peg,

Here is the pertinent section of the Illinois law:

(4) (a) Any physician who intentionally performs an abortion when, in his medical judgment based on the particular facts of the case before him, there is a reasonable possibility of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb, with or without artificial support, shall utilize that method of abortion which, of those he knows to be available, is in his medical judgment most likely to preserve the life and health of the fetus.
(b) The physician shall certify in writing, on a form prescribed by the Department under Section 10 of this Act, the available methods considered and the reasons for choosing the method employed.
(c) Any physician who intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly violates the provisions of Section 6(4)(a) commits a Class 3 felony.

Also, a second physician must be present to try to save the child should it be born alive.

… Obama’s refusal to support BAIPA had no consequences …

He refused to support it because he thought its enactment would have consequences. In his own words, arguing against BAIPA because of the consequences he assumed it would have:

“… what we’re really saying is [the bill is saying], in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a — a child, a nine-month-old — child that was delivered to term.”[It sounds like, according to Obama, the patients in the hospital newborn intensive care unit who are less than nine months old – this is common – are not really protected by law, but would be under BAIPA]

“That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it — it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute.”[The fact that the fate of a born, wiggling, kicking baby, albeit premature, is under consideration apparently means nothing to Obama.]

“… this essentially says that a doctor is required to provide treatment to a previable child, or fetus, however way you want to describe it.”[He acknowledges that “child” is an appropriate term for born-alive, premature infants after admitting that “the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child.”]

– State of Illinois, 92nd General Assembly, Regular Session Senate Transcript, March 30, 2001

[Obama on the requirement that a second physician be called in to assess the condition of the born-alive infant “burdens” the decision to abort. He sees the issue only in terms of abortion rights]… 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. Now, if that’s the case … that’s fine, but I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births …

– State of Illinois, 92nd General Assembly, Regular Session Senate Transcript, April 4, 2002

An important consequence BAIPA had was to reveal what a flaming extremist Obama is on abortion rights, and how utterly calloused he is towards babies who survived the initial attempt to take their lives. He is willing to write them off if caring for them might threaten abortion rights. Anybody that cold-hearted towards helpless babies cannot really have any genuine compassion for the downtrodden.

What is this technique? I thought the goal was to kill the baby.

harry,

No, you need to know a little more about Illinois abortion law at the time Obama was a state senator. I am not arguing abortion in general. I am arguing about the unimportance of Obama’s vote on BAIPA and the worthlessness of the law itself. Illinois law protected viable born-alive infants. In the case of abortions after viability, doctors were required to (a) use the abortion technique least likely to harm the baby and (b) have a second doctor present to take care of the baby should it be born alive.

No one alleged that babies who could have survived were being left to die. No one alleged that babies who should have been taken to the neonatal intensive care unit were neglected.

I am not arguing in favor of late-term abortions or allowing born-alive infants to die. I am not even arguing that abortion should be legal. I am arguing a narrow point her, which is that Obama’s refusal to support BAIPA had no consequences other than political ones. No babies were lost that would have been saved had he voted for the bill, and after the bill passed, no babies were saved that would otherwise have died.

“Are legislators supposed to vote in favor of bills that they believe to be unconstitutional and destined to be struck down by the courts?”

The problem with this question is that you are asking it as if his votes in 2003 don’t exist. The House of Representatives had added a neutrality clause to their already-passed version of BAIPA, and to my knowledge, no one thought that the bill with the amendment clause attached posed a threat to Roe. Obama himself stated that he would have voted for such a bill had he been in the U.S. Senate at the time. He said as much in 2004 when the issue first arose in his run for the Senate. But the fact remains that he chose to vote against the bill in 2003 even after he chaired the committee that inserted the neutrality clause that had passed muster at the federal level. Why did he make this “no” vote? Suggesting that he did so because he was worried that it would be found unconstitutional is no longer plausible given his later remarks trying to defend his vote.

Furthermore, it is simply untrue that the Illinois version of the BAIPA was redundant. The 1975 law did not protect the sort of infants that were discussed in Baker and Stanek’s allegations, which is why the office of the AG in Illinois declined to bring charges. That law was intended for viable infants, not the pre-viable ones at issue in BAIPA.

It is absurd to assume, as you do, that Hurlburt, Hayes, and Wright just made that up and submitted complete fabrications as testimony.

You need to get the big picture. Since Roe there have been over 750,000 abortions that took the lives of late second and third trimester babies. Babies at that stage of development are routinely cared for in newborn intensive care units — if they are wanted by their mothers. Do you really expect anybody to believe that these physicians-turned-executioners really work to make sure babies who survive the initial attempt on their lives get the same care wanted babies at the same stage of development get? Babies surviving abortions would be very bad for business and these licensed hit men know that.

This situation, along with laws that allow for a double-murder charge to be enforced in cases of homicide in which a pregnant woman is murdered, thereby killing her unborn baby, make clear the inconsistency and irrationality of “legal” abortion. Currently, the child in the womb, in some instances, has a value that warrants a charge of homicide against the one who took its life — in other instances the child is only a mass of “fetal tissue.” That is ridiculous. Our right to life is intrinsic and is not derived from our being wanted by another, nor is it derived from our existing somewhere outside the dark, shadow of contemporary bigotry.

