Tuesday, August 19, 2008

I wanted to like him..

Raise your hand if you were born in your mom's third trimester! Yea, that's what I thought...you are the type to raise your hand when reading a blog. Regardless, most of of us were born in the third trimester. Some even born in the second trimester are alive and well today. Unfortunately, its this issue that totally has made it no way that I can vote for Barack Obama.

If you missed it this weekend, Obama and McCain were interviewed at Saddleback church by Pastor Rick Warren, author of the famous Purpose Driven Life book. Overall, Obama danced around most questions and didn't give very many clear answers. This combined with his relatively short record in public politics make a lot of his positions unknown. But, he was clear on one issue. Around 2:16 of the clip below he is alright with late term abortions and says he is in favor of limiting late term abortions. To me, since there are some who are alive and well born at 22-26 weeks....considered the second trimester and not the third. Want to see proof? You can read here about a baby who was born in January and living at 24 weeks. I find that those who don't believe that life starts at conception will sway towards pro-choice. But, do you continue to support "choice" when otherwise the baby would live?

For the record, I wanted to like Obama. In my opinion, he had a better health care plan and a better view on the environment. More importantly, I thought he would shake up things more and I felt like we needed a political change.

However, my concerns have started outweighing his positives. His speeches across Europe made it sound like he was pandering to that European audience. I have no desire for our president to be pandering to a European audience. His position on abortion is irreconcilable against my beliefs. And he has too many grey areas where I cannot draw a conclusion as to what his stance is. This Saddleback forum showed that to me.

In contrast, McCain has been clear. You may not like his positions, but there is no doubt as to what they are. McCain's health care plan has come around. Its not just a $5000 tax credit but provisions for those who have pre-existing conditions that make their insurance much higher than $5000.

McCain has not won my vote yet but I think Obama has lost it due to his stance on abortions. Here is more on Obama's stance on abortion. He even voted against banning partial birth abortions when an exception for the mother's health was made. Here is the definition of partial birth abortion, sometimes called late term abortion which Obama talks about in the video below, from wikipedia:


In the U.S., a federal statute defines "partial-birth abortion" as any abortion in which the fetus is extracted "past the navel [of the fetus] . . . outside the body of the mother," or "in the case of head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother," in order to cause death of the fetus. [...] Removing a dead fetus does not meet the federal legal definition of "partial-birth abortion," which specifies that partial live delivery must precede "the overt act, other than completion of delivery, that kills the partially delivered living fetus."[27] Additionally, a doctor may extract a fetus past the navel and then cut through the neck.

So, thats a baby that is extracted alive from the mother and then killed purposefully. Obama has continually voted against banning those.

Here is his position on abortion from his own mouth. He even mentions late term abortions which can be another term for partial birth abortions. Although he claims to support "limiting" late term abortions, he has voted against banning them even when there are exclusions for the mother's health.

No comments: