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Obama responds to BornAliveTruth ad
Last week we reported on campaign ads produced by independent organizations, such as the BornAliveTruth.org commercial that’s been running in Ohio and New Mexico. The ad, which features Gianna Jessen, who survived an attempted abortion, questions Barack Obama’s efforts while in the Illinois Senate to defeat the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. In response, the Obama campaign has released an ad in those same two states that attempts to refute the original ad’s claims while trying to tie its running directly to the McCain campaign.
Topic: Campaign 2008, News Desk
Keywords: Abortion, barack-obama, Born Alive Infants Protection Act, Gianna Jessen, John-McCain, TV ads
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back to top45 Comments to “Obama responds to BornAliveTruth ad”
Great ad!
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I love the opening shot of Obama addressing vespers in the open air after a wonderful church picinic! The church is full of overweight, 32-49 yr. old white people. Brilliant.
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Oh yeah, Obama’s different.
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In terms of being subject to dishonest sleazy attacks by Republicans, he can be only as different as circumstances allow.
I’m glad he’s hitting back on this one and calling it the lie that it is. If John Kerry had been faster to defend himself against outright falsehoods, he’d be seeking his second term now.
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4. That’s convenient.
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To deny basic life-saving medical care to any child who “survives” an abortion is the height of cruelty. Anyone ever got to hear a speech by Gianna Jensen (abortion survivor)?
Of course, as the proAborts will remind us all, someone has to pay the bills for the little ones who require all that time in NICU
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Well this is horsepucky:
“In terms of being subject to dishonest sleazy attacks by Republicans, he can be only as different as circumstances allow.”
If he didn’t want to run these ads, he wouldn’t. He made the choice, just as he made the choice to run the ad about McCain and computers which Biden has called wrong.
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If John Kerry had been faster to defend himself against outright falsehoods, he’d be seeking his second term now.
******What falsehoods?******
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Well, I’m not convinced by this ad. Why doesn’t Obama come out and say, “I support health care for aborted babies born alive.”? He doesn’t because he doesn’t. What a sleaze.
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What he says is he supports health care for infants, and you notice he’s in a hospital atmosphere in that scene, but he never addresses the “who survived abortion part.” Not to mention the fact that he misrepresents McCain’s position on abortion. But what’s another lie. Obama certainly is not being honest about his vote.
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Vespers, Scroopy? Church picnic? Why do you make things up?
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The Illinois Attorney general officially opined that the infant protection laws at the time were inadequate and that the proposed legislation was necessary. The act contained language identical to the latter Federal Law that passed unanimously and without demurral by NARAL that protected Roe V Wade. Obama’s excuses then, the same ones offered in this rebuttal, did not stand up to scrutiny when he accused the National Right to Life of lying and distortion following the Saddleback interviews, as his campaign was forced to admit afterward.
The BornAliveTruth.org assertions are true, and the Obama campaign rebuttal repeats previously exposed lies, depending on short attention spans and poor memories to rally his true believers.
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I’ve read Gianna Jensen’s book (years ago) and the book by the Swiftboat veterans. Both are worth reading.
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#8
What I wanna know is why Sen Kerry has declined to release his service record, to include his hospitalizations (if his “war wounds” in fact required any)
I cant help but believe his USN record would have compared favorably against W’s Tx Air National Guard stuff.
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TRS #9: Exactly. If he means to say, “I support medical care for aborted infants born alive,” he could say that. As you say, and it’s perversely to his credit, he doesn’t say that because he doesn’t believe it.
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Politics is so…disgusting. As so many have pointed out, this in another instance of a politician, this time Obama (he does this so often), obfuscating rather than clarifying.
Oh to have clearly articulated positions on matters of importance from the candidates so we can all vote according to our convictions!
Elections have come to such a sorry state. It’s largely a game played by spinmeisters rather than a serious service sought by forthright statesmen.
Give us a clarity, and then we’ll vote for the leadership we think is best for the country!
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I watched the Obama ad, there’s no substance to it. Only spin. The ad states no one supports infanticide, well duh, who’s going to come out and say they do?
Obama was busted on this one, the Jessen testimony nailed him to the wall despite his weak attempt at a rebuttal. I think Obama should hire some of the posters here, they’d probably do a much better job defending Obama than whoever he has producing ads like the one linked here do(or perhaps they already do work for him
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To hear some of you talk, you apparently really believe Obama lies awake at night having vivid fantasies of personally stabbing babies through the head with a fork.
Sawgunner; Kerry released his records in 2005. I have posted a link to an article about it at least four times here over the past few months. Since learning the truth apparently does nothing to put to rest the lie you’re spreading here, I see no point in hunting it up yet again.
