While the media was barely covering the Gosnell story, Obama hailed “reproductive freedom” as a “fundamental principle.” Our rational president, who lectured religious Americans about “universal values,” voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act as an Illinois senator. The same senator who voted “present” regularly to avoid other contentious issues took time on four separate occasions to vote against medical care for newborns who survived “botched” late-term abortions. Later, when this became a slight embarrassment, Obama claimed that he would have supported a born-alive act that didn’t weaken Roe v. Wade—an interesting argument from a politician without any noticeable qualms about weakening the First, Second, Fourth, or Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out, the law did nothing more than extend the right to life for babies whom physicians deemed to have “sustainable survivability,” which shouldn’t have endangered Roe v. Wade at all. Moreover, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, we might expect Obama to know that the Bill of Rights is integral to the Constitution, while Roe v. Wade, as even many liberal legal scholars, like his former Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, have confessed, is pretty hard to justify as constitutional law, essentially having been confected out of Justice Harry Blackmun’s personal preferences.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, where a madman massacred all those children in Newtown, Connecticut, the president gave a heartfelt speech that included this line: “If there is even one step we can take to save another child . . . then surely we have an obligation to try.” Wouldn’t one such step be to ban the nihilist practice of murdering children who’ve survived outside the womb? Obviously, as a state senator, Obama was so ideologically wedded to defending abortion in all circumstances that moderation—if you can call voting to protect a born, living child moderation—was out of the question. As president he shows no signs of changing his views—in fact, his hard- line position on abortion is now Democratic Party dogma.