National Review Online's Andrew McCarthy sums it up:
When it got down to brass tacks, Barack Obama argued that protecting abortion doctors from legal liability was more important than protecting living infants from death.McCarthy's op-ed includes a link to the Illinois State Senate's official transcript of Obama's speaking in opposition of the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protectiion Act. Jill Stanek's blog has audio of the part of Obama's speech in which he argued against placing the "burden" on abortion doctors to get a second opinion on whether a still-moving infant survived an abortion. There is no question of the authenticity of the audio, which was found on the Chicago Tribune Web site.
As McCarthy adds,
This is staggering. As Obama spoke these words, he well knew that children were being born alive but precisely not looked after by the abortion doctors whose water the senator was carrying. As Stanek put it, as many as one in five — twenty percent — were left to die. That was what prompted the legislation in the first place.Obama, who vehemently accused National Right to Life of "lying" about his Born Alive vote, has yet to display the leadership and accountability to at least admit that he himself has repeatedly lied about both his vote and his reasons for voting as he did. (That link will show you his "top ten"; he's up to about twelve different excuses by now.)
Through Obama’s radical prism, everything “is about abortion and not live births.” But in reality, this had nothing to do with “burden[ing] the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.” It was about the legal and moral responsibilities of doctors and nurses in circumstances where, despite that decision, a living human being was delivered.
Hot Air's Ed Morrisey adds:
It’s too burdensome, Obama argues, to have a second doctor check on the infant. But why was this “burden” of a second examination added? Because the doctors who aborted the children were the ones ordering the staff to discard them after they were born alive. [Christ Hospital nurse Jill] Stanek made that extremely and explicitly clear in her testimony, which Obama attended. He acts as if she had never spoken, and that the subsequent investigation hadn’t shown evidence that Christ Hospital wasn’t alone in this practice. ...RELATED: A visual reminder on why Sen. John McCain consistently earns a "zero percent" rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America—meaning he has never voted in favor of the abortion lobby's bills—while Obama consistently enjoys a "100 percent" NARAL rating:
Obama wanted to protect the abortion industry from acknowledging this disgusting practice, and so he just pretended in his speech that the issue was purely academic. He refused to stop infanticide in order to shield the multi-billion-dollar abortion lobby.
In fact, Obama's opposing to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act even with a clause that "protected Roe" actually makes him more pro-abortion than NARAL. As NRO's McCarthy wrote, that is truly staggering.
