No Runny Eggs

In an interview  this week with “Relevant,” a Christian magazine, Obama said prohibitions on late-term abortions must contain “a strict, well defined exception for the health of the mother.”

Obama then added: “Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.”

Wow! Barack Obama is now running limping to the center even on abortion rights!

Except he’s not.

The Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) is a bill (Senate 1173 and House 1964) that Barack Obama has said he would immediately sign if he was President. At a speech to  the Planned Parenthood Action Fund Obama said:

“The first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act,” Obama said in his July speech to abortion advocates worried about the increase of pro-life legislation at the state level.

The specific language of the bill that Obama was addressing is:

(b) Prohibition of Interference- A government may not–

(1) deny or interfere with a woman’s right to choose–
(A) to bear a child;
(B) to terminate a pregnancy prior to viability; or
(C) to terminate a pregnancy after viability where termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman; or

(emphasis mine)

Looking at the language and listening to Obama, it seems like he is using a reasonable interpretation of what “health” is, except his definition of “health” is not what the Supreme Court has found in prior decisions. According to: The Supreme Court on Abortion: A Survey
by Mark Tushnet, from Abortion, Medicine, and the Law, Third Edition, 1986, pp. 162

“The final stage of pregnancy under Roe v. Wade occurs after the fetus becomes viable. After viability, the state could regulate or prohibit abortions unless they were “necessary, in appropriate medical judgement”, to preserve the life or health of the woman. This standard must be read, however, in light of the Court’s decision the same day in Doe v. Bolton, that clinical judgement “may be exercised in light of all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age — relevant to the well-being of the patient

(again, emphasis mine)

Obama is Co-Sponser  of the Senate version of FOCA, the bill that if unchanged and left to the Supreme Court, will likely allow partial birth abortions for a wide variety of reasons including claims of mental health impacts. Yet Obama claims mental health shouldn’t be a reason. That seems to leave me with only two conclusions about Obama’s interview comments:

1. This is another example of Obama backing off of an earlier commitment

or

2. Barack knows full well the implications of the Supreme Court’s previous decisions and his comments to a Christian magazine were nothing but deceitful pandering.

You decide.