Last night during his Republican National Convention speech, Fred Thompson skewered Barack Obama for his opposition to IL’s Born Alive Infants Protection Act:

We don’t need a president who thinks protecting the unborn or the newborn baby is above his pay grade.

Afterward, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews engaged in a lengthy discussion on that point with Republican NM Congresswoman Heather Wilson.
Keith Olbermann couldn’t help but jump in to carry water for Obama by misstating that Obama opposed Born Alive because there was already a law in place, which was false. Here’s the video:

Read reasons why Olbermann’s rationale of Obama’s vote this was flat out false on page 2.
In fact, MSNBC reporters slanted their GOP abortion coverage last night, obsessing about the pro-life platform and politicians when last week at the Democrat Convention they totally ignored the radical abortion positions of the party and politicians, most notably Obama, who supports infanticide if it would otherwise interfere with abortion. From the Media Research Center’s report…

Obsessing over Sarah Palin’s pro-life position on abortion, MSNBC hosts and reporters on Tuesday night repeatedly raised it and painted it as a detriment to Republicans even though last week with Democrats the channel did not similarly pursue how a solidly left view on abortion might hurt Obama and Biden. By the count of the MRC’s Geoff Dickens, between 8 PM and midnight EDT, MSNBC raised abortion at least 16 times, twice with an edge that painted the GOP position as extreme by applying a “hard right” label. Chris Matthews declared “they are going hard right on abortion rights” and later David Gregory asserted: “The abortion platform here is pretty hard right.”
Chuck Todd, Political Director for NBC News, fretted over how “this is as stringent of a platform on abortion the Republican Party ever has. And the problem is” that “these delegates are more conservative than even the ones four years ago.” Andrea Mitchell described Palin as “very conservative” and pressed a Republican Congressman: “Now there are a lot of women in that area who are less conservative socially than Sarah Palin. There are a lot of women who believe in choice. So how do you square the circle there?”
Matthews bemoaned to Tom Ridge that “it seems like you got a convention saluting a vice presidential nominee who wants to outlaw abortion, period, across the country. Is this going too far?” To Tim Pawlenty, Matthews demanded: “Do you believe you can win with the cultural statement being made by the selection of Governor Palin? That statement being someone from the very culturally conservative part of your party?”

The bias is disgusting.
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Obama Assertion: IL’s Born Alive was unnecessary, because “IL law already stated that in the unlikely case that an abortion would cause a live birth, a doctor should ‘provide immediate medical care for any child born alive as a result of the abortion” (August 19, 2008, Obama campaign document).
Refutations:
1. IL pro-life Republican Attorney General Jim Ryan determined shelving babies to die in hospital soiled utility rooms was not illegal. See letter here: www.jillstanek.com/archives/2008/08/did_il_abortion.html
2. Obama reasoned at the time that providing legal protection to newborn preemies would be unconstitutional (read both IL State Senate floor speeches here: www.jillstanek.com/archives/obama-links-to/), not that there was already a law in place
3. If IL Born Alive Act was unnecessary, why did it finally pass in the Democrat-controlled IL General Assembly 6 months after Obama left for the US Senate, followed by IL’s pro-abortion Gov. Rod Blagojevich signing it into law? See law and votes here: www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=984&GAID=8&DocTypeID=HB&LegId=15648&SessionID=50&GA=94
3. Quoting National Right to Life on the IL abortion law itself (www.nrlc.org/ObamaBAIPA/WhitePaperAugust282008.html):

Obama explained in 2001, and has never recanted, that he opposed the Illinois BAIPA because it declared a “previable fetus” to be a legal person — even though the bill only did so if the baby had achieved “complete expulsion or extraction from its mother.”
The old Illinois law in question (720 ILCS 510.6) covered only situations where an abortionist declares before the abortion that there was “a reasonable likelihood of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb.” Humans are often born alive a month or more before they reach the point where such “sustained survival” — that is, long-term survival — is likely or possible (which is often called the point of “viability”).
The old Illinois law has no bearing on many of the induced-labor abortions about which the nurses testified before the committees in Congress and the Illinois state legislature, because many of them were performed on unborn humans who were capable of being born alive, and who often were born alive, but who were not old enough to have a “reasonable likelihood of sustained survival… outside the womb.”
Even with respect to “viable” infants, the old law is ridden with loopholes. It does not apply except when the abortionist himself declares that there is “a reasonable likelihood of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb.” This already-weak law was further weakened by a lengthy consent decree issued by a federal court in 1993, which among other things permanently prohibits authorities from enforcing the law’s definitions of “born alive,” “live born,” and “live birth.”
On April 4, 2002, Obama spoke on the Illinois Senate floor against a bill (SB 1663 — which was not the BAIPA) that would have more strictly defined the circumstances under which the presence of a second physician (to care for a live-born baby) would be required; Obama argued that this would “burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion . . . [I]t’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births.”

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