The election is coming up very quickly. I know there are many of my brothers and sisters in Christ who just don’t like Senator John McCain. I also know some my mostly younger evangelical brethren who have been swayed by the rhetoric of the Obama campaign and “progressive” evangelical groups like Sojourners and the Matthew 25 Network.
Those groups talk about finding middle ground on abortion. It is played off as not as important as addressing poverty. It is a “dividing wedge” issue they say (so let’s avoid the topic if we don’t agree). Those who has bought into this line of thinking or who have been star struck need to know who they are voting for when it comes to his view regarding the pre-born.
Dr. Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, wrote a piece for the Public Discourse – the Witherspoon Institute’s blog entitled “Obama’s Abortion Extremism” on 10/14/08:
Sen. Barack Obama’s views on life issues ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket.
Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.
Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals-even self-identified pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals – who aggressively promote Obama’s candidacy and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of view.
The fact that some self-identified “pro-life” Catholics and evangelicals support him is stunning; saying that he isn’t pro-abortion, but pro-choice. After all who wouldn’t want a world without abortions? George examines their arguments and finds them wanting. George states that you simply can not say that about Barack Obama, and he gives compelling reasons in the following bullet points:
-
He supports repealing the Hyde Amendment which protects taxpayers from having to pay for abortions that are not necessary to save the life of the mother or are not the result of rape or incest.
-
He said that the first thing he would do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). This would create a federally guaranteed “fundamental right” to abortion throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy. This legislation would nullify existing state and federal anti-abortion law and policies.
-
He opposed the partial birth abortion ban (unlike many “pro-choice” legislators) in the Illinois Senate. He then condemned the Supreme Court decision that upheld the ban.
-
He said that an unexpected pregnancy is punishment that a young woman should not have to endure.
-
He has said women’s equality requires access to abortion on demand.
-
He also wants to strip federal funding from crisis pregnancy centers.
So much for finding middle ground on abortion in order to reduce the number of them that occur! George says that it gets even worse:
But it gets even worse. Senator Obama, despite the urging of pro-life members of his own party, has not endorsed or offered support for the Pregnant Women Support Act, the signature bill of Democrats for Life, meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women facing crisis pregnancies. In fact, Obama has opposed key provisions of the Act, including providing coverage of unborn children in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), and informed consent for women about the effects of abortion and the gestational age of their child. This legislation would not make a single abortion illegal. It simply seeks to make it easier for pregnant women to make the choice not to abort their babies. Here is a concrete test of whether Obama is “pro-choice” rather than pro-abortion. He flunked. Even Senator Edward Kennedy voted to include coverage of unborn children in S-CHIP. But Barack Obama stood resolutely with the most stalwart abortion advocates in opposing it.
Still not done – his positions & record gets even worse:
-
As an Illinois State Senator, Senator Obama opposed legislation to protect children who are born alive. This legislation would not ban abortions, but protect babies who survive abortion and babies who were deliberately delivered. The federal version passed unanimously in the United States Senate.
-
Senator Obama also wants to lift President Bush’s funding restriction on embryonic stem cell research. Senator McCain holds this position as well, and I vehemently disagree with him in regards to this position.
-
Obama has co-authored a bill that would authorize the large-scale industrial production of human embryos for use in biomedical research. (McCain strongly opposes this bill.) Basically this would allow “embryo farms.”
-
Obama was one of a few senators that opposed funding non-embryonic stem cell research.
Regarding the pro-life Obama supporters George writes:
They typically do not deny the facts I have reported. They could not; each one is a matter of public record. But despite Obama’s injustices against the most vulnerable human beings, and despite the extraordinary support he receives from the industry that profits from killing the unborn (which should be a good indicator of where he stands), some Obama supporters insist that he is the better candidate from the pro-life point of view.
They say that his economic and social policies would so diminish the demand for abortion that the overall number would actually go down-despite the federal subsidizing of abortion and the elimination of hundreds of pro-life laws. The way to save lots of unborn babies, they say, is to vote for the pro-abortion-oops! “pro-choice”-candidate. They tell us not to worry that Obama opposes the Hyde Amendment, the Mexico City Policy (against funding abortion abroad), parental consent and notification laws, conscience protections, and the funding of alternatives to embryo-destructive research. They ask us to look past his support for Roe v. Wade, the Freedom of Choice Act, partial-birth abortion, and human cloning and embryo-killing. An Obama presidency, they insist, means less killing of the unborn.
This is delusional.
We know that the federal and state pro-life laws and policies that Obama has promised to sweep away (and that John McCain would protect) save thousands of lives every year. Studies conducted by Professor Michael New and other social scientists have removed any doubt. Often enough, the abortion lobby itself confirms the truth of what these scholars have determined. Tom McClusky has observed that Planned Parenthood’s own statistics show that in each of the seven states that have FOCA-type legislation on the books, “abortion rates have increased while the national rate has decreased.” In Maryland, where a bill similar to the one favored by Obama was enacted in 1991, he notes that “abortion rates have increased by 8 percent while the overall national abortion rate decreased by 9 percent.” No one is really surprised. After all, the message clearly conveyed by policies such as those Obama favors is that abortion is a legitimate solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancies – so clearly legitimate that taxpayers should be forced to pay for it.
But for a moment let’s suppose, against all the evidence, that Obama’s proposals would reduce the number of abortions, even while subsidizing the killing with taxpayer dollars. Even so, many more unborn human beings would likely be killed under Obama than under McCain. A Congress controlled by strong Democratic majorities under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi would enact the bill authorizing the mass industrial production of human embryos by cloning for research in which they are killed. As president, Obama would sign it. The number of tiny humans created and killed under this legislation (assuming that an efficient human cloning technique is soon perfected) could dwarf the number of lives saved as a result of the reduced demand for abortion-even if we take a delusionally optimistic view of what that number would be.
How can a Christian, who knows the facts about his record, can vote for him with a clear conscience? I don’t want to question the faith of those evangelicals who support him, but I do want to exhort them that God’s word is clear regarding abortion. When Obama says that he wants to work to reduce the number of abortions, and that he wants to find middle ground with those who are pro-life what in his record has shown that he will do that? Nothing. He has shown quite the opposite. An Obama administration will be simply dangerous for the pre-born.
HT: David C. Innes for the article and From Their Own Mouths for the 3rd video in this post.