Dana Goldstein has a nice column at RH Reality Check beating back a growing right-wing smear campaign against Barack Obama. It's based around Obama's "no" votes in the Illinois State Senate on the "Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act," otherwise known as BAIPA. Goldstein explains:
Leading anti-choice blogger Jill Stanek, who testified in the Illinois state Senate on behalf of the bill, has played a key role in disseminating this anti-Obama argument in the right-wing blogosphere. Taking the bait, former presidential candidate Sen. Sam Brownback, in a fundraising email to supporters of his political action committee last month, excoriated Obama for opposing BAIPA. And in a Feb. 26 editorial, the National Catholic Register fumed, "Obama wouldn't even protect children born alive by mistake during abortion attempts."
So was Obama's decision a vote for infanticide? Not in the slightest. The procedure targeted by BAIPA -- known as "dilation and extraction" -- is extremely rare:
Dilation and extraction accounts for less than one-fifth of one percent of all American abortions, and is used most often to end wanted pregnancies in which expectant parents learn their baby will not be viable outside of the womb.
The bill was a red-herring. Like the Partial Birth Abortion Act in Congress, it was written by anti-choicers to vilify women and doctors who perform legal abortions (90 percent of which occur during the first 16 weeks of pregnancy). Obama, to his credit, called a spade a spade, voting against BAIPA twice:
On the state Senate floor on April 4, 2002, he explained, "This issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births. Because if there are children being born alive, I, at least, have confidence that a doctor who is in that room is going to make sure that they're looked after."
In short, Obama did not oppose a bill that intended to protect children "born alive by mistake"; he opposed a desperate measure by the right-wing to curb Illinois women's reproductive freedom.
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