Endorsed: Culture Of Death Rallies To Obama

IN what, for Senator Hillary Clinton, is a major blow to an apparently doomed campaign, NARAL Pro-Choice America - the chief abortion "rights" advocacy group in the United States - has abandoned her and endorsed Barack Obama for President. Nancy Keenan of NARAL said it was very "fortunate" these "two strong pro-choice candidates" were running for the White House but all the resources and support of her organisation would henceforth be put to work for Senator Obama. The reason was entirely - and ruthlessly - pragmatic: Senator Obama was the contender "we believe will secure the Democratic nomination and advance to the general election." The decision temporarily renewed the Battle of the Victimhoods that has intermittently raged between the prospectively history-making black and female candidates. It was left to an angry EMILY's List president, Ellen Malcolm, to remember the sisterhood. She called the choice "tremendously disrespectful to Senator Clinton." NARAL is more relaxed, staffers arguing Mr Obama can heal the rift between black voters and white female activists.

A far more pessimistic assessment of the Illinois frontrunner's healing powers and fitness for the presidency has been published in the latest National Catholic Register. The NCR editorial discusses the fanatically pro-abortion outlook of a man who says the signing of a "Freedom of Choice Act" will be the first thing he does as president. Even before he phones Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, possibly. Senator Obama "strongly disagreed" when a new law prohibiting the murder of a child while being born was upheld by the US Supreme Court. Not merely in favour of abortion, then, but a believer in the right to "late term abortion." A zealot. Hard though it is to believe, he's even more hard-core than that. As a legislator in Illinois, Senator Obama twice voted against the Infant Liability Act, a measure designed to protect from being killed babies "accidentally" born alive during attempts to abort them ("live birth abortion"). He quashed the bill in committee. Even NARAL did not object to a Federal bill with the same intention. He believes killing babies is a constitutional right. Feel the Hope.