Who needs Dr. Cornelsen?

Back in 1977, William Baxter Waddill got himself into a peck of trouble in California. A baby had been born alive during a saline abortion. As required by law, Waddill had called in a pediatrician -- in this case, Dr. Ronald Cornelsen -- to assess the baby. Waddill told Cornelsen, "If we all tell the same story, there will be no trouble. ... So long as we stand together, no one anywhere can make any accusations anywhere. ... Do not get squirrely. Just tell them exactly as we've discussed. Just say you went in, there was no heartbeat and you left."

The baby was well into viability -- over 30 weeks gestational age, in fact -- and much to Waddill's consternation she wouldn't stop breathing. In front of witnesses, Waddill strangled the little girl. He beat the murder rap because an obscure legal definition of "death" resulted in a hung jury.

The Born Alive Infants Protection act would remove any ambiguity in the law. A doctor who strangled a baby born alive as a result of an abortion would be legally culpable in that child's death.

Well, a recording has surfaced that makes it clear why Obama voted against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. He wanted to keep those pesky Dr. Cornelsens out of the room so that abortionists could deal with their screw-ups in privacy. Hear it for yourself here (MP3) or here (wav):

I suspect and my impression is, is that the Medical Society suspects as well that doctors feel that they would be under that obligation, that they would already be making these determinations and that, essentially, adding a -- 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.

(See the entire post and more context to Obama's comments at Jill Stanek's blog.)

Obama, on the advice of his abortionist friends at the Medical Society, clearly doesn't want witnesses like Dr. Cornelsen being involved in the neglect (or strangulation) deaths of babies who survive abortions. The Dreaded Complication is something that abortionists want to keep "in the family" as it were -- away from the prying eyes of pediatricians who might be tempted to say, as Dr. Cornelsen said to Waddill, that the baby belongs in the NICU, unmolested. And the last thing an abortionist wants is a pediatrician in court -- as Waddill had Cornelsen -- providing expert testimony that the child could have survived.