March 20, 2008. From Senator Obama: “Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t’ want them punished …. With an STD.”

That’s punished with a baby, conception as a mistake.

The blogs and talk radio were all over the remark, of course, but it’s an indication of how protective the national media is of their chosen candidate that this disturbing comment went mostly unnoticed by them. After the initial outrage, nothing in the past two weeks. If words matter, as Obama has famously said, then “punished with a baby” should matter.

It does to me because I am pro-life. For two reasons:

One is my Catholocism. I remember sitting in Father Polini’s religion class as a sophomore at South Catholic High School in South Philadelphia back in the early ’50’s when he lectured about the inviolability of unborn life.

The second reason is logic. If something becomes a baby, it had to have begun as a baby. Not as a virtual baby or a potential baby — a real baby. It can be called a zygote, an embryo, a fetus or whatever — it still becomes a baby. My logic tells me that destroying it at any point along that continuum is destroying a life.

That said, I wouldn’t prevent a woman from having an abortion nor support laws denying them that opportunity because my objections are based on a personal religious belief and a thought process that are peculiarly mine, even though others might agree with them.

Science has been desperately trying to figure life out, researching virtual life, personhood, potential life, viable life and other definitions that attempt to describe this growing “object” within a woman’s belly.

Further, scientific research has demonstrated that half the “cellular material” at the very early stages of pregnancy becomes the placenta. So how much and what portion of that “material” is or isn’t “the baby?” I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. God knows, but right now, He’s not telling.

Punishment?

What we do know is that abortion is an emotionally devastating experience. Senator Obama’s characterization of a baby as “punishment” belies the gravity of the event. His remark reduces the creation of life to a bad act that merits punishment, not unlike robbing a bank or driving while drunk. Adding “the punishment of an STD,” makes equivalent in his mind the creation of life and the transmission of a disease.

Missing from Senator Obama’s comment is the idea that a pregnancy represents life. It demonstrates a mindset that abortion is nothing more than an expedient solution to a life-altering decision, just a gambit that reduces abortion to a cut-and-dried response to a difficult situation. Most importantly, it eliminates the critical partner to anyone’s behavior — its consequences.

There are no consequences in Obama’s conclusion because the consequence is eliminated. The “sinner” experiences no consequences, the baby does. Obama’s view represents a mindset that is unfortunately here to stay, engraved in the stone of secular thinking and would be a rallying point from this potential next President.

Probably there are some who consider abortion merely as a fail/safe for careless sex, as an out clause or loophole. I expect that they’re in the minority. The decision to abort or not to abort is a monumental one, emotionally complex, with significant impact on the mother and father, her family and friends.

Sadly, the attitude of some pro-lifers has been the same as Senator Obama’s, but for a different reason. To them, bringing the baby to term is the punishment, the living consequence of the sinful act of fornication. The woman, too often a teenager, got what she deserved. There is little Christianity or compassion to be a point of view that seems no different from Senator Obama’s.

The theoretical and religious preachments of the politician and pastor ignore the tortured truth of an often frightened young girl faced with momentous choices that may or may not include parents and/or boyfriend (if he even cares): Have the baby and miss school and perhaps never graduate, get married prematurely, maybe never graduate and probably raise a child in poverty, have the abortion and kill a living thing, or have the baby and give it up for adoption.

Senator Obama’s comment, however, is more ominous than a righteous pro-lifer’s retributive cry for punishment and runs deeper than affirming a woman’s “reproductive rights.”

The year after the “Born Alive Infants Protection Act” became federal law in 2002, an identical law was considered in a committee of the Illinois Senate. Both laws mandated health care providers to care for a living baby that survived a botched abortion and not, well, there is no pretty to describe the alternative – to dispose of it. The Illinois version was defeated with the committee’s chairman, Senator Obama, leading the opposition, in effect voting once in 2003 and twice before that, for infanticide.

We will soon be voting for a nominee for president. One can vote with a clear conscience for someone who is pro-choice. Can our conscience be as clear for someone who denies a living baby the right to life? Not mine. How about yours!? This is a punishment too far.