What do we call a person who is born alive and kicking, a person with a pulse, a person who can feel pain? The word fetus no longer applies. Common sense compels us too call this little person our fellow citizen. As a citizen, this little person has rights worthy of defense. This child is not the property of his mother, to do with as she pleases. Once the youngster has been evicted from his mom’s womb, by natural or induced forces, he is a person whose well being should be vigorously defended by the greater community of his fellow citizens. Defending the rights of our most vulnerable fellow citizens is our moral obligation.

If a newborn is bound to die despite the caring attentions of medical professionals, then he will die. But to withhold assistance to a newborn only because he survived the best efforts of his mom and her hired abortionist to snuff out his life, is barbaric. It is indecent for folks with medical degrees to ensure the death of someone in crisis by withholding life-sustaining assistance. Though it may be permissible for an adult patient to sign his own “do not resuscitate” order; it is outrageous for such an order to be signed by adults who wish death on a viable newborn. Convenience killings just don’t pass the smell test. Unless . . .

Unless your name is Barack Obama, a politician so tightly wedded to the big-bucks abortion lobby that he lives in fear of even one unwanted child leaving the delivery room alive.

Good Nurse Stanek

When Jill Stanek applied for employment at Christ Hospital in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago, she assumed that abortions were not among the hospital’s services; she was mistaken. To her dismay, Christ Hospital was, in fact, entangled with two denominations that believe that Jesus would bless any and all abortions. One of these denominations is the United Church of Christ, the one in which Barack Obama felt most at home for two decades.

One day, while on duty, Nurse Stanek crossed paths with another nurse who had just assisted in an “induced labor abortion,” one in which an abortionist had injected a pregnant woman with prostaglandin to induce the violent uterine contractions that caused the forced uterine eviction of her youngster. The nurse was rushing to dump the unwanted baby in a squalid utility closet where it would be left to die from neglect. This was the custom at Christ Hospital. Jill Stanek requested that the nurse relinquish the tiny abortion survivor.

“I couldn’t let him die alone,” she recalled. “And so I held him for the forty-five minutes that he lived.”

Nurse Stanek found this experience troubling; the hospital was doing things that were morally suspect: small citizens were being denied warmth, oxygen and nourishment in a building bursting with life-sustaining equipment and skilled medical practitioners.

The medical profession had long ago cast the Hippocratic Oath into the gutter, along with its antiquated admonition to “do no harm.” Even so, Nurse Stanek asked herself, could leaving small children in filthy closets until they were dead be legal behavior in America?

When Christ Hospital’s management was cold to her concerns, Nurse Stanek sought guidance from the life-loving Concerned Women of America. The attorney general of Illinois, Jim Ryan, responded to her inquiries by asking his state’s Department of Public Health if abandoning newborns to die was legal in Illinois. Inquiries by the press revealed that this practice was routine at Christ Hospital.

On July 17th, 2000, Attorney General Ryan made public his report on Christ Hospital. The health department had concluded, in part, that “. . . while we are deeply respectful of your serious concerns about the practices and methods of abortions at this hospital, we have concluded that there is no basis for legal action by this office against the Hospital or its employees, agents or staff at this time.”

Child abandonment, in the guise of some medical procedure, was legal in Illinois. These babies were officially non-persons; doctors were not obligated to assist them in any way.

Nurse Stanek was appalled. These children had been born in America; the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed their citizenship at birth. Nurse Stanek felt confident that her common-sense appeal would prompt the creation of legislation to protect these vulnerable children. Nothing stood in her way but the Dark Eminence, Senator Barack Obama.

The “Born Alive” Bill

In February of 2001, Illinois state senator Patrick O’Malley introduced his Born Alive bill. It came up for a vote on March 30th as Senate Bill 1095. Here is all of it; any smart high-school kid could understand it. It’s a gem of moral clarity:

(a) In determining the meaning of any statute or of any rule, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative agencies of this State, the words “person,” “human being,” “child,” and “individual” include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development.

(b) As used in this Section, the term “born alive,” with respect to a member of the species homo sapiens, means the complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of that member, at any stage of development, who after that expulsion or extraction breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut and regardless of whether the expulsion occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.

(c) A live child born as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law.

This bill is about the legal status of humans who have been born. This bill has nothing to say about the, as yet, unborn. It goes to considerable lengths to make clear that it in no way contradicts any aspect of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. This bill simply obliges doctors to afford babies born alive during abortion proceedings the same level of medical care as any other baby – all newborns would be given equal attention. No longer would babies be handled like trash just because their moms thought them to be an inconvenience. The adult survivors of late-term abortions walk among us today; they are just as human as the rest of us.

Barack: The One

Only one senator spoke against the Born Alive bill: state senator Barack Obama. Every word out of his mouth was a twisted lie. He did his best to mischaracterize Bill 1095 as legislation that was all about unborn fetuses. He knew he was lying when he began his unscrupulous smear. He jabbered nonsensically about how the bill would be found unconstitutional.

The lying Barack intoned, “. . . this is probably not going to survive constitutional scrutiny. Number one, whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a child . . . that is delivered to term.”

His every word was rubbish. Why was he blubbering about “a pre-viable fetus” when the wording of the bill clearly excluded all unborn humans from its purview? He rattled on, making no sense at all: “I mean, it – it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if it is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statue. For that purpose, I think it would probably be found unconstitutional.”

Harvard Law School should revoke this halfwit’s law degree; he is an embarrassment. Bill 1095 clearly drew a bright line at birth. It did not address the issue of abortion. Any abortions that may have happened were in the past, before the sanctions of Bill 1095 kicked in. Bill 1095 did not question the legality of abortion; it questioned the decency of fatally neglecting already born children. This bill did not trespass on Roe v. Wade in any way. Barack Obama worked very hard to dirty up a deeply moral piece of legislation. Barack Obama had become a willing flunky of the cash-heavy abortion lobby. The instant he chose to take their money and to do their bidding he became the Angel of Death to countless vulnerable living human persons.

Barack and twelve other state senators followed Planned Parenthood’s legislative blueprint to the letter; all thirteen of them voted “present” when the bill came for a vote, effectively voting “no” on the bill. When the bill passed the senate, its enemies conspired to kill it in a House committee. Senator Patrick O’Malley introduced three more bills in 2004. Obama voted against the two bills that came for a vote. Once again, Barack Obama rose and railed against legislation that would have provided humane care to newborns whom the abortion lobby wanted discarded as medical waste.

Three months after Barack Obama’s nonsensical rant against the Illinois bill, the United States Senate considered the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. This proposed legislation mimicked the Illinois bill, but included a modified Part C, which now read:

(c) 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 home sapiens at any point prior to being born alive as defined in this section.

This clarification rammed home the fact that this bill had nothing to say about humans yet unborn. The U.S. Senate embraced this bill; they approved it unanimously 98 to zero. But when the same bill came before Barack Obama’s health committee in 2003, Obama made certain that the bill died a silent death.

Three years later, Obama, in his self-promoting advertisement, The Audacity of Hope, would spread the lie that the Born Alive bill “. . . mandated lifesaving measures for premature babies (the bill didn’t mention that such measures were already the law) – but also extended ‘personhood’ to pre-viable fetuses, thereby effectively overturning Roe v. Wade.

Nothing but lies. There were no pre-existing laws to protect living newborns who had survived all efforts to kill them. The Illinois Department of Health had said as much. Attorney General Jim Ryan had made this grim fact public knowledge. Obama was spreading lies to conceal his pivotal role in condemning vulnerable youngsters to grotesque deaths. Barack Obama never met an abortion procedure he considered too extreme. He was even more zealously enthusiastic about abortions than Barbara Boxer, who had garnered a 100 percent lifetime pro-abortion voting score from the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Even Barbara drew the line somewhere; she had spoken in favor of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. She had said, “Of course, we believe everyone born should deserve the protections of this bill . . .”

The homicidal Barack Obama wanted them all dead; he did everything in his power to make the futures of millions of newborns utterly hopeless. The gals at NARAL were enchanted by Obama’s over-the-top pro-abortion extremism. They endorsed him for president; Hillary was just too tame. Obama raised buckets of cash by touting his extreme beliefs about abortion. On February 17, 2004, Michelle Obama pumped out a fundraising e-mail attacking the 2003 ban on partial-birth abortions which she falsely described as a “ban on a legitimate medical procedure.”

Obama’s Quack-Medicine Show

Though Michelle Obama may be a genius at Jackie O wannabee makeover impersonations, her claim that partial birth abortion is “a legitimate medical procedure” is the blather of an ignoramus. In the informed opinion of more than six hundred doctors who comprise The Physicians Ad Hoc Coalition: “Never is the partial-birth procedure medically indicated.” It’s quack medicine; the only motivation for performing such a cruel act on a living baby is the mother’s desire to be rid of an inconvenient child and the abortionist’s desire to pocket a fee. An “intact dilation and extraction (D&X) is medically indicated only when the unborn child is dead.

Partial birth abortion requires that a pregnant woman and her hired abortionist work in concert to produce a medically risky feet-first breech birth. No reputable obstetrician would prefer a breech birth because they are notoriously troublesome. But a partial birth abortion requires a breech birth because the whole procedure is carefully choreographed to allow the woman and her hired abortionist to slide past state murder statutes on a slim technicality. By delivering a baby feet first all the way up to his ears and then artificially stopping his easy emergence into the world just long enough to ram a spike into his skull and suction out his brain, the conspiring adults maintain the legal fiction that the baby’s life was snuffed out before he was born.

