President Obama is an extremist on abortion. He has never supported any meaningful restriction on it, and never will.
He opposed a partial-birth abortion bill in Illinois, even as the federal version passed the House with 282 votes and the Senate with 64 votes and was signed into law by President Bush in 2003. He arrived in the U.S. Senate in time to denounce the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the ban.
In 2007, he told the Planned Parenthood Action Fund that his first act as president would be signing the Freedom of Choice Act. The act would enshrine in federal law a right to abortion more far-reaching than in Roe v. Wade and eliminate basically all federal and state-level restrictions on abortion. This isn’t a point its supporters contest; it’s one they brag about. The National Organization for Women says it would “sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies.”…
As a general matter, Todd Akin’s position on the issue is closer to the American mainstream than Obama’s. The public doesn’t agree with Akin on the hardest cases, but as my National Review colleague Ramesh Ponnuru points about, most people oppose most abortions. In a Gallup survey in 2011, 61 percent of men said that abortion should be legal in few or no circumstances, and 60 percent of women said the same.
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