During the primary season, Barack Obama took a lot of heat from feminists like NOW and Hillary Clinton for his "present" votes in the Illinois Senate, despite the fact that they were part of a pro-choice strategy coordinated by the Illinois Planned Parenthood Federation. These days, the right is gearing up attacks on Obama for his record of supporting abortion rights too much in the same legislative body. Only they're not going to attack him on some namby-pamby procedural thing — they're calling him a baby-killer.

The whole controversy stems from an Illinois bill called the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which supporters contended would require doctors to provide medical treatment to a fetus that survives and abortion. Of course, the legislation would've also significantly restricted access to abortion — which was the real point, given that Illinois law already required that medical treatment be provided to infants that survived abortion. In fact, the Illinois Medical Association opposed the bill for many of the same reasons Obama did — that it was a back-run, feel-good attempt to persuade legislators who would have otherwise opposed bills that restricted abortion access to support the bill so they wouldn't get called baby-killers. Obama didn't take the bait.

By the way, the whole effort to push this meme is being led by Jill Stanek, a rabid pro-lifer from Illinois who, it turns out, is also raising money to fund more anti-condom billboards in AIDS-ravaged Tanzania because she thinks people shouldn't ever have sex outside of marriage. So, it's not about the precious life of your precious child that Obama supposedly wants to kill, the legislation was just another attempt by the same old anti-abortion and "purity" crowd to get their religious beliefs enshrined into law. In other words, it's a smear campaign run by the same old people that consider every abortion an infanticide and every doctor that provides them an immoral abortionist. But if they called Obama pro-choice or pro-abortion, the media and the independent voters would yawn, so they went with baby-killer. It just has a better ring to it to the kind of people that don't want women to ever have one.

NOW Again Attacks Obama's Illinois Voting Record on Abortion Bills [Washington Post]
Hillary Slams Obama 'Present' Votes On Abortion, Gun Laws [Chicago Sun Times]
Wash. Post's Solomon Ignored Planned Parenthood Support For Obama's Abortion Votes [Media Matters]
Obama Infanticide Attack Being Readied By 527s, Pat Buchanan Says [Huffington Post]
Obama Faces New Criticism on Abortion [Associated Press]
Obama's Pro-Life Critic [Politico]
Obama And Abortion Ctd. [Andrew Sullivan]

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