The controversy over Senator Obama's vote against a bill that would have protected infants from being allowed to die subsequent to having survived an attempt to abort them continues despite the fact that the MSM has had almost nothing to say about it.
Ramesh Ponnuru adds some thoughts in his column at NRO. He writes:
Nurse Jill Stanek said that at her hospital "abortions" were repeatedly performed by inducing the live birth of a pre-viable fetus and then leaving it to die. When she made her report, the attorney general said that no law had been broken. That's why legislators proposed a bill to fill the gap.
Obama did not want the gap filled. He did not want pre-viable fetuses/infants to have any legal protection. In the Illinois legislature, he argued that providing them with legal protection would both be unconstitutional in itself - a violation of the Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence - and undermine the right to abortion.
Obama was wrong about these points. The Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence treats the location of the young human organism, not its stage of development, as the key factor in whether it can be legally protected.
It's not clear yet how many people are aware of Obama's stand on infanticide since the MSM seems disinclined to inform the public about it, nor is it clear how much the public will care even if they do know. One thing we can say for sure, though, is that the issue certainly won't help him.
Meanwhile, the candidate who reminds us that we are our brother's keeper turns out to have a brother living in abject penury in a six foot by nine foot shack on the outskirts of Nairobi. Surely, some of the ample proceeds from Obama's book could have been diverted to helping this suffering brother. Evidently they weren't.
RLC