Bigotry is real. It was lethal to the Jews under Hitler and brought unimaginable suffering and injustice to the Blacks of the Old South. Contemporary bigotry towards the child in the womb will eventually be dispelled and looked upon by future generations with all the disgust and horror with which we now view slavery and lethal, racist eugenics.

Why are you so committed to perpetuating and legitimizing contemporary bigotry? It won’t last. It can’t. The instinct to care for and protect the young of our own kind is built into humanity. It can be suppressed temporarily by vicious, intimidating, media-manufactured bigotry, but that effort is never complete because each new generation has to be re-propagandized. This is indicated by the annual March for Life in Washington still gathering hundreds of thousands of people each year, most of which are young people, and by the aging abortion rights movement.

The young people of America are beginning to understand they are the survivors of an unprecedented, lethal assault on humanity. Thank God for the rebelliousness of youth against the establishment. It will be the abortion rights movement’s undoing.

harry,

Your message is misleading in that there was no testimony by Hurlburt, Hayes, or Wright. What you quote comes from material submitted for the record and included in an appendix to the hearing. And who are they relying on? Jill Stanek, who did testify, and whose allegations were investigated by the Illinois Department of Health and were unsubstantiated.

They will last only hours if uncared for.

No, you are adding something that was not in the submitted document. It says: “The babies are between 16 and 24 weeks old. With undeveloped lungs, they will last from a few minutes to 6 or 7 hours.” You are adding if uncared for. What is under discussion is babies with underdeveloped lungs that will die whether or not they are cared for.

Note this exchange between Representatives Canady (who introduced the bill under discussion) and Nadler:

Mr. NADLER. Thank you.

Let me ask you this: Assume that this bill were law. Assume that we had passed this bill, it were law, and it said what it said. Now you have the situation I think Ms. Stanek referred to before: a baby born that is in terrible shape, medically, et cetera. And the question arises of whether or not to take heroic measures or what to do. And she said there was confusion.

I think that under current law that basically is up to the parents and the doctor to decide whether they should take heroic measures or not.

How would this law change that, if at all?

Mr. CANADY. This law does not do anything to change the standard of care that would be applicable in such circumstances. And it is true that there are difficult cases where people in good faith can have disagreements.

Or are you claiming the nurses presented utterly false testimony to the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and they bought it? Get real.

I am stating the fact that the allegations made by the nurse who testified, Jill Stanek, were referred to the Illinois State Attorney General’s Office, were investigated by the Illinois Department of Public Health, and no evidence was found that the events she reported were true. I do not pretend to know whether she was right and the hospital was wrong, whether she was wrong and the hospital was right, or something in between. But I do know that once the authorities have investigated allegations and are unable to corroborate them, they are not a sufficient motivation for passing a law, particularly a redundant law.

Only churches are exempt from the contraception mandate (there is a long history of excluding churches from such regulations), and no one is exempted from the contraception mandate for economic reasons.

Charles: A rational basis that distribution of contraceptives is best served through individual insurance and not the existing Title X grants?

It does seem rational to me, but in any case, ‘rational basis’ does not mean that this is a law that you would enact, or that it is a law that best serves its stated purpose. Rational basis is satisfied when there is even a theoretical good reason (it need not even have been explicitly stated in the legislative history) for the law (in this case regulation) that has been enacted. It may be that the contraception mandate is illegal under the so called Relgious Freedom Restoration Act, but it definitely is not illegal under the Constitution.

Charles: And can it really be called neutral despite two decades of contentious and antagonism by Obama’s allies in applying state-level mandates and the significant fundraising impact for Democrats from the pandering?

Neutral means that it is was not specifically enacted to target one particular group. And I doubt very much that even opponents would claim that the contraception mandate was specifically instituted to poke Catholics in the eye. Even if they did believe that, they would have to prove it in court, which would be rather difficult.

On the other hand, when it comes to First Amendment rights he’s and his administration have proved themselves somewhat less, shall we say, “committed”.

To summarize: Protect a questionable “constitutional right” to the hilt, protect the most elemental rights in our Constitution, ….cautiously.

Got it.

Sigh,

I am quite sure that what Nadler and other pro-choice politicians in the House and Senate realized was that if they voted against the federal BAIPA, which—if it did anything at all—was redundant, their votes would be used in a campaign of lies against them alleging that they supported infanticide. Perhaps one might accuse Obama of political naiveté or ineptitude, but certainly one can’t accuse him of being responsible for any harm, or even of being indifferent, in declining to vote against something that was already illegal—that is, if a vote for BAIPA was a vote against anything at all, which arguably it was not.

Do we really want our legislatures to spend their time passing new laws against which there are already existing laws? Is the theory you are relying on that if one law against an evil is good, then two laws against it are better? How about three, or five, or ten?

And recall that there had been no allegations of infanticide in Illinois, in any case, so infanticide was not an issue in Obama’s vote. The issue was negligent care of pre-viable born-alive infants, an issue which Obama expressed a willingness to address directly.

And to make one final point, Obama’s stated reason for voting against BAIPA was that he believed it to be unconstitutional. He was mistaken, but it seems clear to me that that was his true reason. Are legislators supposed to vote in favor of bills that they believe to be unconstitutional and destined to be struck down by the courts?