How Extreme is Obama on Abortion? He Would Not Make the Philadelphia House of Horrors Illegal

As shocking as the stories from the Philadelphia House of Horrors are - accounts of infants born alive but murdered by the abortionist with scissors immediately after birth - there is another shocking angle to this story. The current president of the United States is so extremist in his pro-abortion views that he favors these barbaric crimes being made legal.

From the editors of National Review Online comes this sobering piece: "Ho Hum Horror"

"The case of Kermit Gosnell reached the newspapers just a few days before the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. President Obama did not mention Gosnell in his official statement celebrating the anniversary. But the case sheds more light on Roe’s import than the statement did.

Obama did not refer to the word “abortion,” preferring instead to discuss “reproductive freedom” and the “fundamental principle” that “government should not intrude on private family matters.” The stories about Gosnell were a little less abstract. They told of a clinic where dirty instruments spread venereal disease, cats roamed and defecated freely, and some patients died. The state government conducted essentially no oversight; administrations of both parties wanted to keep abortion as free from governmental intrusion as possible.

Gosnell’s Philadelphia clinic’s lack of hygiene is not the detail that has captured the most attention, or inspired the most outrage. It turns out that Gosnell frequently, perhaps hundreds of times, fully delivered intact fetuses and then used scissors on the newborn. In his words, he engaged in “snipping” to “ensure fetal demise.” In many cases, the fetuses were in the third trimester.

This procedure, sometimes called a “live-birth abortion,” is illegal. But not thanks to President Obama. As a state legislator in Illinois, he argued that the law should offer no protection to neonates if they had been delivered before viability. He said that protecting them would violate Roe v. Wade and undermine the right to abortion. What looked like infanticide to most people was for him, it must be inferred, a “private family matter.” When Gosnell applied his scissors to pre-viable children, he was, on Obama’s terms, merely exercising a cherished freedom.

Credit Obama with a real insight: The physical location of a human being conceived five months ago may mark the difference between whether he is considered a “fetus” or an “infant,” but it cannot mark a moral difference. Nor can it make a moral difference whether this being is partly inside the womb. When Congress moved to ban partial-birth abortion, most liberals took the view that any prohibition had to include a health exception: If in the judgment of the abortionist the safest method of . . . ensuring fetal demise . . . was to partly deliver the fetus, crush its skull, vacuum its brains, and then deliver the rest, then he had to be free to do so — at any stage of pregnancy. President Obama favored this health “exception.”

Read the rest here. This man must go; his position on this atrocity is beyond the pale of civilized discourse.