TRS at #8: You know perfectly well. If you’re comfortable calling yourself a Christian while defending the false witness spread by the Swiftboat Veterans, that is your business.
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“To hear some of you talk, you apparently really believe Obama lies awake at night having vivid fantasies of personally stabbing babies through the head with a fork.”
He might as well have, as much effort as he put into keeping this important bill dead. He sure doesn’t believe in giving these babies a second chance.
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This is especially sad considering that even the People’s Republic of China, with its draconian population control, considers a child born alive to be a Chinese citizen and entitled to medical care. What does it say when the PRC does a better job on a moral issue than we do?
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Yeah……this ad states that John McCain is against choice. mmmm….Not so. He is for a woman’s choice to give birth. He is for a woman’s choice not to abort a pregnancy. Do you all see how communist liberals spin the verbiage to make it sound like Johnny Mac is the devil? The fact that B. Hussein Obama is the most liberal senator won’t phase any commie who supports him.
Here is the fact: abortion is murder! E. O. S.
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Obama has to vote the party line on this topic. You cannot be the Democratic nominee and be known to vote for anything remotely resembling a pro-life stance. He knows who is paying his coffers. He doesn’t have dreams of stabbing babies, I agree, but he does have nightmares of what will happen to him if he fails to vote the party line.
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How is it a sleazy lie to say that Obama voted to let infants die? Abortion is a key component of his campaign agenda. He freely admits it.
The only difference in this case is that after a trained professional attempts to murder an infant and happens to be unsuccessful and if that child shows some signs of life after attempts to remove his arms and legs or vacuum out his brains have failed, then Caesar Obama will give the young thing the royal thumbs up and give him a chance to live. How benevolent!
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No, Xion, he doesn’t give him the chance to live unless his gestational age is nine months.
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I have heard Gianna Jensen speak and I have read her book. It is just amazing to me how human beings can rationalize anything. There will come a day when everything will be shown to be exactly what it is. No more rationalizing or twisting. Thank God we can ask him to help us do that already and he will!
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Xion: How is it a sleazy lie to say that Obama voted to let infants die? Abortion is a key component of his campaign agenda. He freely admits it.
Because what’s being claimed is that he supports allowing live infants to die for lack of medical care.
That’s much different than abortion.
Obama voted against a badly written piece of legislation. To extrapolate from that that he actively supports the practice the legislation was supposed to address is a lie.
Here’s a hypothetical analogy: Some lawmaker hears of cases of parents or other adults enticing children to smoke cigarettes, and proposes a new law that forbids it. But the way the bill is worded gives rise to the possibility that parents could be prosecuted for buying cigarettes at all, even in the absence of evidence that they are for children. So many lawmakers vote against the bill, because they believe it is too broad.
Then, come election time, those lawmakers end up in attack ads claiming that they “support parents who force children to smoke.”
The truth of their vote has been twisted into a lie about their motive. And the same thing is true of Obama in this case.
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SteveG, you’re just wrong.
Look it up on FactCheck.org. They determined that the bill in Illinois was substantially the same as the one that almost every Democrat and Republican voted for in the U. S. Congress.
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NJL @ #11: Vespers, Scroopy? Church picnic? Why do you make things up?
the real answer, my dear sister in Christ is that he is unSCROOPulous.
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NJLAWYER & THEOPHILUS —
I never make up important things and always acknowledge correction. Therefore, I apologize to all the literalists whom I misled into believing that I was confirming facts about the actual setting in which Obama appears in the ad rather than describing how it looked.
My bad. I should have known that anyone who considers abortion to be murder lacks the capacity to differentiate tropes of description and interpretation from matters of certitude and omniscience.
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If you cannot be trusted to save the lives of the most vulnerable among us, you cannot be trusted to do right in any other arena. This is repugnent and disgusting. A woman’s right to kill her baby trumps the baby’s right to life. God will only allow this evil for so long, and we will pay the price. We probably already are.
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#26 ‘That’s much different than abortion.’
No, no it is not. Why is the baby less human 5 minutes before live birth when this legislation requires care? Does something magical happen in those 5 minutes? Was Gianna not Gianna when she was living in saline solution? These are the questions that Obama does not want asked. In his own words, he opposed these legislative moves because of the threat to abortion on demand. Read the campaign page and see nuance. Obama also claims that there was a 1975 law that protected these children. But that is simply spin on a political blunder by Obama.
http://factcheck.barackobama.com/factcheck/2008/06/30/washington_times_wrong_on_obam.php
Then why aren’t the people that Jill Stanek blew the whistle on in jail? Or at a minimum their medical licenses stripped? Because the 1975 law applied only to “viable” babies born alive not all babies born alive. This 1975 law codified infanticide. Aborted babies are supposed to be dead, thus labeling them as nonviable and putting them in the broom closet to die is not a medical decision but a philosophical one. The 1975 law was fundamentally flawed. His own words on the floor of the IL Senate are his indictment. Read the official transcript.
http://www.jillstanek.com/archives/2008/08/baipaobamamp3.html
Factcheck.org got it wrong.
