Suddenly, the left is concerned about motherhood. Ain't that special? Allah ponders the future:

This is phase one. Phase two will be, “Wouldn’t a strong, responsible, authentic feminist woman have aborted it?” Man, I’m downright giddy at the thought of where the next eight weeks are going to take us.

Jill Staneck has a contrast between Palin's pro-life stand and Obama's refusal to support born-alive infant protection legislation:

Palin is a pro-lifer who not only talks the talk but walks the walk. Palin and her husband chose to deliver her fifth child, Trigg, earlier this year even though he was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome. Her doctor recommended abortion but Palin and her family refused. Indeed, 90% of babies with Down syndrome are aborted in the U.S. today.

But Palin told the Anchorage Daily News in April, "We knew through early testing he would face special challenges, and we feel privileged that God would entrust us with this gift and allow us unspeakable joy as he entered our lives. We have faith that every baby is created for good purpose and has potential to make this world a better place. We are truly blessed."

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, actively opposed legislation as IL state senator to protect little babies with Down syndrome who had survived their abortions but were being shelved in a hospital soiled utility room to die.

In fact, I presented my testimony 3 times before committees then-state Sen. Obama sat, describing my experience of holding a baby with Down syndrome for 45 minutes until he died who was an abortion survivor.

Obama was unmoved and aggressively opposed the IL Born Alive Infants Protect Act.

Unbelievable.

I know what Slublog is talking about:

Obama, who is the father of two girls, likely watched the 20-week sonogram that is now a regular part of the pregnancy experience for most couples. I simply cannot comprehend how a father who saw his children in the womb during that sonogram can be so pro-abortion. The minute I saw pictures of my daughters on that computer screen, I was smitten and struck by the humanity of the fetus.

If Obama saw that, and remains a pro-abortion tool, then he’s an idiot or worse. However, that doesn't explain his position on this particular issue. There is much debate over when life begins, but some sort of consensus exists that it happens once the baby has left the birth canal. Based on his votes, that's not enough for Obama. His position and his votes are based entirely on the intent of the mother - if the mom intended to kill the baby, it should die even if it left the birth canal and survived the abortion procedure.

Sheesh, Obama is disgusting.

Ed Morrissey hits the nail on the head regarding Obama and infanticide:

If child abuse is an evil that must be confronted, then infanticide is even more evil. What did Obama do when he saw this evil? Did he confront it, as one of God’s soldiers? Or did he facilitate it?

The answer now from the Obama campaign is clear. Obama facilitated evil in order to protect abortion on demand, which was never threatened by S.1082 in the first place. That much apparently wasn’t above his pay grade.

What other conclusion can you come to after you read this article:

That family had wanted a baby, but when they learned that theirs would be born with Down syndrome, they wanted an abortion. For that, they went to Christ Hospital in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago, which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ.

In “induced labor” or “prostaglandin” abortion — a common procedure at the hospital. The doctor administers drugs that dilate the mother’s cervix and induce contractions, forcing a small baby out of the mother’s uterus. Most of the time, the baby dies in utero, killed by the force of the violent contractions. But it does not always work. Such abortions sometimes result in a premature baby being born alive. Sometimes the survivors live for just a few minutes, but sometimes for several hours. No one tried to save or treat them — it is hard to save someone you just mauled and tried to kill. But something had to be done with them for the minutes and hours during which they struggled for air.

Stanek says her friend had been told to take this baby and leave him in a soiled utility closet. She offered to take him instead. “I couldn’t let him die alone,” she says.

Stanek was horrified by this experience. This was not an abortion — it was something worse. Could it be legal to take a living and breathing person of any size, already born and outside his mother’s womb, and just leave him to die, without any thought of treatment?

First thought - that hospital needs to change its name, and the United Church of Christ needs to take a long, hard look at itself for allowing this sort of thing to occur at a hospital affiliated with it. Disgusting.

But back to Obama - when legislation was proposed to stop this sort of barbarism, he actually spoke against it in the Illinois Senate. Let that sink in for a moment.

On March 30, 2001, Obama was the only senator to speak in opposition to a bill that would have banned the practice of leaving premature abortion survivors to die. The bill, SB 1095, was carefully limited, its language unambiguous. It applied only to premature babies, already born alive. It stated simply that under Illinois law, “the words ‘person,’ ‘human being,’ ‘child,’ and ‘individual’ include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development"...

Here is what Obama said on the Senate floor that day in opposition to the bill:

There was some suggestion that we might be able to craft something that might meet constitutional muster with respect to caring for fetuses or children who were delivered in this fashion. Unfortunately, this bill goes a little bit further, and so … this is probably not going to survive constitutional scrutiny. Number one, whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a — a child, a nine-month-old — child that was delivered to term. That determination, then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it — it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute.

The absurd conclusion of Obama’s argument is hard to miss. He implies that “pre-viable” babies born prematurely, even without abortions, are somehow less “persons” than are babies who undergo nine months’ gestation before birth.

But even this is not the most important part of his argument. That would be his first sentence — the one about “caring for fetuses or children who were delivered in this fashion.” He seems open to this idea. And he does not state explicitly that a pre-viable, premature baby is not a “person.” Rather, he is arguing that the question of their personhood is a moot point. Even if the state should perhaps provide care for these babies, any recognition of their personhood might threaten someone’s right to an abortion somewhere down the road. That made the bill unacceptable to him.

