Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports that Hillary Clinton is attacking Obama with a mailer in New Hampshire that accuses him of being soft on “abortion rights” because he voted “present” seven times on abortion bills while serving in the Illinois State Senate. Pickler notes that Obama’s support for abortion was actually extremely radical: “He voted against requiring medical care for aborted fetuses who survive, a vote that especially riled abortion opponents.” (The last time I checked, “fetuses who survive” birth ought to be classified as “infants,” colloquially known in many parts of the country as “babies.”) As Amanda Carpenter of Human Events wrote in a column from last year, Obama voted “present” on the Illinois anti-infanticide bill before he voted “no”–a position more radical than that of NARAL (the group formerly known as the National Abortion Rights Action League). In fact, Obama’s vote on the anti-infanticide bill seemed to be more extreme than Hillary Clinton’s position on abortion because the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act passed the Senate in 2002 on a voice vote with unanimous consent. Does Hillary Clinton now oppose the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act? Her campaign’s press shop has refused to respond to repeated phone calls from me in the past, so if anyone else in the media can get to the bottom of this, that’s something voters would like to know about.