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the height of cruelty
attempts to murder an infant . . . attempts to remove his arms and legs or vacuum out his brains . . . Caesar Obama
Humane and rational people support the killing of aborted fetuses, not resucitation and intensive care for fetuses expelled by abortion in order to bring maimed and deformed people into the world. Abortion is fetal destruction, not birth.
The “born alive” movement is a back door, indirect strategy to undermine abortion rights by defining fetuses as persons in law. Instead of confronting citizens with the ethical choice to prosecute abortion as murder, the “born alive” movement tries to sneak in prohibitions by appealing to the aesthetic revulsion against abortion surgery.
Obama was correct to oppose the “Born Alive” bill as an attempt to undermine abortion rights by establishing confusing and emotional precedents.
Nature has endowed people with the instinct to regard expelled fetuses as persons, because through the evolutionary trick of delivering such undeveloped newborns, humans make newborns into persons by treating them so. But feeling and acting as if your fetus is a person doesn’t mean that a fetus is a person.
It’s a good and necessary thing for people to feel as they do, and bad for “pro-life” zealots to manipulate feelings with conflictive and abusive language like we read on this thread. The insults actually undermine our humanity. Caesar thrilled the colosseums because the victims were persons capable of shared human sentiment, not despite the crowds’ belief that the victims were not.
If I believed a fetus was a person, I too would think abortion is murder. But there’s reasonable doubt about the ethical status of the fetus among humane and rational people, which means that abortion lacks the universal ethical structure of murder, and juridical approaches to abortion are inappropriate. Obama will help your pastors reduce the frequency of abortion, but he will not give your pastors the keys to the jails. If your pastors can’t stop abortion with the keys to heaven and hell, they shouldn’t blame Obama.
Obama was being polite when he said the origin of personhood was above his paygrade and refraining from declaring the obvious consensus that abortion isn’t murder. In return, Christians want to slap him.
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Kyle: They determined that the bill in Illinois was substantially the same as the one that almost every Democrat and Republican voted for in the U. S. Congress.
Kyle: Obama did not defeat the bill in Illinois all by his lonesome. It failed, THREE TIMES, because the majority of state Senators in the committee voted against it. Do you really think the majority of the committee were bloodthirsty baby-haters who love the idea of babies dying?
That’s the grotesquerie your side is painting on this.
FactCheck’s article on the matter is here.
It does note that he voted against the 2003 version of the state bill that was substantially identical to the federal version he said he would have supported… BUT, and this a significant point, the federal version had already passed, in 2002, before Illinois got a state version in 2003.
What’s the point of having a state law to enforce something that’s already covered by federal statute?
I don’t mean to suggest that Obama has been totally upfront on this. I don’t think he has been, and it’s clearly a part of his record that I imagine he now wishes would go away. But I also don’t see any signs that he likes the idea of killing babies for sport.
Another good gem from FackCheck.org: Jerome Corsi’s “The Obama Nation” is a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods.
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Scroop – if it’s not a person, what is it? That question has never been answered, to my knowledge. Is it a hyena? Is it a beetle? Is it a turtle? What is a fetus, if not human? Is it not a homo sapien? Does it not possess a beating heart? Does it not have fingerprints? Does it not cry? These children are human in EVERY sense of the word – they are helpless, and vulnerable, but very human. Is a disabled person not human because they cannot speak, hear, interact with their surroundings? If a tiny fetus is not human because of these parameters, then neither is someone grossly disabled or deformed.
I have a coworker who’s wife delivered their son at 24 weeks. He could fit in his daddy’s hand. He is now 4, and nearly caught up to his peers developmentally – he is an active, wonderful boy. They fought to save him and his mother. Yet, in another hospital on another day, a boy in his situation could be sucked out and dismembered because his parents didn’t want him. And – even worse – if the abortion happened not to be “successful” and he was born alive, they would be permitted to either A) kill him, or B) leave him to die slowly. This is not schizophrenic and barbaric to you? How far our society has fallen. As I said before, if a person cannot even fight for the sanctity of human life, what good can come from him?