Most people, whatever their view on abortion, agree that the Constitution at least guarantees the rights of born and living human beings. Barack Obama does not agree. For him, the Constitution exists primarily in order to guarantee the right to abortion, and other rights of human persons — born and alive — are secondary. Beginning with abortion rights as his premise, he draws as his conclusion the unfortunate but necessary legality of infanticide.

Christians who are thinking of voting for this guy really really need to take a long look at this episode. It's legitimate to disagree on the morality of war or domestic economic and welfare policy; but infanticide?

More food for thought.

Absolutely unbelievable:

While in the Illinois legislature, [Obama] opposed a Born-Alive Infants Bill. What this means is that when he, as a state legislator, was presented with the reality that babies who had survived abortions were being left to die, he would not raise his hand to provide those children legal protection. His reason: He didn’t want to cede ground to crazy pro-lifers. He warned: “Whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the Equal Protection Clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a . . . a child — a nine-month-old child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place.”

What kind of a moral monster do you have to be to accept that logic? How utterly blind to human suffering, how uncompassionate? This is just sick. And I refer you to my earlier statement. As a society, we really need to take this issue more seriously before it corrodes our souls down to nothing.

Note, if you will, a new link banner over in the sidebar to a site called Abort73.

The Sunday prior to last was Sanctity of Human Life Sunday in many churches in the US. I ran across that link while browsing through some resources that my church had made available to members of the congregation on the issue of abortion, including a little booklet from Abort73.

I'm about as pro-life as they come, and I'm pretty passionate about the debate once it gets going. I've long felt that the argument over abortion in America has been framed incorrectly from a moral standpoint. The pro-abortion side has, for a very long time, been quite successful in focusing attention on their buzzword of "choice," as if the choice made by a pregnant woman about whether or not to keep her baby was far more important than the life of the baby itself. And as long as the debate is focused on concepts like women's rights and the virtue of being able to make free choices, the pro-abortion side will always win - after all, who wants to oppress women, and who doesn't love freedom and the ability to make free choices?

And while in general, the right of free choice is important, it is not more important than the right to life. For instance, if you offend me, inconvenience me or wrong me in some way, I am not free to choose to kill you in response because the value placed on your life is (or should be) much higher than the value placed on my ability to choose a course of action to right the perceived offense, inconvenience or wrong. There is such a thing as a hierarchy of rights, because some rights are dependent upon others, and thus some rights trump others: The right to choose (or, put another way - the right to pursue happiness) is meaningless if you don't have liberty. And liberty is meaningless if you don't have life. Ultimately, all of our rights depend upon the fundamental right to life.

And so, since life is the most important fundamental human right upon which all other rights depend, the ultimate question in the debate over abortion must be this: when does human life begin? If abortion is a transaction that involves, as the pro-abortion crowd constantly claims, only a woman and her doctor, and the fetus is nothing but a non-human clump of cells and not a separate, living human person, then there's no problem. But if that fetus actually is a separate human life, we have a holocaust on our hands.

And that's exactly what the situation is. The only reason abortion is not recognized as a holocaust is because of the way the debate has been framed. The intrinsic value of the unborn child's life and the horrifying injustice of abortion have been obscured by all the talk of "women's rights" and "choice." And let's be frank: because abortions generally happen out of sight, and because a fetus doesn't necessarily "look human," and because we've never met the fetus and never will, well, it's easy to just not think about it too much.

The more I think about the abortion issue, the more chilling it becomes. And not only because of the millions of lives lost to the procedure, but also because of the corrosive effect that it has had on our society. When the Supreme Court made its huge error in legalizing abortion on demand, proponents of the procedure argued that there was no slippery slope, that this would not lead to legalization of assisted suicide and eventually active euthanasia, that abortion would never be taken so lightly as to become little more than a method of birth control, and so on. And yet, today abortion is primarily viewed as a method of birth control, assisted suicide is available in some jurisdictions and has many advocates, and medical professionals are even starting to talk about active involuntary euthanasia.

Back in 1995, I wrote the following:

We hear a lot in our society about the importance of “death with dignity.” Often this phrase is used in the promotion of physician-assisted suicide by people who argue that those with terminal illnesses should have the right to “hasten their death” in the face of suffering. In so arguing, however, advocates of assisted suicide reinforce the idea that those who suffer have no intrinsic value as human beings that would cause society to favor sustaining their life; and as a result they strip those who suffer of any dignity at all. They seem to say that the terminally sick and aged have no inherent dignity - but it can be earned by choosing suicide.

The assisted suicide movement - like so many well-meaning “compassionate” efforts - fails because it does not recognize the inherent worth of every man, woman, and child. Dignity and value are not commodities that rise and fall on some moral market in response to the fluctuations of human frailty. They are intrinsic to what we are as humans. They are a part of our very nature, as real a part of us as the blood that flows in our veins.

These thoughts come to mind as I read of the passing of Dame Cecily Saunders, the founder of the modern Hospice movement. Her life’s work has allowed countless individuals to face the end of their life with some amount of physical comfort, often in their own home surrounded by their loved ones. There is a profound truth at the core of the movement that she founded: that dignity in death comes not through the act of dying, but through the act of living one’s life to the fullest until death.

One of the most important concepts in Western society is that individuals are not granted rights by a government, but that individuals have been endowed with certain rights by their Creator. Because we are created in the image of God, we each have intrinsic value from the very first moment of our life to the very last. To chip away at that idea is to do damage to - and potentially to destroy - the foundation of every other right that we have. Abortion is nothing more than a chisel, chipping away at and cracking this fundamental foundation of our rights. It has been incredibly damaging to our society, and it will continue to do damage until we have the courage to see it for what it really is. Go look. How comfortable are you?