Abraham Lincoln faced a similar problem in 1854 when he spoke of the “covert zeal” of President Franklin Pierce and Sen. Stephen A. Douglas for the spread of slavery. These leading Democrats never said they were in favor of slavery. They simply viewed the right of whites to choose slavery for blacks as a “sacred principle of self-government.” Lincoln abhorred this subterfuge.
President Obama doesn’t talk about abortion much. He famously tried to avoid the question in 2008 when Pastor Rick Warren asked him what rights, if any, unborn children have. “The answer to that question is above my pay grade,” he said then. With his strong election victory, Barack Obama was promoted to the office where the buck stops, where such questions demand an answer. His answer has been clear: None. The unborn have no rights at any time, in any context.
President Obama has been the most pro-abortion president in history. That was a distinction not easily won, especially after eight years of Bill and Hillary Clinton. They famously said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” That seemed to be a middle path. But the only place they made abortion rare was in Antarctica. President Clinton sent out the Red Cable to all U.S. embassies ordering them to press their host countries to make abortion-on-demand legal and paid for by the state.
Yet, in 1994 Hillary told Newsweek abortion is “wrong.” She only said it once in her entire career. Still, she said it.
Barack Obama has never said that. From his first public office, he has been an advocate for abortion-on-demand. He led the fight in the Illinois State Senate to deny protection for newborn children who survive abortion attempts. These children are U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. And just as too many states denied “equal protection of the laws” to black Americans under a century of unjust Jim Crow laws, Barack Obama denied protection of Illinois laws to newborns in the Land of Lincoln because they had been targeted for abortion. It is tragically ironic that a disproportionate number of these late-term botched abortions are performed on minority women.
As president, Bill Clinton twice vetoed the ban on partial-birth abortions. Elena Kagan strongly urged him to veto the law. President Obama elevated Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court. This outspoken advocate of partial-birth abortion, not surprisingly, voted to approve Obamacare — the greatest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade. We can have little doubt as to how Kagan will rule if the lawsuits filed by dozens of Catholic dioceses make it to the Supreme Court. She is unlikely to surprise and shock any liberal abortion advocates as Chief Justice John Roberts shocked and appalled millions of pro-lifers with his last-minute shift of position. For pro-lifers, the shocks and the surprises only come one way with the Supreme Court. Liberal pro-abortion advocates never find one of their own jumping the traces. They vote in lockstep to uphold the culture of death.
Like the Clintons, President Obama opposed the ban on partial-birth abortions. Nurse Brenda Pratt Shafer described what she saw in a partial-birth abortion. It requires re-reading now:
I stood at the doctor’s side and watched him perform a partial-birth abortion on a woman who was six months pregnant. The baby’s heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen. The doctor delivered the baby’s body and arms, everything but his little head. The baby’s body was moving. His little fingers were clasping together. He was kicking his feet. The doctor took a pair of scissors and inserted them into the back of the baby’s head, and the baby’s arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. Then the doctor opened the scissors and he stuck the high-powered suction tube into the hole and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby was completely limp. I never went back to the clinic. But I am still haunted by the face of that little boy. It was the most perfect, angelic face I have ever seen.
Just reading about such a horror led pro-choice liberal columnist Richard Cohen to oppose it:
… the fact remains that the anti-abortion people are on to something. Late-term abortions may be necessary, but you cannot read about them without feeling diminished as a human being. Something awful has happened, and simply as a matter of principle we ought to be opposed. We ought to say, in short, that this procedure cannot be used — that late-term abortions cannot be permitted at all — unless we absolutely have no choice.
Cohen said then that people who don’t shudder at this nightmare make him shudder. President Obama does not shudder. Nor does Justice Elena Kagan. They have a cool and detached view. To them, the fetus has no rights, ever. And “the right to choose” can mean the right to a dead child.
From his first day in office until now, President Obama has quietly but vigorously pushed the abortion agenda. He records promotional videos for Planned Parenthood. This group kills 340,000 of the more than1,200,000 unborn children killed each year by abortion. Under Obamacare, they will be able to kill millions more.
Ken Blackwell, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