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St. Augustine speculated that a fetus was like an ungerminated seed, without a soul. He seemed to think the truth was unknowable. Mosaic law explicitly denied the fetus protection of the law of personal injury and treated the fetus as property. God was able to “watch” gestation and foresee the development of the psalmist, but He didn’t tell Moses to treat abortion as murder.
“It” is a human fetus, genetically human and alive, but without the constellation of many features and circumstances that identify personhood. Your pet dog has far more temperament and emotional and mental capacity than a fetus.
I was a good parent — and regarded my newborn as a person, the most precious person in all the world, in fact. And did I ever project!
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The “pro-life” argument consists in calling people who practice abortion and oppose the criminalization of abortion as cruel, bloody, barbaric, and inhumane. Without that name-calling, the movement has nothing. Even with the name-calling, the movement can’t persuade half the population, including honorable people, that such such killing is murder.
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I’m quite sure abortion wasn’t performed during Moses’ time.
And, you still failed to answer my question. Is a profoundly disabled person human? What is your criteria? I have known disabled people who could not speak, interact with people (or very little), could not walk, feed themselves, and we weren’t entirely sure what they could take from the world around them. Are they not still human? By your definition, a dog is more human. Should we, then, be able to kill them? After all, these people certainly inconvenience those of us able-bodied people who need to care for them. And they are really expensive to care for. The sanctity of human life must be preserved. Call abortion what you want. But murder is the only fitting description.
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Specious argument, Scroopy. Reasonable doubt falls in favor of the fetus being a CHILD, not the other way around. Reasonable doubt keeps the accused from being found guilty. Think about it.
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Steve at #33,
“Obama did not defeat the bill in Illinois all by his lonesome. It failed, THREE TIMES, because the majority of state Senators in the committee voted against it. Do you really think the majority of the committee were bloodthirsty baby-haters who love the idea of babies dying?”
You and I have been over this before on another post. Obama and his committe voted against it 3 times, along party lines. A 6-4 vote, Dems against, Repubs for. And then as chairman, he refused to bring it to a vote in the State Senate. Yes the majority killed it, not just Obama. BUT he was the chairman, and the majority that killed it was his party.
I don’t think they’re baby haters and I don’t think they dream about babies dying. But I do see total and complete indifference to the babies plight. They’re more worried about the pro-choice endorsments, and let’s not forget the campaign cash that rolls in with it. I think they choose money and ideology over what’s morally right. I don’t think they think about the babies at all. That’s probably the saddest part of this. And it speaks loudly to just what their priorities are.
Here’s the link, since you seem to have forgotten.
http://www.nrlc.org/ObamaBAIPA/Obamacoveruponbornalive.htm
“But in Illinois, Obama kept fighting, now from a chairman’s chair. In 2003, the state bill was reintroduced in its original form, but the chief sponsor also introduced “Senate Amendment No. 1,” an amendment to remove the “immediate protection clause” and insert the exact language of the new “neutrality clause” from the federal bill. Adoption of “Senate Amendment No. 1″ would transform the state bill into a virtual clone of the now-enacted final federal bill/law. Both the bill and the amendment were referred to a committee of which Obama had just become chairman (the Democrats had taken majority control of the Illinois Senate in January, 2003).
On March 12-13, 2003, Obama chaired a meeting of the committee at which Senate Amendment No. 1 was adopted (with his support, 10-0). This transformed the state bill into a virtual clone of the federal bill; see them side-by-side here. Obama then led all of the committee’s Democrats in voting to kill the amended bill, and it was killed, 6-4.”
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DESIGNERGIRL Is a profoundly disabled person human? What is your criteria?
I’m profoundly respectful of your question. Culturally, “human” is what we want it to signify and no more or less than what we make it to be, a category of value that is of ultimate importance to us.
Biologically, “human” is a family of the order of primates. Besides ourselves, there have been many species of humans, wonderful creatures all, some of whom we killed without compunction, and today might consign to a zoo, maintain in an asylum, put on disability, enslave, or treat as pets or companions. The important thing to understand is that not all creatures who were genetically human were characterized by the qualities we associate with personhood.
Of course a profoundly disabled person is a person, because he or she shares our formal condition, such as presence in society, legal protection, personal history, and bonds of attachment and memory with other persons. Moreover, we choose to invest the disabled with totemic inviolability. On the other hand, it’s also true that if every human were profoundly disabled, personhood would cease to have any meaning. The disabled are as “human” as we treat them. (In this line of reasoning, it’s important not to allow capital punishment.)
In contrast to a person, the fetus is not socially present, has no personal history or inferable consciousness, and is replaceable.
