Pensees: The Protection of Convenience: Barring the Intrusion of Guilt - the Morals of Senator Obama

The Protection of Convenience: Barring the Intrusion of Guilt - the Morals of Senator Obama

Convenience must thrive unhampered. Let the baby die.

Senator Obama is a dangerous man. In his third debate with Senator McCain he once again slithered around the question of infanticide with such apparent disgust for the horrific practice of leaving a born-alive child to die that even I was made to wonder if THE ONE was legitimately parrying off exaggerated charges. Perhaps, thought I, the bill was packed with all kinds of morally-neutral amendments that he justifiably felt manipulated into casting a vote that would cause him to capitulate to other agendas or risk the spin of being cast by Republicans as a rabid abortionist. Perhaps. Things like that do happen in politics. Maybe the novice Senator had the raw courage to stand by his ideals knowing full well, as he claims, that babies born alive were already protected.

Wrong.

The man blatantly chose to protect the action of abortion by voting not to protect the child born-alive. His motive, in his own words at the time of the debate, was not to “burden” the doctor or the mother that had already decided that the baby should die.

Consider Obama’s own words:

”As I understand it,” Obama said during the floor debate, ”this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child - however way you want to describe it - is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s nonviable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead, that, in fact, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and check off and make sure that this is not a live child that could be saved.” This, he argued, was too much to ask of a doctor performing abortions, and it could also, as he put it, ”burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.” (source)

In other words, said Obama, if the doctor botches the abortion, to be “burdened” with the requirement of calling in another physician to check the fetus or child —”however you want to describe it” — would be tantamount to admitting that somewhere between the botched abortion and the request for the other physician that fetus somehow became human. This is simply too great a “burden” to put on a doctor and his client who merely wanted to accomplish a simple little convenience killing within the sanctity of socially accepted labels such as abortion, partial-birth, non-viable, fetus.

Guilt is so intrusive to convenience. Guilt feelings and hard questions are very unpleasant and risk suppressing convenience-based decisions. Convenience must thrive unhampered. Let the baby die. To bring another person into the room to assess the mangled-but-still-breathing body humanizes the baby and makes poor doctor and mother feel even more inconvenienced by the discomfort of unnaturally killing a baby. Anything that brings the reality of the discomfort of guilt and shame near the abortion clinic must be avoided at all costs. Thus, Barack Obama became the only Senator to cast a vote against the born-alive child — “however you want to describe it” — with a clearly articulated agenda of protecting the abortion industry from inconvenience.

I have Christian friends who are voting for Barack Obama. Some are black. They’re so excited that Obama is black that they are willing to give up their principles in order to vote this man in.

Shame on you. You may be black, but you’re human first. And so is the baby that is born-alive.

I have other Christian friends that are voting for Obama because they do not support the war effort in Iraq. I myself do not support the war effort in Iraq and even go so far as to question its morality. However, to equivocate by pretending that an unjust war (a very difficult case to make even with this war) and abortion (a no-brainer) are equally sinful so it doesn’t matter which poison one picks is to be as convenience-driven as Obama was when he defended the “right” of an abortionist and woman to leave a child to die even though it had survived their murderous attempts. Shame on you.

Finally, to believe Obama without research is to be deliberately naive. He’s good, very good, at lying. In his debate with John McCain he literally tried to dismiss the accusation that McCain made about his vote by sharing the same disgust the rest of us feel toward the barbarity of leaving a child to die. He said, essentially, “If you think it is unbelievable that anyone would vote like that, it’s because it is. It’s not true.” The problem is, Senator, it is true. There’s too much documentation to ignore. Thoughtful people should actually think.

Robert P. George nails it on the head:

Some of Senator Obama’s supporters are now making one last, rather desperate-sounding attempt to defend his votes against protecting infants born alive after unsuccessful abortions. Their argument goes this way: Permitting children who survive attempted abortions to be abandoned is so heinous, so barbaric, that for someone to accuse Senator Obama, a decent man who is himself the father of two daughters, of supporting what amounts to legalized infanticide is too outrageous to merit an answer. There is a problem, though. In light of the documentary evidence that is now before the public, it is clear that the accusation against Senator Obama, however shocking, has the very considerable merit of being true.