What a different sixteen years makes.

Back in 1992 when then-Governor Bill Clinton campaigned for the presidency with a pledge to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare,” he was in significant ways speaking the mind of America.

At the time, many polls showed a slim majority of Americans believing that abortion should remain legal, yet also believing that efforts should be made to reduce the overall number of abortions performed.

Of course, as was the case on many important policy matters, candidate Clinton’s rhetoric didn’t match with President Clinton’s policies, and after eight years in the White House, his administration clearly left a “pro-abortion” legacy.

Nonetheless, Clinton moderated the Democratic Party’s “official” position on abortion, at least a little bit. And the very fact that the party would even agree back in the 1990’s to using the words “rare” and “reduce” in the context of discussing abortion, indicates that the Democrats’ previously held “abortion on demand” position was no longer being embraced by a majority of Americans (if, indeed, it ever was).

But that was in the 90’s. Now, just days away from the 2008 Democratic National Convention, where Senator Barack Obama will presumably become his party’s nominee for President, reports indicate that there is a bit of an internal struggle with those who are formulating the Democratic Party platform. What’s the controversy about? Whether or not the word “rare” should stay in the abortion plank. Apparently, the prevailing sentiment is that making abortion “rare” is now an unworthy, and perhaps even harmful objective.

But the party platform will likely morph and change a few more times between now and the convention. What won’t morph and change, however, is Senator Obama’s legislative track record. And on the issue of abortion and the proper care of children, an ugly and lethal profile of Mr. Obama has begun to emerge.

Many of the details trace back to the whistle-blowing of a woman named Jill Stanek, a Registered Nurse who, back in 1999, was working in a hospital maternity ward in Obama’s home state of Illinois. Ms. Stanek went public in that year, decrying a practice in her hospital known as “induced labor abortion,” wherein doctors force a woman’s cervix to open prematurely. Continued...