Sunday, October 12, 2008

Where does Obama say he supports 3rd trimester abortion?

Somebody seeking this information came to my blog.

We can start with this: Obama promising Planned Parenthood that, if elected, the first thing he would do is sign the "Freedom of Choice Act":



Among the effects of FOCA would be to put the determination of when a baby is "viable" in the judgement of the aborting physician, and would, even after "viability", allow such a broad allowance for "health" exceptions that mere distress would be sufficient.

Obama had said, in an interview with Relevant Magazine:

Now, I don’t think that “mental distress” qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.


So when speaking to evangelicals he parses it in terms of being okay with restricting third-trimester abortions for "mental distress" or "feeling blue". But as one hardcore supporter of the abortion lobby says, Obama must have been lying about supporting FOCA if he was really was okay with prohibiting third-trimester abortions for "mental distress" or "feeling blue":

... Obama ... is ... backing away from a proposed federal law (of which he is a co-sponsor) that envisions a much broader definition of mental health than the one he laid out this week.

That proposed federal legislation, the Freedom of Choice Act, refers to the key Supreme Court case on the issue, which was decided the same day as Roe v. Wade in 1973. In that case, Doe v Bolton, the Court said a doctor could decide to perform an abortion based on "all factors--physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age--relevant to the well-being of the patient. All these factors may relate to health."

Subsequent cases in the Supreme Court and lower courts have said states cannot ban abortions where the doctor deems them necessary to protect a woman's physical and mental health. Lower courts have taken that to mean a state cannot prohibit an abortion--even one post-viability--if the woman would suffer severe emotional harm without it.

Nowhere do those cases impose criteria of "serious clinical mental health diseases."


So, in supporting FOCA, Obama supports abortion, even in the third trimester, under the Doe vs. Bolton definition of "health", which includes maternal age, and financial and family concerns.

Either Obama supports third-trimester abortions only in those cases in which a woman has at least some mental or physical diagnosis (Tiller's patients typically have "adjustment disorder", meaning that they're not well-adjusted to being pregnant), or he supports third-trimester abortions as long as the woman can give a reason, and she doesn't need any kind of diagnosis from a doctor to justify it. Either way, he supports third-trimester abortions.

I'll give a few examples of the sort of abortions this means. I'll not address the issue of abortionists screwing up and performing third-trimester abortions by accident.

William Waddill knew Mary W. was at least 28 weeks pregnant when he started the abortion that led to the birth (and subsequent strangling) of Baby W. Ana Rosa Rodriguez was well into the third-trimester when Abu Hayat ripped her arm off in an abortion attempt. Abortionist Douglas Karpan initiated a third-trimester abortion on a teen who changed her mind. Teen Denise Montoya died from complications of a third-trimester abortion. Other mothers who died from botched third-trimester abortions include Lou Anne Herron, and Magdalena Rodriguez. Second and third trimester abortion images are available here. A chiropractor in Florida got caught doing a third-trimester abortion on a teenager. Seedy abortionist Steve Brigham did at least one third-trimester abortion in his New York office. Here are my reflections on how Tiller's staff determine if a third-trimester fetus is viable or not. You can read about Midtown Hospital's third-trimester abortion scandal. And you can look here at claims that such abortions are only done for health reasons. This is not a comprehensive set of information, just a sampling.

Clearly these abortions were not being done for reasons most people would consider to be related to the mother's "health" in any way.

And not only does Obama support such abortions, he opposes having a doctor on hand, or calling one in, to care for the baby should it be born alive:



One more time, with feeling:

"[A]dding an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion."

This video puts Obama's words in proper context.



My only complaint about this otherwise excellent video is that the baby they stick in the utility room is much older than the babies in question -- it's not only not a newborn, it's full-term. But then, it would be child abuse to even take one of these kids out of the incubator and leave her lying on a table without a warming lamp. The people who made the video would have gone to jail for using a living child to accurately depict what Obama's okay with -- unless, of course, they could have found an abortionist willing to let them borrow a live-born aborted baby to film.

This video shows the ages of babies that are left to die, only these babies are being provided with the care Obama thinks it's okay to deny them:



Now, Obama has backpedaled, said that he voted against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act because he trusts that the abortionist is going to provide the care depicted, purely from the goodness of his own heart. That he's just going to turn to the mother after he's been paid to provide her with a dead fetus, and say, in effect, "Good luck with that million-dollar NICU bill and your kid's later therapy costs. If I refund your abortion fee, will you promise not to sue?"

It's clear why abortion doctors don't want to send these kids to the NICU. But why does Barack Obama object to sending them to the NICU? Because if you recognize them as human beings AFTER they're born alive ("temporarily alive", Obama insists, since of course the rest of us are immortal and will never die) then you can't abort them. He's somehow not grasping that they've already been aborted if they're outside the womb. But there it is.

The Obama Debate Every American Should See.

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