for abortion. (Mar 2008)
Obama voted against banning partial birth abortion. (Oct 2007)
Obama voted YES on expanding research to more embryonic stem cell lines. (Apr 2007)
Obama voted NO on notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions. (Jul 2006)
Obama Supports Legalized Infanticide
Born Alive Infants Protection Act: Congress heard testimony about babies that had survived attempted late-term abortions. Nurses testified that these preterm living, breathing babies were being thrown into medical waste bins to die or being "terminated" outside the womb. With the baby now completely separated from the mother, it was impossible to argue that the health or life of the mother was in jeopardy by giving her baby appropriate medical treatment.
Who would oppose a bill that said you couldn't kill a baby who was born? Not Kennedy, Boxer or Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not even the hard-core National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Obama, however, is another story. The year after the Born Alive Infants Protection Act became federal law in 2002, identical language was considered in a committee of the Illinois Senate. It was defeated with the committee's chairman, Obama, leading the opposition.
Let's be clear about what Obama did, once in 2003 and twice before that. He effectively voted for infanticide. He voted to allow doctors to deny medically appropriate treatment or, worse yet, actively kill a completely delivered living baby.
Obama Supports Legalized Abortion
Rated 100% by NARAL on pro-choice votes in 2005, 2006 & 2007
Sen. Obama received the following scores on NARAL Pro-Choice America's Congressional Record on Choice.
2007: 100 percent
2006: 100 percent
2005: 100 percent
Source: NARAL voting record, www.ProChoiceAmerica.org Jan 1, 2008
Voted against banning partial birth abortion
Obama's record in Illinois represents that of a pragmatic progressive, who pushed for moderate reforms and opposed right-wing legislation. In the IL legislature, voting "present" is the equivalent of voting "no" because a majority of "yes" votes are required for passage. Many IL legislators use the "present" vote as an evasion on an unpopular choice, so that they can avoid being targeted for voting "no." During the 2004 Democratic primary, an opponent mocked Obama's "present" vote on abortion bills with flyers portraying a rubber duck and the words, "He ducked!".
In 1997, Obama voted against SB 230, which would have turned doctors into felons by banning so-called partial-birth abortion, & against a 2000 bill banning state funding. Although these bills included an exception to save the life of the mother, they didn't include anything about abortions necessary to protect the health of the mother. The legislation defined a fetus as a person, & could have criminalized virtually all abortion.
Source: The Improbable Quest, by John K. Wilson, p.147-148 Oct 30, 2007

Partial Birth Abortion
Terror in the Womb: The Forgotten Victims of 911
On Thursday, September 11, our nation remembers the victims of the terror attacks of seven years ago in New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. Every American remembers where they were when we were attacked, just as we remember where we were when President Ronald Reagan was shot, or when the Challenger space shuttle blew up on take off, and for those of us old enough when JFK was assassinated. On September 11, 2001, I was in Miami, FL driving one of the Center For Bio-Ethical Reform’s (CBR) Reproductive “Choice” Trucks. Just as I was on the phone with local reporte! rs attempting to secure some media coverage of our pro-life billboard truck project, the tragic news came over the radio. I will never forget that day.
I will never forget that fateful day not only because of the devastation it brought to New York and our nation’s capital but because it crystallized in my mind forever the battle to which I have been called. That call is to defend the forgotten victims of terror – America’s unborn children.
Interestingly, more Americans were killed by abortionists on September 11 (about 3,200) than were killed by Islamic terrorists (about 3,000). Assuming 3,000 deaths among the 50,000 people who worked at the World Trade Center, about one in seventeen was killed. One in three unborn babies is killed by abortion every day. On September 11, it would have been six times safer to be a worker in the Twin Towers than it was to be a baby in her mother’s womb.
Why do Americans support the “War on Terror,” but ignore the plight of the unborn?
Why did Americans write big checks to the Red Cross and the United Way, but ignore pro-life organizations which are struggling to raise funds?
Could it be because the press made the victims of September 11 so painfully real? After all, we were shown pictures of the World Trade Center tragedy on television night after night for weeks and months. Grieving relatives were interviewed. Their backgrounds were profiled. The press also made real the horror of the victim’s deaths. The sight of airliners crashing into skyscrapers tortured us. We were sickened by pictures of people jumping from the upper floors. We gasped as the buildings collapsed into rubble. The images were published and broadcast until they became unbearable. Thus was forged a national consensus that, somehow, each of us must fight terrorism, personally, regardless of the cost.
Sadly, no such consensus exists concerning abortion -- even in the church.
The victims of abortion are anonymous. The horror of abortion is invisible. Of course American’s aren’t haunted by abortion. How could they be?
The good news for the forgotten unborn victims of terror is that CBR and others who use the photographic evidence of abortion intend to change all that. Many pro lifers hope to do for the public’s perception of abortion what the media has done for people’s understanding of Muslim terrorism. Abortion pictures have been banned from television, newspapers and magazines but we have airplane photos, truck photos and hand-held signs and we are using them to make abortion as unavoidable as the press made the terror of 9/11.
We continue our Genocide Awareness Project on college campuses, our work with crisis pregnancy centers, our video production endeavors, and Reproductive “Choice” Campaign (RCC).
Kristin Doss, 20, who is pro-life and once briefly considered an abortion, was shocked by the images.
"They think making it graphic is going to change people's minds when, in actuality, it's just making people mad," she said. "If I was thinking about an abortion, it would make me think twice, but it would also make me angry because it is a person's right and doing that is forcing something on someone."
People get angry when pro-lifers show the truth about abortion because they don't want to be bothered. The pro-life movement is losing this struggle precisely because enough people aren’t bothered by abortion. Unlike 9/11, abortion has not exacted enough of an emotional toll on American society. The culture is in massive denial about what abortion is and does.
Also unlike the terror of 9/11, pro-lifers do not have a willing media to help forge a consensus on the terror of abortion. Americans are not angered at the news media for showing the pictures of 9/11 because Americans are not complicit in the deaths of those who perished in the Twin Towers or Pentagon. However, many Americans ARE angered by our images of aborted babies because at least 40 million parents have participated in the killing of an unborn baby. The news media, entertainment media, education establishment, clergy, etc. have suppressed the truth about abortion. Therefore, we must bypass these gatekeepers and take our message directly to our target audience. This is the lesson of historical social reform.
Social reformers have always had to force-feed facts into the heads of people who resist evidence of their own complicity in injustice. The Reproductive “Choice” Campaign and other similar efforts by pro lifers across America will continue to disturb the nation until the stress becomes unendurable. Sooner or later Americans will be forced to come to grips with the victims of abortion.
3000 Americans died on September 11, 2001 by the hands of foreign terrorists to which our nation rightly mourns. Unfortunately, few Americans realize that on the very next day (and everyday since) September 12, 2001 another four thousand Americans died at the hands of domestic terrorists (abortionists) and few if any noticed. Sadly, for these victims of terror there is no day of remembrance.
Obama Lied About Abortion Record
Amanda Carpenter
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Newly discovered documents from the Illinois state archives prove Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has lied about his opposition to legislation requiring health officials to provide care to babies who survived abortion as an Illinois state senator.
Obama has claimed again and again he would have supported his state’s version of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act if it included language to protect abortion rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade and viciously attacked conservative opponents who suggested otherwise. Now there’s documentation showing Obama did vote against a version of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act that contained language to protect abortion rights identical to the bill that passed 98-0 in the U.S. Senate.
“We have a smoking gun committee report,” the National Right to Life Committee’s Legislative Counsel Susan Muskett said. NRLC posted the unearthed documents from the Illinois senate archives Monday.
There’s been much confusion about Obama’s work on this bill, largely due to the Illinois Senate’s method of marking the bill as “held” in the Health and Human Services Committee, when in fact archived reports show it was killed by a 6-4 party line vote. As Chairman of that committee Obama voted in the majority. NCLR has the committee action report of that vote.
The 6-4 vote tally is included in the right hand column of the table. Just before the committee roll call vote was held to kill the bill, however, senators voted to amend the state’s version Born Alive Infant Protection Act to include a “neutrality clause.” That clause was copied from the federal version of the law and was the very language Obama has claimed would have allowed him to support the bill. The amendment passed the committee 10-0 and that vote is recorded in column on the left side of the table.
A copy of that clause is available here.
In essence, Obama voted to successfully amend the bill in a way Obama has said would have enabled him to support it, before he voted against it. Conservative journalist David Freddoso said these documents are “absolute proof” Obama has distorted his position on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. In his new book, “The Case Against Barack Obama” Freddoso painstakingly documented Obama’s votes and committee work against the bill.
“He said he would have voted for that bill if it had been like the federal bill when in fact he voted against it when it was like the federal bill,” Freddoso said. “So he’s been lying about it the whole time.”
Muskett agreed. “He needs to come clean and admit he voted to deny protection to born alive babies who survived an abortion,” she told Townhall in a phone interview.
Not only has Obama distorted his record, but his campaign has viciously attacked critics who accurately described his record.
On June 30, 2008 his campaign accused talk radio host Bill Bennett of making “outright false statements” and smearing Obama on CNN because Bennett said Obama supported a bill that even NARAL Pro-Choice America would not oppose. A “Fact Check” document was published on Obama’s presidential website “on CNN and Bennet’s [sic] Inaccurate Claim That IL ‘Born Alive’ Legislation Obama Opposed Was the Same as Federal Legislation He Supported.”
Obama abortion support exceeds even NARAL's
Records document opposition to protecting born-alive babies
Posted: August 16, 2008
1:00 am Eastern
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
Sen. Barack Obama is more dedicated to abortion at any time for any reason than even the National Abortion Rights Action League, according to documents unveiled by the National Right to Life Committee and publicized by WND columnist Jill Stanek, who also blogs at JillStanek.com.
"He actually did vote on March 13, 2003, in the Senate Health and Human Services Committee to approve the Illinois Born Alive Act, which was the same as the federal law. Then he voted it down," Stanek said. "He is the most pro-abortion senator. … Even NARAL went neutral [on the federal Born Alive Infant Protection Act]."
