Mofo Politics | Hoping Obama Fails

Infanticide supporter Obama appoints ex-Planned Parenthood official to key post

Posted November 25th, 2008 under Headlines Tags: infanticide, obama, planned parenthood

Life News:

Continuing his quest to put abortion advocates in key places where they could advance a radical pro-abortion agenda, Barack Obama has named a former Planned Parenthood staff as one of his top domestic advisors. Obama named Melody Barnes as his director of the Domestic Policy Council.

Barnes, who served in the upper echelons of the Obama campaign, is no stranger to promoting abortion.

She served on the board of directors of Emily’s List, a group that has spent nearly $250 million promoting pro-abortion candidates.

Barnes also served a stint as a member of the board of directors of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion business that brought in over $1 billion in income the last fiscal year.

The lawyer was also a chief counsel to pro-abortion Sen. Ted Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee where pro-life advocates have fought massive battles on Supreme Court nominees.

Barnes made her pro-abortion bona fides clear in a 2005 article posted on the Center for American Progress web site.

“It is unacceptable to speak timidly about the right embodied in Roe v. Wade,” she wrote. “Too much is at stake the lives and welfare of women, the well-being of their families, and of great importance a concept of liberty that includes women as equal.”

Hey remember that time Barack Obama fought against an anti-infanticide bill that even pro-abortion extremists Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer voted for?

Obama heard the testimony of a nurse, Jill Stanek. She recounted how she’d spent 45 minutes holding a living baby left to die.

The child had lacked the good grace to expire as planned in an induced-labor abortion — one in which an abortionist artificially induces labor with the expectation that the underdeveloped “fetus, or child — however you want to describe it” will not survive the delivery.

Stanek encountered another nurse carrying the child to a “soiled utility room” where it would be left to die. It wasn’t that unusual. The induced-labor method was used for late-term abortions. Many of the babies were strong enough to survive the delivery. At least for a time.

So something had to be done with them. They couldn’t be left out in the open, struggling in the presence of fellow human beings. After all, those fellow human beings — health-care providers — would then be forced to confront the inconvenient question of why they were standing idly by. That would hold a mirror up to the whole grisly business.

Better the utility room. Alone, out of sight and out of mind. Next case.

Stanek’s account enraged the public and shamed into silence most of the country’s staunchest pro-abortion activists. Most, not all. Not Barack Obama.

My friend Hadley Arkes ingeniously argued that legislatures, including Congress, should take up “Born Alive” legislation: laws making explicit what decency already made undeniable: that from the moment of birth — from the moment one is expelled or extracted alive from the birth canal — a human being is entitled to all the protections the law accords to living persons.

Such laws were enacted by overwhelming margins. In the United States Congress, even such pro-abortion activists as Sen. Barbara Boxer went along.

But not Barack Obama. In the Illinois senate, he opposed Born-Alive tooth and nail.