Far Right Lies About Obama's Abortion Record ... Seth Colter Walls of the Huffington Post let us know on August 2nd that the far right was preparing a concerted effort to smear Sen. Barack Obama by saying he supported infanticide. The story has now made its way into stories looking at the abortion debate this election cycle published in three of the nations largest news papers today, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. The basis for the absurd claim is a vote Obama and five other Democrats made in the Health and Human Services Committee of the Illinois General Assembly. Obama led the Dems in a party line vote that defeated a bill called the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. The bill states that infants born alive from the womb, perhaps during an extremely rare late-term abortion procedure, would be given life-saving medical attention. The bill is legally useless as any infant born from the womb alive at any time is protected by murder statutes and. From the beginning the Born Alive Infant Protection Act was intended to play politics with this serious issue and five years later the far right is using it to do just that. Obama and the other Dems on the committee voted agasint the bill becasue, as the Chicago Tribune reports:
... at the state level it could have undermined Illinois' legal precedents.
Once more, the key is that 1975 Illinois abortion law, which contains language that's similar but not identical to the later bill. The 2003 bill could have affected the way courts interpret the 1975 law.
In 2005 (after Obama was already in the U.S. Senate) when Illinois lawmakers inserted an extra provision asserting that the law would not affect "existing federal or state law regarding abortion," the measure passed without objection.
The far right smear machine has decided to ignore this fact and claim that the real reason Obama and five other Illinois Democrats voted down the legislation in committee in 2003 was that they were voting to support infanticide for infanticides sake.
This is a textbook example of the way these people work. This bill was introduced in many states and indeed in the U.S. Senate, where it passed in 2002 98-0 after explicit language was inserted to protect federal abortion precedents, with the sole purpose of being able shout 'infanticide' at any politician who voted no for any real, legal concern for women. And now the plan is paying divedends as mention of this far right smear makes its way into our nation's leading news institutions.
UPDATE: See Obama's response to these lies on his fact check website.
Kentucky Accepts Federal Abstinence-only Funds and Tries to Scare Teens into Abstinence ... The state of Kentucky decided to accept federal money to fund abstinence-only education in its schools despite a teen birth rate that far exceeds the national average:
Critics of abstinence-only education are disappointed by Kentucky’s continued participation, pointing out that the state’s teen pregnancy rate far exceeds the national average — proof that this approach to sex education clearly is not working.
Between 2005 and 2006, the Centers for Disease Control reports that the teen birth rate in Kentucky jumped 6.6 percent, more than twice the national average that same year. Overall, the number of 15- to 19-year-olds giving birth in Kentucky is 19 percent higher than the national average.
“Numbers don’t lie,” says William Smith, vice president for public policy with the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. “It is time for Kentucky to join many other states in refusing this failed experiment of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.
And check the language on flyers given out at health departments in Kentucky attempting to scare teens out of pre-marital sex:
A handful of local health departments across Kentucky share the following grim words of caution with teenagers: “WARNING! Going on this ride could change your life forever; result in poverty, heartache, disease, and even DEATH.”
The foreboding message — delivered via overhead projector in a font fit for a horror movie — then warns that those who ignore this advice will likely “come out losers.”
The potentially deadly “ride” is premarital sex, and the message is part of a federally funded abstinence-only-until-marriage education program, which teaches adolescents that abstaining from sex is the only safe option, omitting information about contraceptives.
AIDS Claims More Rural, Black, Female Populations in Georgia ... HIV/AIDS is disproportionately affecting rural black women in the US South and Atlanta-Journal Constitution reports that trend is holding true in Georgia:
By 2006, 71 percent of those living with HIV/AIDS in Georgia were black, although African-Americans are about 30 percent of the state’s population, according to state figures. Seventy-nine percent of Georgians diagnosed with HIV that year were African-American.