The Born Alive Infant Protection acts on the state and federal levels provide that infants who do survive abortions should be given necessary medical care and treatment. Stanek has been working to institute such provisions since, as a nurse, she discovered an abortion-surviving infant alive, but relegated to a closet shelf where the child was left to die.
Obama's long reputation for abortion advocacy has been a red flag in his intense efforts to collect support from voters who oppose the idea of partial-birth abortions, which Obama has supported, and who want to protect survivors of abortion procedures. He's often said, and his own website repeats, that he would have supported the Illinois state law protecting those born-alive infants if it had had a "neutrality" clause like the federal law, which states the law specifically is not intended to impact the status of babies before birth.
But Stanek said documentation uncovered by Doug Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee reveals Obama did vote against a version of the Illinois that was the same as the federal law, contrary to what the candidate has stated.
"Since then we have found two separate documents proving Barack Obama has been misrepresenting facts," Stanek wrote. "In fact, Barack Obama is more liberal than any U.S. senator, voting against identical language of a bill that body passed unanimously, 98-0. In fact, Barack Obama condones infanticide."
The following state legislative committee report shows Obama during a 2003 meeting first voted at add a neutrality clause to the state law, but then voted with other Democrats to kill the bill:
 State committee hearing report showing Obama voted to amend state plan with neutrality clause, but then opposed the final project |
"Newly obtained documents prove that in 2003, Barack Obama, as chairman of an [Illinois] state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion – 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. Obama's legislative actions in 2003 – denying effective protection even to babies born alive during abortions – were contrary to the position taken on the same language by even the most liberal members of Congress. The bill Obama killed was virtually identical to the federal bill that even NARAL ultimately did not oppose," Johnson wrote in his report.
He noted that the federal law carries the clause: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being 'born alive' as defined in this section."
"The bill passed without a dissenting vote in either house of Congress," Johnson said.
Meanwhile, Obama opposed a state version of the law three straight legislative sessions, and even continued blocking a state law after NARAL withdrew its initial opposition to the federal plan and after the federal bill was enacted.
As early as 2004 in his run for the U.S. Senate, when accused of supporting infanticide, Obama said he opposed the state law because it lacked the pre-birth neutrality clause.
The Chicago Tribune reported: "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," the newspaper said.
The Obama campaign in June also issued a "factcheck" that asserted the same arguments, and major media outlets have been virtually silent on the discrepancy between the record and the campaign's statements.
Said the NRLC, "NRLC and other pro-life observers have always regarded Obama's 'defense' as contrived, since the original two-paragraph BAIPA on its face applied only after a live birth; the 'neutrality clause' added in 2001 merely made this explicit, and therefore the new clause did not change the substance of the original bill."
The documents now, NRLC said, confirm Obama's defense "is based on a brazen factual misrepresentation." The organization has created an image, linked here, encompassing both laws, showing how little variance there is.
In fact, the campaign itself has released images revealing how very alike were the state and federal plans:
The documentation was sent to Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune.
"Less than two years after this meeting, Obama began to publicly claim that he opposed the state BAIPA because it lacked the 'neutrality' clause, and that he would have supported the federal version (had he been a member of Congress) because it contained the 'neutrality' clause," the NRLC report said.
A separate committee report even documents that the specific "neutrality" clause was added.
"Well, if that doesn't beat all," Stanek wrote. "They're continuing to lie despite documentation. I expected many responses, but not that one."
The NRLC also cited a contemporaneous Associated Press dispatch that confirmed the committee had "blocked" a bill that declared "any fetus with a beating heart or moving muscles outside the womb is 'born alive.'"
Stanek told WND Obama has said the first issue he would deal with as president is to make all abortions at any time legal for any reason, striking down all local, state and federal restrictions.
"Abortion is foremost on his mind," she said.
Obama Lied About Abortion Record
New Book, The Case Against Barack Obama, Sets the Record Straight
The Obama camp is now acknowledging that Barack Obama lied about his abortion voting record on the Born Alive bill, as reported weeks ago in the New York Times bestseller The Case Against Barack Obama by David Freddoso.
The New York Sun reported that Obama's campaign has admitted that the senator voted against giving medical care to babies born alive after an abortion attempt—a fact that the campaign originally dismissed as a "smear." The reality behind Obama's rhetoric is that he worked against efforts to ban the gruesome practice of leaving babies who survived failed abortions to die. When confronted with the facts, Freddoso says the senator did what is typical among politicians—he lied.
In fact, as Freddoso points out in The Case Against Barack Obama, Obama has made several untrue statements over the course of this debate. While Obama said that he would have supported the federal version of the Born Alive bill if it had come up in Illinois, when it did come up, he in fact did not support it.
Additionally, he falsely accused the National Right to Life Committee, and those who have been pointing out his extreme and cruel position on this issue of being liars. Even in his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama smears all pro-lifers saying they have discouraged compromise that would reduce the number of partial-birth abortions simply because the image of a partial-birth abortion helps win converts to pro-life groups.
The Case Against Barack Obama is currently #5 on the New York Times bestseller list. It has been received with much acclaim as the first book to truly prove that Obama deserves his liberal label and that his claim to be a reformer is a lie.