"Limp and dead": Obama on BAIPA

This is really disturbing, horrifying, actually, but it is a must-read in order to understand where Obama is coming from with his BAIPA stance, and why he's trying to deny and obfuscate his record.

Obama and Infanticide
by Robert George & Yuval Levin

At the third debate, Obama misrepresented his record on abortion. On born-alive abortion victims, he said this:

'There was a bill that was put forward before the Illinois Senate that said you have to provide lifesaving treatment and that would have helped to undermine Roe v. Wade. The fact is that there was already a law on the books in Illinois that required providing lifesaving treatment, which is why not only myself but pro-choice Republicans and Democrats voted against it.''

George and Levin refute this:

Obama's case against the bill did not revolve around existing state law, as he seemed to suggest last night. The law Obama referred to in the debate was the Illinois abortion statute enacted in 1975. But at the time of the debate about the Born Alive Act, the Illinois Attorney General had publicly stated that he could not prosecute incidents such as those reported by nurses at Christ Hospital in Chicago and elsewhere (including a baby left to die in soiled linen closet) because the 1975 law was inadequate. It only protected ''viable'' infants-and left the determination of viability up to the ''medical judgment'' of the abortionist who had just failed to kill the baby in the womb. This provision of the law weakened the hand of prosecutors to the vanishing point. That is why the Born Alive Act was necessary-and everybody knew it. Moreover, the Born Alive Act would have had the effect of at least ensuring comfort care to babies whose prospects for long-term survival were dim and who might therefore have been regarded as ''nonviable.'' As Obama and the other legislators knew, without the Born Alive Act these babies could continue to be treated as hospital refuse. That's how the dying baby that Nurse Jill Stanek found in the soiled linen closet got there.

''As I understand it,'' Obama said during the floor debate, ''this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child - however way you want to describe it - is now outside the mother's womb and the doctor continues to think that it's nonviable, but there's, let's say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they're not just coming out limp and dead, that, in fact, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and check off and make sure that this is not a live child that could be saved.'' This, he argued, was too much to ask of a doctor performing abortions, and it could also, as he put it, ''burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.''

Do you feel ill yet?

This is the first time I've seen this complete quote. It leaves no wiggle room for Obama: he clearly understands that these are dead babies that we're talking about.

Please read the rest.

Updated with link to IL Senate transcript: Obama's "limp and dead" remark is on page 32.