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NRL News
Hidden in
Plain View: Obama’s Radical Pro-Abortion Agenda As I listened to NRLC President Dr. Wanda Franz open NRLC 2008, I couldn’t help but recall the very different message I heard from pro-abortion Sen. Barack Obama when I watched a video of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee speaking to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in 2007. As Dr. Franz pointed out, “According to conventional wisdom, elections are always about the voters’ pocketbooks.” However, “Should the next president make bad decisions about economic policy, the voters will ultimately express their displeasure, and the policies will change accordingly.” But “Mistakes in appointing Supreme Court justices are a different matter, altogether,” Dr. Franz warned. “It can take decades to correct such mistakes, as we all found out. That is why we still have to work in the pro-life vineyard, 35 years after Roe and Doe.” Obama likewise understands the fundamental issue of the day: which direction the High Court takes. In April 2007, with the two Supreme Court justices nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate as part of a slim 5–4 majority, the justices upheld a ban on an abortion procedure for the first time since 1973. Sen. Obama, like Dr. Franz, knows full well that between one and three justices will almost certainly retire and be replaced by the next President. The question will be whether the newly constituted Court will continue down the path of upholding commonsensical limitations on abortion or will it abruptly reverse course, open the floodgates. and cause the deaths of an even greater numbers of unborn children. This is not hyperbole. If the policies promoted by a “President” Obama become law, hundreds of thousands of additional unborn babies will die each year as surely as the sun sets in the West. It was no accident that at the same time Obama was bemoaning Gonzales v. Carhart for upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act he also told Planned Parenthood, “This election is not just about playing defense, it’s also about playing offense.” If you connect the dots, if you fill in the blanks, those 13 words will send a chill up and down your spine. If Obama’s life were a book, the foreword would be written by a descendant of Margaret Sanger, the introduction by the president of NARAL, and the epilogue by the executive director of Catholics for a Free Choice. Yet Obama’s position on abortion remains unknown—or confused—to many Americans. The Polling Company recently asked if respondents thought Obama was pro-choice, pro-life, or didn’t know. Amazingly, 10% thought he was pro-life, 44% correctly answered pro-choice, but a stunning 43% didn’t know! The public, alas, was not up to speed on pro-life Senator McCain either. Forty-six percent accurately said McCain was pro-life, 13% falsely thought he was pro-choice, and well over a third (38%) didn’t know. One way we can help clear away the fog is by wide distribution of the comparison piece on page five. It provides a very helpful summary, contrasting the views of pro-abortion Barack Obama with those of pro-life Senator John McCain. Obama is counting on a compliant (when not openly supportive) media, the desire of Americans to be more than fair to the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party, and his own skill at putting critics on the defensive to disguise his extremist views. But the larger obstacle to a clear-eyed appreciation of just how committed Obama is to the Planned Parenthood agenda, ironically, is the inherent decency and moderation of most Americans. People simply refuse to believe that anyone can be “pro-abortion” or that there exist individuals and organizations which honestly believe we really don’t have enough blood of innocent babies on our hands. You don’t have to go back to the birth of Planned Parenthood, whose midwife was the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, to understand whom they are perpetually eager to “help.” Listen for any period of time—or merely look at PPFA’s rising bottom line, the growth of their megaclinics, and which populations they consider to be “underserved” (poor Hispanics and African-Americans)—and you cannot miss that Planned Parenthood firmly believes not only that more abortions are necessary but that they are a very, very good thing. Planned Parenthood’s political arm will spend an enormous amount of money to elect Obama. And why not? Why bother to abort nearly 300,000 unborn babies annually if you can’t get behind a guy who shares your lethal default response to an unplanned pregnancy? Obama has made many revealing statements over the last year but none more telling than what he said at a town hall meeting in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. If either of his daughters were someday to “make a mistake,” he said, “I don’t want them punished with a baby.” There was another extremely revealing moment in that July 2007 speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund (which you can watch at www.imoneinamillion.com/video.php?candidate=obama). Obama was asked how he was going “to make sure that the judicial nominees that you will inevitably be able to pick are true to the core tenets of Roe v. Wade.” A softball question, if ever there was one. Significantly, the first words out of his mouth had nothing to do with judicial nominees. “Well, the first thing I’d do as president,” Obama said, “is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” That’s how important FOCA is to Planned Parenthood and Barack Obama, a co-sponsor. Again, what follows is not straining to make an exaggerated point. It is what FOCA proponents say the legislation would accomplish. With one fell swoop, FOCA would obliterate every protective law we’ve been able to pass, not just in Congress, but in all 50 states. Explained NRLC Federal Legislative Director Douglas Johnson, “The heart of the bill is a ban that would nullify all of the major types of pro-life laws that the Supreme Court has said are permissible under Roe v. Wade, including bans on government funding of abortion.” He added, “In the interests of truth in advertising, the bill should be renamed the ‘Freedom for Partial-Birth Abortionists Act.’” Enactment of FOCA is one major way a President Obama would greatly multiply the number of abortions. (Never forget how the Abortion Establishment must have received the news that the number had dropped a whopping 8% between 2000 and 2005.) In a very important speech delivered at NRLC 2008, Johnson talked about the impact of Obama’s health care proposals. As noted in the story on page 5, Obama’s health care platform hinges on universal health care, which would require all Americans to be covered by private insurance or government-provided coverage. However, under Obama’s plan, even private insurance plans would have to follow federal government mandates. Obama made it clear in the July 2007 speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund that abortion (euphemistically known as “reproductive care”) is, to him, a major part of health care. Johnson quoted him as saying, “in my mind, reproductive health care is essential care, basic care so it is at the center, the heart of the plan that I propose.” This means that every American would be compelled by law to pay for abortion on demand, through both tax dollars and health-insurance premiums. Beyond this, it is highly likely that the Obama plan will also entail -- as did the Clinton health care proposal of 1993 -- provisions that would effectively nullify any state laws that restrict access to abortion on demand for either adults or minors, and impose sweeping new requirements that abortions be made easily available in every region of the country. “By force of federal law,” Johnson said, “you would have to have mainstream health care providers enlisting, training abortionists in hundreds of communities where they don’t now operate, and/or you would have to have the establishment of new free-standing abortion clinics, for example, Planned Parenthood clinics, in hundreds of communities, a major part of the income of which would be these new federal subsidies for abortion on demand.” The results of Obama’s policies—and other similar health care reform plans that may be introduced in Congress—would be disastrous for unborn babies. “If they succeed, it will very substantially increase the number of abortions performed in the United States,” Johnson said. “It would mean a vast expansion of the availability of abortion on demand and a lot more abortions. We need to keep very much in mind as we review these different plans.” FOCA plus Obama’s health care proposals would mean “at least many tens of thousands more a year, probably ultimately even hundreds of thousands of additional abortions per year,” Johnson said. As part of his call-and-response sermon to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Obama would end a major “indignity” by intoning, “We’ve been there before and we’re not going back.” Well, so have we. We’ve been there as the abortion rate, ratio, and number went through the roof. We’ve been there when the federal government paid for hundreds of thousands of abortions each and every year. We’ve been there when only a Herculean effort stopped enactment of then First Lady Hillary Clinton’s federal health care plan that would have mandated coverage of abortion on demand as routine medical care, no questions asked. We’ve been there for all that, and much more. And we aren’t going back. |