To ensure that the baby is delivered to his assassin feet first, the abortionist’s underlings spend hours pushing on the paying customer’s abdomen in an effort to turn the unborn victim around until he is in a feet-downward position and ready for slaughter.

A law banning this hideous practice was passed in 2003; the Big Bucks abortion lobby fought it tooth and nail. In 2007 the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart. The statute banning this barbarism includes two findings of Congress:

(1)A moral, medical, and ethical consensus exists that the practice of performing a partial-birth abortion . . . is a gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited. (2)Rather than being an abortion procedure that is embraced by the medical community, particularly among physicians who routinely perform other abortion procedures, partial-birth abortion remains a disfavored procedure that is not only unnecessary to preserve the health of the mother, but in fact poses serious risks to the long-term health of women and in some circumstances, their lives. As a result, at least 27 States banned the procedure as did the United States Congress which voted to ban the procedure during the 104th, 105th, and 106th Congresses.

The ban included exceptions if the woman’s pregnancy would result in physical illness, injury or disorder. Congress passed similar laws in December 1995 and October of 1997, but they were quickly vetoed by Bill Clinton. To immunize themselves from possible fines or up to two years in the slammer, abortionists now guarantee that late-term babies will be delivered dead by injecting the youngsters with lethal chemicals.

The Silent Scream

Congress took notice of the pain inflicted on the targets of partial-birth abortions:

“The vast majority of babies killed during partial-birth abortions are alive until the end of the procedure. It is a medical fact, however, that unborn infants at this stage can feel pain when subjected to painful stimuli and that their perception of this pain is even more intense than that of newborn infants and older children when subjected to the same stimuli. Thus, during a partial-birth abortion procedure, the child will fully experience the pain associated with piercing his or her skull and sucking out his or her brain.” (Public Law 108-105)

Expert testimony was given by both sides in a 2004 trial in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York when the ACLU and the National Abortion Federation challenged the law. At the end of trial U.S. District Judge Richard C. Casey summarized:

“A D&X procedure may subject fetuses beyond twenty weeks’ gestational age to ‘prolonged and excruciating pain.’ Because the density of receptors is greater in the fetal skin at about twenty weeks of gestation, and because the mechanisms that inhibit and modulate the perception of pain do not develop until thirty-two to thirty-four weeks’ gestation, there was testimony that a fetus likely feels severe pain while the procedure is being performed. . . When questioned about whether they spoke to their patients about fetal pain, Plaintiffs’ answers ranged from uncertainty about whether fetuses feel pain to a lack of caring on the matter. . . Most of Plaintiffs’ experts acknowledged that they do not describe to their patients what the D&E and D&X procedures entail in clear and precise terms.”

Judge Casey made several “findings of fact” which included:

“The Court finds that the testimony at trial and before Congress establishes that D&X [partial-birth abortion] is a gruesome, brutal, barbaric, and uncivilized medical procedure. Dr. Anand’s testimony, which went unrebutted by Plaintiffs, is credible evidence that D&X abortions subject fetuses to severe pain. Notwithstanding this evidence, some of Plaintiffs’ experts testified that fetal pain does not concern them, and that some do not convey to their patients that their fetuses may undergo severe pain during a D&X.”

None of this troubled Barack Obama’s conscience. He had concluded that supporting any and every abortion procedure, no matter how cruel, was his golden road to votes and contributions and power. Mr. Obama was an eager social climber who was willing to claw his way to the top over millions of small dead bodies.

Barack Obama has been unrelenting in his insistence that all Americans be compelled to finance extreme late-term abortion procedures with their compulsory tax payments. It’s the moral equivalent of forcing Americans to support a religion that practices human sacrifice. These late-term homicides are simply convenience killings.

As a state senator, Obama voted against Senate Bill 230 which would have banned partial-birth abortions. This bill included an exception for any extremely rare instance where a pregnancy might endanger the life of a pregnant woman (the baby was already dead; the mom was hit by a train, etc.). In the year 2000, Obama once again voted against a bill that would have ended the compulsory taxpayer funding of partial-birth abortions. Obama cast a resounding “no” vote on a bill that would have required physicians to inform parents that their minor children were seeking abortions out of state. This bill did not require parental consent, merely the common decency of a notification. What parent wants to discover, later on, that their daughter is in emotional distress because her boyfriend or some creepy gym teacher filled her head with their opinions and then smuggled her out of state to get a clandestine abortion?

In 2002, Barack Obama voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act that would have protected infants who had survived every attempt by abortionists to kill them. Barack Obama said that he was against calling in any doctor who had dedicated his life to saving human lives because the second doctor’s loving care for the newborn child would “burden” the decision of the unloving mom and her hired abortionist. And why does Barack Obama care so much about the wishes of homicidal conspirators? Because newborns can’t vote, that’s why.

