WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct. 3, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As President Obama steps up his outreach to moderate, independent, and faith-based voters in the final weeks before the Nov. 6th election, a new video has surfaced where he calls the unborn child a “potential life” and argues that viability is a “moving target.”
Published by David Brody of CBN News today, the video was taken at a 2004 campaign event in Springfield, Illinois.
“My basic view is that abortion is an extraordinarily difficult moral issue. As a Christian, I think that a fetus is not just a collection of cells. It is a potential life,” he says.
“And I think that after viability it is legitimate for the state to prohibit late-term abortions as long as there is an exception for the mother’s life and health. Prior to viability, the problem is that this potential life is inside someone else’s body. It’s inside a woman’s body,” he continues. “And I don’t feel that it is appropriate for me to simply dictate to that person, to that woman what she should do with her body.”
“I leave that up to her and her conscience and her minister or Rabbi,” he adds. “I leave that up to her family and her doctor to make those decisions.”
During the 2008 campaign, Obama told Christian pastor Rick Warren that it is “above my pay grade” to determine when an unborn child is eligible for human rights.
In this most recent video, he takes a more circumspect approach to late-term abortion than he did in a 2003 interview uncovered this summer. In that video Obama was asked by a reporter if he is “pro-choice” even in terms of late-term abortions, to which he replied bluntly, “I am pro-choice. I believe that women make responsible choices and they know better than anybody the tragedy of a difficult pregnancy and I don’t think that it’s the government’s role to meddle in that choice.”
In another video from 2003, he states: “I voted no on the late-term abortion ban, not because I don’t recognize that these are painful issues but because I trust women to make these decisions.”
Obama has also been accused of supporting infanticide because of his repeated votes against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which would have protected children who are alive in the course of an abortion.