Jeffrey Miller

Listening to the Hugh Hewitt show he was playing back clips from a speech that Sen. Obama gave before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund on July 17, 2007. Theblog here has the complete transcript.

Thanks to all of you at Planned Parenthood for all the work that you are doing for women all across the country and for families all across the country, and for men, who have enough sense to realize you are helping them, all across the country.

I guess I am glad to be senseless enough to not equate murdering children in the womb with helping me. Yes the great work they are doing for "families" I guess even when it comes to abortion they are doing it for the children.

And as I look out over these crowds and they are a wonderful cross-section of the country, male, female, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, disabled, gay, straight, old, young what I’m heartened to see is particularly the young people who are getting their first chance to be part of a larger movement of Americans. I see young women who are Ariana’s age and younger, and I think about my own two daughters, Sasha and Malia, and sometimes it makes me stop and makes me wonder: what kind of America will our daughters grow up in?

What kind of America will our daughters grow up in?

Of course looking out in the audience he did not see any of the the 49 million people killed since Roe v. Wade. Plus just try to imagine a world where your daughters couldn’t abort your grandchildren. Oh the horror! Of course this year Obama went on to say about his daughters "I don’t want them punished with a baby." So I guess one of his themes is worryingly that his daughters can’t get abortions. He goes on to talk about the Supreme Court’s Gonzales versus Casey.

With one more vacancy on the Court, we could be looking at a majority hostile to a woman’s fundamental right to choose for the first time since Roe versus Wade and that is what is at stake in this election. The only thing more disturbing than the decision was the rationale of the majority. Without any hard evidence, Justice Kennedy proclaimed, It is self-evident that a woman would regret her choice. He cited medical uncertainty about the need to protect the health of pregnant women. Even though the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists found no such uncertainty. Justice Kennedy knows many things, my understanding is he does not know how to be a doctor.

When I read the supposed quote from Justice Kennedy I knew immediately it wasn’t real. I wish he had ever said such a thing, but he certainly did not write this or anything like it in the actual opinion. And if you Google the quote it only shows up in reference to Obama’s speech. But I guess I am just one of those bitter Americans who actually reads the text of the decision. After all he is only a lawyer and taught Constitutional law so we can’t expect him to correctly quote a decision.

Sen. Obama also does not mention that the American Medical Association testified that a partial-birth abortion bore no relevance to any measure needed to advance the health of any woman. The AMA also wrote Sen. Santorum and said "Thank you for the opportunity to work with you towards restricting a procedure we all agree is not good medicine."

He dismissed as mere preferences the reasoned judgments of the nation’s doctors. We’ve seen time after time these last few years when the president says otherwise, when the science is inconvenient, when the facts don’t match up with the ideology, they are cast aside. Well, it’s time for us to change that. It is time for a different attitude in the White House. It is time for a different attitude in the Supreme Court. It is time to turn the page and write a new chapter in American history.

Let me see if I can flesh this out about the science of a partial-birth abortion. From the court opinion. "The main difference between the two procedures is that in intact D&E a doctor extracts the fetus intact or largely intact with only a few passes, pulling out its entire body instead of ripping it apart. In order to allow the head to pass through the cervix, the doctor typically pierces or crushes the skull." So according to Sen. Obama a mothers life is more at risk if the baby is delivered normally than if the baby is killed as it is being delivered and then fully delivered. I guess the "science is inconvenient" that the only difference is that in one case a live baby is delivered and the other that a dead baby is delivered. Now you could ask Obama what is the difference between this in infanticide, but he doesn’t have a problem with that either. He then goes on to call abortion "most fundamental freedoms we have in this country" using the argument of equal rights where the idea is that if a women gets pregnant it destroys her career and keeps her from being equal to men. Ironically he also goes on to say about another court case " it’s an approach to the law that favors the powerful over the powerless." I wonder who is more powerless than an infant in the womb?

There will always be people, many of goodwill, who do not share my view on the issue of choice. On this fundamental issue, I will not yield and Planned Parenthood will not yield. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t find common ground. Because we know that what’s at stake is more than whether or not a woman can choose an abortion.

Then we get a bunch of typical Obama boilerplate about turning the page, moving on, change, hope, yada yada yada. Then he talks about the "tragedy" of teenagers becoming pregnant and then

Not even to the brave servicewomen fighting for our country who aren’t getting the support they need when they come home as veterans of the United States of America. [Applause] If they’re fighting for us, they should be getting the services that they deserve. It’s time to turn the page on a policies that provides almost 1.5 billion dollar to teach abstinence in our schools but refuses to teach basic science and basic contraception.

Yes the real problem is teaching abstinence and not a toxic culture that created the hook-up culture where "first base" is now sexual relations. A world where sex ed classes and increased sex among teenagers is never correlated and if only we dumped even more money into this kind of sex education we will have such a wonderful world.

There’s a moral component to prevention. And we shouldn’t be shy about acknowledging it. As parents, as family members, we need to encourage young people to show reverence toward sexuality and intimacy. We need to teach that not just to the young girls, we need to teach it to those young boys. [Applause] But [Applause] But even as we are teaching those lessons, we should never be willing to consign a teenage girl to a lifetime of struggle because of a lack of access to birth control or a lifetime of illness because she doesn’t understand how to protect herself. That’s just commonsense. There’s common ground on behalf of commonsense there we have an opportunity to move forward and agree.

Once again he views pregnancy very negatively and this time as causing a lifetime of struggle. The thing about liberals talking about abstinence is that it is always done with a "wink, wink" and Obama even says that it is the "ideal but often not the reality." "You know you shouldn’t be having sex at your age, but if you do here is a pile of contraceptives and a key to a hotel room along with some gas money." He then brags about his support for the Prevention First Act which is of course all about contraceptives. I guess when it comes to a "moral component to prevention" contraception isn’t included as a concern. He can’t even bring himself to say that they shouldn’t be having sex but that they should show a "reverence toward sexuality and intimacy" whatever that means. My sneaking suspicion is that it would be totally at odds with the Theology of the Body. More along the plot to Sex in the City.

The theme then once again returns to his daughters Sasha and Melia and that we must not " leave them in ignorance is potentially consigning them to illness, pregnancy, poverty and in some cases death and that’s absolutely unacceptable." Yes whenever I think of pregnancy I also think of illness and poverty. They just go together I guess if you are Barack Obama. Or really "Moloch" Obama the most pro-abortion presidential candidate ever and that says a lot. NARAL was quite happy to endorse him recently. While surely NARAL would have endorsed Sen. Clinton if she had been ahead, they are very happy that they truly have somebody exactly on the same page as them. And this is a page he won’t be turning.