Obama Would Have Approved of the Florida Abortion Baby Killing

A lot of people aren't sure about whether a typical abortion at, say 6 weeks, is murder. But who, except Barack Obama and NOW, would disagree about the case described in "Lawsuit: Florida Clinic Botched Abortion, Threw Out Live Baby":

Eighteen and pregnant, Sycloria Williams went to an abortion clinic outside Miami and paid $1,200 for Dr. Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique to terminate her 23-week pregnancy....

Only Renelique didn't arrive in time. According to Williams and the Florida Department of Health, she went into labor and delivered a live baby girl.

What Williams and the Health Department say happened next has shocked people on both sides of the abortion debate: One of the clinic's owners, who has no medical license, cut the infant's umbilical cord. Williams says the woman placed the baby in a plastic biohazard bag and threw it out....

Police recovered the decomposing remains in a cardboard box a week later after getting anonymous tips.

Here's more detail:

The complaint says one of the clinic owners, Belkis Gonzalez came in and cut the umbilical cord with scissors, then placed the baby in a plastic bag, and the bag in a trash can.

Williams' lawsuit offers a cruder account: She says Gonzalez knocked the baby off the recliner chair where she had given birth, onto the floor. The baby's umbilical cord was not clamped, allowing her to bleed out. Gonzalez scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic biohazard bag and threw it out....

At 23 weeks, an otherwise healthy fetus would have a slim but legitimate chance of survival. Quadruplets born at 23 weeks last year at The Nebraska Medical Center survived.

An autopsy determined Williams' baby — she named her Shanice — had filled her lungs with air, meaning she had been born alive, according to the Department of Health. The cause of death was listed as extreme prematurity.

Reader, whatever you think about abortion in general, wouldn't you be shocked if a state made Gonzalez's actions legal? Should he be able to say, "Sure I dumped a live baby in the trash can, let it die, and let it rot. That's legal. It's none of your business, or of the woman who had the abortion. She should know that that's what happens after an abortion. Didn't she notice there was no coffin or burial plot charge in the bill?" [He did *not* say that-- but should he be able to?]

What would you think about someone who agrees with that? Well, Barack Obama does. He voted several times against proposals to make baby killing illegal in Illinois, including against the one that eventually passed and which was almost identical to the federal law passed 98-0 in the U.S. Senate.

There is an mp3 and text of Obama's speech opposing the bill. The bill, 92_SB1663, said:

 (b)  Subsequent to the  abortion,  if  a  child  is  born
19    alive,  the  physician  required  by Section 6(2)(a) to be in
20    attendance shall exercise the  same  degree  of  professional
21    skill,  care and diligence to preserve the life and health of
22    the child as would  be  required  of  a  physician  providing
23    immediate medical care to a child born alive in the course of
24    a  pregnancy termination which was not an abortion.  Any such
25    physician  who  intentionally,   knowingly,   or   recklessly
26    violates Section 6(2)(b) commits a Class 3 felony.

Here is a defense of Obama. It is confusing enough that I deduce it is trying to confuse the issue. The argument seems to be that Obama was really against infanticide but in some unspecified way the bills would have restricted abortions more generally. Obama seems to have changed his story a number of times. One of them was the peculiar claim that the bill would have overriden Roe v. Wade, which is stupid since a state statute can't override a Supreme Court decision based on the U.S. Constitution. FactCheck.org says

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. ...

... 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."

This last paragraph is important to the Gonzalez case. Would it have made Gonzalez's action illegal? Or would it be interpreted to let Gonzalez, and nobody else, decide whether the baby had a "reasonable likelihood of sustained survival" without any second- guessing by the courts no matter how bad his decision was? The courts usually let doctors get away with a lot-- get away with murder, I was going to write.

In any case, it is clear that Obama thinks that if a doctor were sure that a baby would only live for two days after being born, the doctor should be able to throw the baby into a garbage can to die.