Obama and 'Infanticide'

Summary
Anti-abortion activists accuse Obama of "supporting infanticide," and the National Right to Life Committee says he's conducted a "four-year effort to cover up his full role in killing legislation to protect born-alive survivors of abortions." Obama says they're "lying."

At issue is Obama's opposition to Illinois legislation in 2001, 2002 and 2003 that would have defined any aborted fetus that showed signs of life as a "born alive infant" entitled to legal protection, even if doctors believe it could not survive.

Obama opposed the 2001 and 2002 "born alive" bills as backdoor attacks on a woman's legal right to abortion, but he says he would have been "fully in support" of a similar federal bill that President Bush had signed in 2002, because it contained protections for Roe v. Wade.

We find that, as the NRLC said in a recent statement, Obama voted in committee against the 2003 state bill that was nearly identical to the federal act he says he would have supported. Both contained identical clauses saying that nothing in the bills could be construed to affect legal rights of an unborn fetus, according to an undisputed summary written immediately after the committee's 2003 mark-up session.

Whether opposing "born alive" legislation is the same as supporting "infanticide," however, is entirely a matter of interpretation. That could be true only for those, such as Obama's 2004 Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, who believe a fetus that doctors give no chance of surviving is an "infant." It is worth noting that Illinois law already provided that physicians must protect the life of a fetus when there is "a reasonable likelihood of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb, with or without artificial support."

Analysis
Republican Senate candidate Alan Keyes attacked Barack Obama over this legislation during their 2004 race for the U.S. Senate, repeatedly  accusing him of favoring "infanticide." Because of this, Keyes said, "Christ would not vote for  Barack Obama." Nevertheless, 70 percent of Illinois voters did vote for Obama, but now the issue has bubbled up again.

The National Right to Life Committee released a statement Aug. 11 saying it had obtained proof that Obama was misrepresenting his 2003 vote by stating that the Illinois "born alive" bill that he voted against in committee lacked a provision, contained in the 2002 federal law, that foreclosed any effect on abortion rights. Obama, in an Aug. 16 interview, then said critics of his "born alive" stance were "not telling the truth" and "lying." On Aug. 18, the NRLC updated its white paper and continued to accuse Obama of dissembling.

As originally proposed, the 2003 state bill, SB 1082, sought to define the term "born-alive infant" as any infant, even one born as the result of an unsuccessful abortion, that shows vital signs separate from its mother. The bill would have established that infants thus defined were humans with legal rights. It never made it to the floor; it was voted down by the Health and Human Services Committee, which Obama chaired.

Earlier versions of the bill, in 2001 and 2002, had met with opposition from abortion-rights groups, which contended that they would be used to challenge Roe v. Wade. Because the bills accorded human rights to pre-viable fetuses (that is, fetuses that could not live outside the womb) as long as they showed some vital signs outside the mother, abortion-rights groups saw them as the thin edge of a wedge that could be used to pry apart legal rights to abortion. Obama stated this objection on the Senate floor in discussion of both bills.