Obama and the Freedom of Choice Act
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I've linked before to this video of Barack Obama addressing the Planned Parenthood Action Fund (July 17, 2007):
Note in particular this line: "The first thing I'll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act."
What is the Freedom of Choice Act?
Senator Barbara Boxer, co-sponser of the bill, has said: "The Freedom of Choice Act supercedes any law, regulation or local ordinance that impinges on a woman’s right to choose. That means a poor woman cannot be denied the use of Medicaid if she chooses to have an abortion." In other words, state governments and the federal government would be mandated to fund abortion with taxpayer money.
David Freddoso (The Case Against Barack Obama) elaborates on what this bill entails:
Note in particular this line: "The first thing I'll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act."
What is the Freedom of Choice Act?
Senator Barbara Boxer, co-sponser of the bill, has said: "The Freedom of Choice Act supercedes any law, regulation or local ordinance that impinges on a woman’s right to choose. That means a poor woman cannot be denied the use of Medicaid if she chooses to have an abortion." In other words, state governments and the federal government would be mandated to fund abortion with taxpayer money.
David Freddoso (The Case Against Barack Obama) elaborates on what this bill entails:
This bill would effectively cancel every state, federal, and local regulation of abortion, no matter how modest or reasonable. It would even, according to the National Organization of Women, abolish all state restrictions on government funding for abortions. If Obama becomes president and lives up to this promise, then everyone who pays income tax will be paying an abortionist to perform an abortion.In making this promise, Freddoso writes, Obama is promising:
- to abolish state laws that protect doctors and nurses from losing their jobs if they refuse to participate in abortions
- to abolish requirements for parental notification and informed consent for mothers who consider the procedure
Obama is one of the very few pro-choice advocates who accepts no restrictions on late-term abortions, or any kind of abortions. I could find no instance in his entire career in which he voted for any regulation or restriction on the practice of abortion.
posted by JT at Tuesday, August 12, 2008
17 Comments:
Obama has never heard of a baby at any stage of development that he didn't want to ensure that women would be free to kill it. Sad.
This video was difficult to watch and tolerate. I find interesting (okay, really outrageous) that Sen. Obama praises and gives credit to/for PP for the reduced number of teen pregnacies. (How does he know it's due to PP and does he know that PP is THE largest provider of abortions).
What I also found interesting (again, outrageous) was that Obama gave praise to Sanger for her work. Does he realize Sanger was a proponent of eugenics and race "hygiene" (read - racist).
I wonder if he knew that or was he just confused like when he said there were 58 states in the union and when he said his great uncle was in the attic for months after WWII because of the experience his uncle had with other American soldiers in rescuing the Jews from Auschwitz (Russia actually rescued Auschwitz, not the USA - so his uncle couldn't have been there).
On a related note, there are recent reports that Obama has been misrepresenting his previous opposition to the Illinois Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. His explanation has been that the Illinois version of the bill did not contain a so-called "neutrality clause" (explicitly denoting that the bill is not meant to influence the legal standing of a fetus). But new evidence released by NRTL suggests another story. Yuval Levin has the details, and links to original sources.
Actually, Obama recently got in big trouble with Planned Parenthood, NOW, NARAL, and the like when he said a number of restrictions in the third trimester are perfectly fine. It turns out the restrictions he said were ok were ones that the Supreme Court explicitly disallowed, and he had to backtrack rather quickly. So much for trying to pander to social moderates by contradicting your voting record so explicitly.
Thanks for linking to that, Alex.
Another part of Obama's defense of his vote was that “there was already a law in place in Illinois that said that you always have to supply life-saving treatment to any infant under any circumstances...”
As Freddoso writes: "This is not true. Such measures were not already the law in Illinois. Not according to the Department of Public Health. Not according to Attorney General Ryan. They had said that Christ Hospital was doing nothing illegal."
JT
Justin, thank you for keeping this in front of us. We need to be reminded again and again of our role and duty as Christians to be the defender of the defenseless.
Just fyi - has anyone seen this Fox News Story about the son of Hamas leader converting to Christianity? Sorry I haven't figured out how to insert a hyper link here on blogger!
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,402483,00.html
So let me get this straight:
We are spending too much money when it comes to militarily supporting freedom in foreign countries, but we need to be spending more money so that women can have the same right that men have to sex without consequential pregnancy; at the cost of unborn, human lives?
All while our falling birthrates threaten life as we know it in the U.S. (see "The Empty Cradle" by Phillip Longman).
1) All arguments in favor of abortion in the case of rape or health issues need to be sidelined until abortion is only allowed in those instances- more than 90% of abortions happen because the baby is deemed inconvenient.
2) Making abortion illegal does need to be our long-term goal, but I think hitting the government funding of abortion should be our greatest short-term goal. Without government funding, abortions would only be available to those who can afford it- while those who can afford it are not targeted by Planned Abortionhood. Also, without government funding PP would face the same challenges to "stay afloat" that other abortion providers face.
Here is a poem that I wrote a few months ago about abortion:
http://bigham.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/the-american-dream/
Conservative humanism vs liberal humanism is a no win situation.
Seems that's what is happening.
We humans have to get this thing done. We have to fight to keep Roe vs Wade by getting another judge on the SC who is liberal.
