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"As we witnessed Tuesday, in election after election, National Right to Life and its network of 50 state affiliates and more than 3,000 local chapters helped provide the margin of victory for pro-life candidates" ("Polling Shows Impact of Abortion Issue in Mid-Term Election," nationalrighttolifenews.org, Nov. 6).
For example, National Right to Life, which describes itself as working "through legislation and education to protect innocent human life from abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide and euthanasia," summarizes the midterms as such: "Despite being vastly overspent by pro-abortion organizations such as Planned Parenthood and EMILY's List, pro-life candidates won ... by significant margins. There were 26 races in which a candidate supported by National Right to Life was running against a candidate supported by the pro-abortion (and pro-Obama) PAC EMILY's List. Nineteen (73 percent) of the National Right to Life candidates won."
Readers who were heretofore unaware should know by this point that I'm a pro-life atheist, and I'll explain how I came to have these views as we go on.
Now dig this, which was largely unreported by the media covering the midterm elections: "National Right to Life's political committees were actively involved in 74 races. In those races, 53 (72 percent) pro-life candidates prevailed, including pro-life Senate candidates in Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota and West Virginia."
Connecting abortion with the ending of "innocent human life" describes why pro-lifers throughout America have opposed Obama from even before he was elected president.
When he was a member of the Illinois Senate, Obama voted three times against versions of the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, which did not pass until 2005. This legislation mandated that if a live baby fully emerged as a result of a failed abortion, its life would be saved.
I am convinced that disobeying that law is tantamount to infanticide, and I have been writing about it in this column and other publications over the past few years. As I reported in the Winter-Spring 2009 issue of Human Life Review about Obama's unyielding support of abortion, including the high percentage of abortions among black women ("President Obama and 'Black Genocide'"), I spoke with a registered nurse who worked in the Labor and Delivery Department at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, and had involuntarily taken part in a botched abortion.
Some of what she told me about these babies who were abandoned after "'live-birth' abortions" also appeared in a September 2000 House Judiciary Committee report on the proposed Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2000 (Report 106-835, gpo.gov). (This bill was passed in 2002.)
One of the babies "was left to die on the counter of the soiled utility room wrapped in a disposable towel. This baby was accidentally thrown in the garbage, and when they later were going through the trash to find the baby, the baby fell out of the towel and on to the floor."
Another nurse "happened to walk into a soiled utility room and saw, lying on the metal counter, a fetus, naked, exposed and breathing, moving its arms and legs."
But what was Obama's reaction to Illinois' Born-Alive Infant Protection Act?
As I reported two years ago, the state senator "opposed what he called the view that 'you have to keep alive even a pre-viable child'" ("Election Day: I'll Not Vote for Pro-Death President," Oct. 3, 2012).
Therefore, "the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act interfered with a woman's reproductive rights."
My reactions even appeared in a column on LifeNews.com: "Liberal Nat Hentoff: I'm Not Voting for the Abortion President" (Steven Ertelt, Oct. 3, 2012).
But it should be noted that I do not vote against all pro-choice candidates, to say the least. I have voted for those with whom I agree on First and Fourth Amendment matters and other constitutional rights. Yet I can't imagine any of them having opposed the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act and gone for infanticide.
So how did I become a pro-lifer, the most controversial position I have ever taken?
Just about all my conclusions about any issue have come from fact-based reporting. On this one, practically everyone I knew was pro-choice, but I became curious when more physicians -- not pro-lifers, doctors -- became involved in prenatal care. During my research, I read such standard texts as "The Unborn Patient: Prenatal Diagnosis and Treatment," by Michael R. Harrison, Mitchell S. Globus and Roy A. Gilly (W.B. Saunders, a division of Reed Elsevier).
They wrote: "The concept that the fetus is a patient, an individual whose maladies are a proper subject for medical treatment as well as scientific observation, is alarmingly modern.
"Only now are we beginning to consider the fetus seriously, medically, legally and ethically."
But in neither this nor other medical textbooks was God mentioned. And, hey, I even learned each fetus has DNA of its own!
Sadly, Obama has supported all abortions -- however late or accidental.
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Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights and author of several books, including his current work, "The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance".
