by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 14, 2007
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is getting renewed attention from voters and has caught pro-abortion rival Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire polls. While some voters appreciate his fresh perspective, Obama has a long-standing relationship with the nation's leading abortion business. As LifeNews.com profiled earlier, Clinton has attacked Obama for voting present on several abortion-related bills while he was a member of the Illinois state legislature.
Yet, those votes came only because he worked intimately with the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council in a concerted effort to try to defeat the pro-life bills.
The Council's CEO Pam Sutherland talked about the cozy relationship her group had with Obama during a July ABC News interview.
She said Obama voted present on bills related to partial-birth abortions, parental notification, and providing medical care for newborns who survive botched abortions "with the explicit support of the president and CEO of Illinois Planned Parenthood Council."
"We at Planned Parenthood view those as leadership votes," Sutherland said of Obama's voting record and admitted that, "We worked with him specifically on his strategy."
"Obama made sure those bills got as few votes as possible for passage," she added.
Sutherland explained that Obama approached her group to work in concert with it.
"He came to me and said: 'My members are being attacked. We need to figure out a way to protect members,'" she told ABC News.
Sutherland later told the Chicago Sun-Times that the goal of the strategy Planned Parenthood and Obama concocted was "to entice moderate Republicans and Democrats to also vote present, helping to defeat the bills."
The strategy also provided political cover for pro-abortion politicians who didn't want to take as much heat from the pro-life community for opposing bills that had such overwhelming public support.
"What it did," she continued, "was give cover to moderate Democrats who wanted to vote with us but were afraid to do so," Sutherland said.
"The poor guy is getting all this heat for a strategy we, the pro-choice community, did," she told the Sun-Times.
According to a Wall St. Journal report, the bills in question included two in 1997 concerning partial-birth abortion (HB 382 and SB 230), two parental notification bills (HB 1900 and SB 562) in 2001, and a series of bills (SB 1093, 1094, 1095) protecting infants who survive abortions.