I might be against abortion if I thought the practice compromised the human capacity to bond with newborns and nurture personhood. But that’s not where I see disrespect for life in our culture. All the coarseness is to be found in the right-wing proclivity to war, capital punishment, dog-eat-dog competition, environmental exploitation, and racism, homophobia, and sexism.
I know a caring and devoted mother who told me she would have an abortion before giving birth to another child with the genetic disabilities of her two children. I don’t think a jury of 12 of her peers would say beyond a reasonable doubt that her commission of abortion was murder.
I know a young mother who carried a defective fetus to term even though doctors pleaded with her to abort. Despite enormous medical bills, she gave birth in order to let the newborn die in her arms at delivery and have a funeral. It was a personal drama of maudlin sentimentality and monumental narcissism. I’m embarrassed that this young mother didn’t have more prudent guidance. I’m convinced she was influenced by a cultural hysteria that she caught from her social environment.
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Scroopy writes: “In contrast to a person, the fetus is not socially present, has no personal history or inferable consciousness, and is replaceable.”
Mothers, Fathers: which one of your children is “replaceable?”
Every “fetus” is distinct. They’re not a dime a dozen.
” I don’t think a jury of 12 of her peers would say beyond a reasonable doubt that her commission of abortion was murder.”
This “peer” wonders why one would even take the chance. And before you come after me, who do you think you are tell a woman how to grieve over her child? That you can reduce her feelings for her child to “cultural hysteria” is at the least insulting, and it’s callous, but callous is what comes from the inability to see the child as human.
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I’ve delivered 5 healthy children, and lost 3 more in miscarrages. I’ve carried, for at least a time, 8 separate children, and NJL, I’ve fallen in love with each one miraculously as soon as I knew they were being knit together in my womb. None were “replaceable”. I have grieved over the loss of all 3 little ones.
Scroop Moth, just because I couldn’t hold my children in my arms yet doesn’t mean I hadn’t bonded, or had a “history” with them. I hear your argument, but I must strenuously disagree with your premise that society defines humanity. God does, but without the spiritual eyes to see, you won’t see that.
This is so very personal for me. I see Planned Parenthood and their ilk creeping around in the shadows, waiting to pounce on pregnant women who are panicky and confused and easily led. If they really advocate for choice, then why do they not recommend sonograms, or explain the age of the baby in the womb, or provide adoption information?
The reason we react as though this is a grave wickedness is because we see abortion as a murderous sin against a vulnerable tiny person made in the image of God. Satan is a roaring lion, seeking who he may devour. Abortion lines right up with his evil hatred of God’s created people.
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Please tell me Scroop Moth did not really say this in post 40, but someone got his log-in to make him look bad: “Culturally, ‘human’ is what we want it to signify and no more or less than what we make it to be, a category of value that is of ultimate importance to us.”
So Hitler was fine, and treating slaves as subhuman is morally acceptable as long as society agrees, and women can be property of men, and little children can be given to pedophiles to use at will…as long as society doesn’t define these people as “human”?
Scroop, you have just given a perfect example of why human beings must have moral absolutes from outside (the Bible) or we will make up our own, and they might not be pretty.
BTW, a born human being is a baby, not a “fetus.”
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. . . who do you think you are tell a woman how to grieve over her child? A relative, who didn’t tell her anything except, “My deepest sympathy.” I hope she doesn’t have another pregnancy like that, and if she does, I hope the next time she follows medical advice, despite the heavy burden of the precedent she acted out.
a perfect example of why human beings must have moral absolutes from outside (the Bible) or we will make up our own, and they might not be pretty.
Contrary to CW, the slippery slope doesn’t begin with the killing of human fetuses which are not persons, but with the killing of persons who are not deemed “innocent” or who are collateral targets of war. I’m against capital punishment and preventive war for the purpose of making the world politically better. I’d argue that my morality is nobler than yours (besides not being incompatible with the Bible, if that matters).
MOMOF5 Thanks for actually responding to one of the finer pro-choice arguments. I ‘d have to feel the same way if I thought the fetus was a person — but one doesn’t have to think of the fetus as a person. It’s a choice, not a necessary conclusion. And it’s not a choice of cruel, inhumane people. Abortion rights don’t require you to have an abortion. Moreover, your feelings about your own pregnancies are not a reasonable basis for using government to prosecute people who make a different choice about their pregnancies. About replaceability — A fetus can be replaced within a month during fertility. Every fetus is the same — it’s against their nature to be differentiated. A person can never be replaced. Though the loss of a very young child can be borne, the loss of an older child cannot. From that, there is no recovery.
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BTW, a born human being is a baby, not a “fetus.” Yes, but a fetus expelled in an abortion is not a birth. Abortion is destruction, not delivery.
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