Barack voted against the same legislation once again in 2003. After his elevation to the position of chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee, Obama again crushed all attempts to bring this bill up for a vote in the Illinois senate. It wouldn’t be Obama’s idea of democracy if the people’s elected representatives were actually given an opportunity to vote on morally significant legislation.

Barack Obama’s extremism and rigidity have won him a 100% rating from the abortion lobby NARAL Pro-Choice America for the years 2005, 2006 and 2007. He was awarded a 100% rating by Planned Parenthood in 2006. This last award is pregnant with ironic symbolism.

Planned Parenthood was founded by a sweet-faced little white woman named Margaret Sanger. Ms. Sanger was an enthusiastic eugenicist: she longed to spiff up America’s racial complexion by diminishing the number of live births among the inferior races of the Earth. In her opinion, the fewer Negroes there were in America, the better. In recent years, Planned Parenthood has toned down its hate-squad rhetoric; abortion is now soft-pedaled as “family planning.” Terminating pregnancies is now a big-buck business and, ironically, one special born-out-of-wedlock mulatto baby whom Margaret Sanger would have snuffed out in a heartbeat has grown to become a renowned spokesman for her lethal project.

The PBS documentaries on Margaret Sanger never mention her published opinions about race or the fact that the Nazis drew inspiration from her writings. For that matter, the Left-leaning PBS also aired a Ken Burns “documentary” about Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton in which there was not a word about these revered feminists’ outspoken abhorrence of abortion, which they denounced as a conspiracy against the essence of true womanhood. The Left has collective amnesia about these inconvenient truths.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2007 Gonzales v. Carhart decision, which banned the quackery of almost-totally-out-of-the-birth-canal homicides, an indignant Barack Obama sputtered: “I am extremely concerned that this ruling will embolden state legislatures to enact further measures to restrict a woman’s right to chose, and that the conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law and a matter of equal rights for women.”

Gone are all the assurances that surrounded the original Roe v. Wade decision that abortion advocates only sought to make abortions safe and rare and restricted to the first trimester. On the contrary, the abortion lobby has sought to popularize abortion, hiding even the most gruesome behaviors behind a curtain of euphemisms.

Barack Obama’s opinions about abortion are the most extreme of all. He is arguing that a woman does not enjoy full human rights unless she can instigate a partial-birth abortion! That’s nuts. Does Obama believe that average Joes are being denied their full Second-Amendment right to bear arms just because they are not permitted to possess atomic weapons? Of course not. Barack hates guns, because guns kill people. Abortionists? They just do “procedures.”

Extremism You Can Believe In

The same man who couldn’t restrain his delusions of grandeur during his presidential campaign, which he egotistically festooned with as-yet-unearned trappings of power, such as his phony presidential seal, his towering fake Roman columns and his tricked-out spanking-new O Force One jetliner, has big plans to “change” America in ways that are truly repulsive. On July 17, 2007, Barack Obama stood up before an assembly of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and proclaimed: “The first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” It was captured on video.

The Freedom of Choice Act would have the effect of nullifying every existing and future federal, state and local regulation of abortion no matter how reasonable. If the National Organization for Women is to be believed, the FCA would also wipe away every state restriction on the government funding of abortions. In shirtsleeve English, every American taxpayer would be compelled to subsidize abortion mills. Gone forever would be every law that now prevents the dismissal of doctors and nurses who refuse to participate in abortions for reasons of conscience. The informed consent of pregnant women before their abortions would become a fuzzy formality. Obama would abolish all requirements that parents be notified when their minor daughters have been scheduled for an abortion by adults who may be total strangers to the parents.

Barack Obama has said that if his daughters ever made a “mistake” and became pregnant, he would not want them “punished” with a baby. Someone should explain to Mister Obama that locking your keys in the car is a mistake; becoming pregnant is a decision. Voluntary sexual intercourse is not an accident, Mister Obama, and children are not ever a “punishment,” they are an organic consequence of a conscious decision to have sexual intercourse. Mister Obama wants his daughters to live in a world where they can live lives that are completely detached from the natural consequences of their moral decisions. He wants his daughters to live in an America where they can be ethical slobs without limit or consequence.

Stranger still, Barack Obama believes that defending the value of the most vulnerable humans is divisive. He believes that if you don’t share his belief that unwanted children are trash, then you are being controversial. His thinking is wrongheaded and exotic on every count.

The banning of partial-birth abortions was a popular decision. The notion that children who are born alive are persons worthy of care and respect is utterly uncontroversial. These commonly held moral precepts are divisive only to the degree to which they separate almost every American from that radical splinter faction of amateur social engineers who cluster on the extreme Left. All these extremists crave is total power. They believe their time is at hand. Barack Obama is The One they have been waiting for.

Thomas Clough
Copyright 2008
September 11, 2008