In a Sept. 20 WorldNetDaily article pushing back against a Barack Obama campaign ad that criticized an ad accusing him of “letting infants die” as a “despicable lie,” Drew Zahn writes:
Obama did, however, vote against Illinois born-alive infant-protection bills four times, as Jessen’s ad claims.
Obama has often said, and his own website repeats, that he would have supported the Illinois state law protecting those born-alive infants if it had had a “neutrality” clause like the federal version, which states the law specifically is not intended to impact the status of babies before birth.
As WND reported earlier, however, documentation uncovered by Doug Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee reveals Obama did vote against a version of the Illinois law that was the same as the federal law, contrary to what the candidate has stated.
Zahn fails to tell the whole story of Obama’s opposition to the “born alive” law anti-abortion activists were pushing in Illinois. As we’ve noted, a state law containing the same language as the federal law would not have offered the same protection because federal laws do not regulate abortion as state laws do. Thus, a state law that declared it was not undermining Roe v. Wade — the provison cited by anti-abortion activists as the identical clause in both the state and federal laws in question — would also need to specifically state it was also not undermining relevant state abortion regulations as well.
Zahn also failed to mention Obama’s other defense for not supporting a “born alive” law — that it was unnecessary because the behavior it banned was already illegal, meaning that such a law would be a political statement instead of a new prohibition.
Zahn further fails to note that in 2005, a “born alive” law did pass in Illinois that specifically stated that it would not affect “existing federal or state law regarding abortion,” a clause missing from earlier versions of the bill.
This misleading attack on Obama — largely driven by WND columnist Jill Stanek — has been a staple of recent WND “news” coverage of Obama as a way to make the false claim that Obama supports “infanticide.”