Barack Obama’s false and misleading statements about his positions on abortion, like his false and misleading statements about so many other matters, are so brazen and incessant that it can seem almost futile to try to hold him to account. The National Right to Life Committee, whom Obama falsely accused of lying about his record on the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, dissects his lies on that topic in yesterday’s debate here.
On Obama’s claim that he refused to support a ban on partial-birth abortion only because it lacked a health exception, John McCain correctly pointed out that what Obama really wanted was a loophole that would entirely negate the prohibition. Moreover, as I explained in an NRO essay—“The Mystery of the Missing Lawsuits”—this past April, despite the fact that the Supreme Court in its 2007 ruling on the federal partial-birth abortion act virtually invited practitioners of partial-birth abortion and their allies to bring so-called as-applied challenges that would carve out from the act’s scope any circumstances in which partial-birth abortion might be shown to be necessary to preserve the mother’s health, the abortion industry has not brought any such as-applied challenges. Why not? Because, the evidence strongly suggests, Planned Parenthood and its allies have, to paraphrase their own Ron Fitzsimmons, just been lying through their teeth all along about the supposed health risks.