Obama Always Clarifying

Barack Obama clarifies his position on late term abortions:

Reporter: You said that mental distress shouldn’t be a reason for late-term abortion?

Obama: “My only point is this — historically I have been a strong believer in a women’s right to choose with her doctor, her pastor and her family. And it is ..I have consistently been saying that you have to have a health exception on many significant restrictions or bans on abortions including late-term abortions.

In the past there has been some fear on the part of people who, not only people who are anti-abortion, but people who may be in the middle, that that means that if a woman just doesn’t feel good then that is an exception. That’s never been the case.

I don’t think that is how it has been interpreted. My only point is that in an area like partial-birth abortion having a mental, having a health exception can be defined rigorously. It can be defined through physical health, It can be defined by serious clinical mental-health diseases. It is not just a matter of feeling blue. I don’t think that’s how pro-choice folks have interpreted it. I don’t think that’s how the courts have interpreted it and I think that’s important to emphasize and understand.”

via Shakesville

I kinda figured this is what Obama would say he meant. It’s difficult now for us to understand whether he just says what he thinks he needs to say, depending on his audience, or whether he was truly “misinterpreted”.  I’m going to go with a third way.  Since the position given above is more consistent with what he’s said earlier about his position, I think this really is his position.

So when Obama was talking about “no late term abortions for the mentally distressed”, he was just saying that women who are only a little upset about being in the last three months of their pregnancies shouldn’t be able to have them, even if they talk to their doctors, pastors and family first.  That’s so much less insulting.

And, Obama still plays to the anti-choice crowd when he falls into the trap of eliding so called “partial-birth abortion” and late term abortion, a rather grievous error all on its own.

There’s no good way out of this one for Obama.  He was either changing his position and losing the votes of pro-choice women or he was being misogynist and losing the votes of women who care about women.

Obama had better soon figure out how to say what he means or he’ll lose even more voters than he already lost on July 3rd when he made his confusing and insulting comments.  You’d think that a man running for the Presidency of the United States of America would have learned, by now, how to be clear about issues of this importance.  To say nothing of how he means to end the war in Iraq.

Check out Bitch Ph.D. for the facts on those late term abortions.  And Barack Obama, if you’re listenong, you go check ‘em out too!

UPDATE:  For more on “the big lie” about partial-birth abortions, see this

UPDATE II:  More commentary on Obama’s “misstatement” and “clarification” by Jan Crawford Greenburg and at Writes Like She Talks and at Shakesville (including the comment thread) again and at Astraea’s Scales.

UPDATE III:  After re-reading Jill Miller Zimon’s post on the Obama clarification, I just have to put this bit here:

This standard has long been understood to require less than “serious clinical mental health disease.”  Women today don’t have to show they are suffering from a “serious clinical mental health disease” or “mental illness” before getting an abortion post-viability, as Obama now says is appropriate.

And for 35 years—since Roe v. Wade—they’ve never had to show that.

So Obama, it seems to me, still is backing away from what the law says—and backing away from a proposed federal law (of which he is a co-sponsor) that envisions a much broader definition of mental health than the one he laid out this week.