In his own recorded words, Barack Obama as an Illinois state senator said, in effect, that it would be too burdensome to save a newborn that survived a botched abortion.  While running for president and in reference to contraception and his two daughters Obama said, "I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals.  But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."  At Rick Warren's Saddleback Forum, he said it was above his paygrade to define when human life begins.

 

Not knowing when a microphone is "hot" should make John Kerry and Reverend Jackson reluctant to speak their true minds, and not knowing when human life begins should make Barack Obama reluctant to support abortion.  But, narcissists will be narcissists.

 

On the issue of abortion, what kind of change might we expect from an Obama administration?  Like 5,000 lifeless lawyers sequestering carbon in the cold ocean depths, 48 million abortions since Roe V. Wade could be only a good start.  Obama could nominate Supreme Court justices that might overturn the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, that was ruled constitutional by a slim 5 to 4 decision of the Supreme Court in 2007.

 

Partial birth abortion or dilation and extraction (D&X) was an abortion procedure conducted on 18 week and older fetuses in which a doctor pulled the fetus (an unborn child having been capable of sucking its thumb since week 9) from the uterus feet-first until only its head remained in the birth canal.  Then scissors were used to puncture the fetus's head in order to suction out the brain.  The D&X procedure was an alternate method to the still legal dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortion procedure in which the fetus is cut into easily removable pieces in the uterus.

 

Princeton professor Peter Singer, one of the progressive thinkers in American academia, thinks that killing a newborn "is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living".  A person, as defined by Mr. Singer, is a being that can predict or forecast future needs and desires.  Singer believes newborns and infants think and live only for the present and therefore aren't real persons.

 

Could Obama nominate Supreme Court justices that have a similar philosophy?  Could federal law be enacted that states one of the defining characteristics of a human life is an ability to predict one's future wishes?  And if infants and the mentally challenged never know what they want for evening dinner at morning's sunrise, then are they not human?

 

If this sounds incredulous, it is.  But, Peter Singer's "non-persons" are already being killed in America.

 

Terri Schiavo was a Florida woman who suffered brain damage and was fed through a feeding tube.  She couldn't communicate her present or future desires if she had them, but she could smile and react to the presence of others just like a baby, and her parents and siblings loved her and wanted her to live.  Terri Schiavo's husband wanted her to die and was successful in having Terri's feeding tube removed.  Terri died of starvation.

 

So much for incredulity.  Being on the wrong end of a feeding tube, artificial or prenatal, can be extremely dangerous to your well-being.

 

There were no mass demonstrations or media outcry against starving Terri Schiavo to death.  Apparently, demonstrators and the main stream media were saving their ire for the detention and mistreatment of GITMO terrorists, who never miss a hearty meal.

 

We Americans aren't much more cultured in our repect for human life than the Mayan culture that sacrificed infants to gods or the Spartan culture that threw undesirable babies into the wilderness.  We're just more sterile and nuanced, as good liberals, in our approach to throwing away unwanted babies.