We have to fight against Roe vs Wade by getting another conservative judge on the court.
What is the Christian's heart here. Surely we need to speak out agianst abortion. It's murder. The doctor's are killing humans, and making millions of bucks doing it.
Partial birth, where they turn the baby around, pull hsi/her's legs out, and these kicking legs are hel, while the doctor cuts into the baby's head, and then proceeds to suck the brains from the head.
Barak is all for this, because women have the right.
I know pro-abortion people whom I love. they are good people in many ways, but they are blind. they are thinking I will not have my rights violated.
Thanks for posting this. I hope more and more people will see this man views.
People are actually voting for this knucklehead. I live in China and have purposely been trying to ignore this whole situation as much as possible, but had to watch this video. He sounds like such a fool. Can somebody tell me what "our daughters having the same rights as our sons" (which he said at least 50 times in 25 minutes) has to do with abortion? That was his main argument. It's as if abortion is what we need to make up for all the sexism and male-centeredness of the past. I don't get it. How does that argument hold weight? Man this dude is scary...
Josh, that argument is common in hard left feminism. The idea is that men have always been able to get away with sex without having to deal with pregnancy, and so women ought to have that right too, which means the government ought to supply it. This justifies not just the legal allowance of abortion, since men actually can avoid pregnancy even if they're poor. So the government has to pay for poor people's abortions too to be fair.
What none of these people recognize is that men have to pay child support even if they insist on an abortion that the woman doesn't have. But the woman really can get away with not having to deal with children with the current status quo. Men can't. So if you're going to play this comparison game to ensure men and women are different in no respect, you're going to have two options: get rid of child support when the father wanted her to have an abortion, or don't treat women as having an absolute right to dispose of their children just because they feel like it.
Justin, does Freddoso give any citations to something that can be checked? Both this and the new info about the born-alive act need substantiation. I haven't seen it anywhere except on partisan blogs without any citations or appearances in mainstream media, which is a little worrying.
Justin: Justin, does Freddoso give any citations to something that can be checked?
Freedom of Choice Act .
The Freedom of Choice Act was initially introduced in 1989 to circumvent state restrictions and essentially codify Roe v. Wade in the federal legal code. But it didn't go far enough. This current bill goes to the extremes that abortion camp wants.
Note two important parts of the Act: "This Act applies to every federal, state and local statute, ordinance, regulation, administrative order, decision, policy, practice, or other action enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of enactment of this Act."
and: "Statement of Policy -- It is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child, to terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability, or to terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the woman."
This would make it against the law for any medical professional to deny a woman her "right" to abortion. No medical professional could be denied this "right" no more than any other right could be denied. Since it would be a fundamental right, then the government would be mandated to fund abortion if the person could not afford it.
Jill Staneck a nurse in a Chicago Hospital that performs abortions brought the issue of infants born alive later to be allowed to die. Standard procedure for the hospital were for the babies to be put in soiled utility closets, but Staneck could not stand to do this so she cradled the baby in her arms for an hour before she died. Dennis Byrne a reporter from the Chicago Sun Time wrote a report on this A New Low in Heartlessness .
A protection bill was introduced in the IL state senate in 2001 as a result of this travesty but it was blocked by Obama Obama's Abortion Distortion .
CR, so a conservative opinion columnist claims the 1975 law didn't cover these cases, but I still don't know what that law was or what it covers.
Also, a Republican on the committee says Obama didn't bring up the argument at the time. Maybe so, but it's still not approaching verification from sources that will be deemed unbiased. I'm looking for recognition from any newspaper that isn't ideological or for a liberal columnist to acknowledge some of these points, particularly the point that these documents show that Obama voted for the admendment and against the law. Anyone can concoct a PDF file. How do we know this isn't another Memogate done by the other side?
Also, I want at least some sense of which law Obama was talking about and an explanation of why it doesn't do what Obama said it did. I haven't seen anything going into the specifics on that.
Jeremy,
There is a saying: a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. That is you.
I provided you information from the mainstream media. The PDF file you complain about is the a pdf file of the bill. Sorry, I only found it in PDF. Perhaps you can write to the democrats and get a hard copy.
There is a deeper problem here it's not your politics but your theology. I got this from reading your parablemania in your affirmation of Bush's statement that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Nothing more need be said.
Any further discussion with you on this issue (on many other issues for that matter) would be futile.
You may have the last word.
NRLC is not mainstream media. The Weekly Standard is an ideological magazine, and the article you linked to is an opinion column. The other link was to someone who said there was a possibility that the practice was illegal and was being investigated. That's hardly confirmation of either possibility but a clear statement that it's unknown which is true.
As for your ad hominem (which is a fallacious form of argument, by the way), I have made a very clear statement that Islam does not worship God in any legitimate way. That's the only really theological statement I've made. I have made a linguistic claim that the word 'God' in the mouth of a Muslim refers to the actual God that Christians and Jews have long believed in, who was the original basis of Islam's attempt to corrupt scripture. But that's a linguistic claim, not a theological claim, and it's not just silly but immoral to pretend that such an issue has anything to do with the issue at hand, which is simply a question about how a pro-lifer can present an argument against a pro-choicer without evidence.
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