Kevin Vance has done some fresh reporting on Obama's vote against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. Earlier this week, the NRLC provided a document showing that Obama voted against a version of the bill that included an amendment clarifying that the act would not be used to undermine Roe v. Wade. Obama said the lack of such language was one reason he voted against the bill.
After talking to Obama's colleagues in the Illinois state senate, Vance reports that Obama's other excuse for voting against the bill is equally spurious:
The other reason Obama opposed the bill, according to his website, is that the "born alive principle was already the law in Illinois." An existing 1975 law is cited as proof that new legislation was unnecessary.
Illinois state senator Dale Righter, the ranking Republican on the 2003 Health and Human Services Committee, says Obama did not raise that concern at the hearing: "There was no discussion of anything like that." Democratic state senator Susan Garrett similarly says she did not remember the 1975 law being raised during the hearing.
Obama's campaign did not return a phone call asking for a response to Righter's claim.
In any case, the 1975 law does not apply to non-viable infants born alive. According to Paul Linton, special counsel for the Thomas More Society, the 2003 bill was a response to the question, "What duties are owed to a non-viable child born alive?" The bill sought to guarantee comfort care for non-viable infants similar to the care that would be provided to any terminally ill adult. "Many of these babies lived for hours after birth," Susan T. Muskett, legislative counsel at the NRLC, writes in an email. "Are these babies medical waste, or persons protected by the Constitution? Obama's reaction was to consider them non-entities under Roe v. Wade until they were 'viable,' even when they were gasping outside the mother."
