The Executive Office of the President of the United States -- aka Barack Obama -- released a document in the days leading up to Christmas that proves once again that reality conspires against even the most careful liars.
The White House intended the document in question -- dryly titled "Long-Term Benefits of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program" -- to build the case for expanding the value and availability of food stamps.
What the document demonstrates is that even the Obama White House knows that an unborn child is a child.
During his political career, Obama has made great exertions to obscure this fact from public view -- and this White House paper is not his first failure in that regard.
When Obama was an Illinois state senator in 2001, as this column noted in 2008, state Sen. Patrick O'Malley introduced a trio of bills designed to protect the right to life of babies surviving abortions. One of these defined a fully born abortion-surviving baby as a "person," "human being," "child" and "individual."
Only Obama stood up on the Illinois Senate floor to speak out against this.
But then Obama had difficulty finding terms that -- from his perspective -- sufficiently dehumanized the type of human he wished to deny the right to life.
He initially slipped and called a born baby who survives an abortion a "child." Yet he made clear that such a "child" should be considered a "fetus" who is "temporarily alive outside the womb."
"The testimony during the committee," Obama said, "indicated that one of the key concerns is that there (is) a method of abortion, an induced abortion, where the fetus -- or child, as some might describe it -- is still temporarily alive outside the womb."
Obama ultimately concluded that the reason he believes a born baby who survives an abortion should not be defined as a "person" or a "child" is that would mean the baby has a constitutionally protected right to life.
"No. 1," Obama said, "whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we're really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a child, a 9-month-old child that was delivered to term.
"That determination, then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an anti-abortion statute."
Succinctly put, Obama's argument was: If you call children children, no one will be allowed to kill them.
Whoever proofread the new White House paper on food stamps must not have been briefed on this argument.
The paper says women are "mothers" while still only pregnant. And one of the paper's key points -- printed in bold in the executive summary -- is: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program's "positive impact on children begins even before birth and lasts well beyond their childhood years."
The paper elaborates: "Recent research focusing on the rollout of the Food Stamp Program in the 1960s and 1970s shows the benefits begin even before a child is born: mothers who receive Food Stamps during pregnancy have a reduced incidence of low-birth weight babies by between 5 and 12 percent."
At one point, the authors of the White House paper try to build a rhetorical barrier between "children" and their purported precursors who once lived "in utero." But even here, they use precisely one of the terms Obama used 14 years ago when voting against calling a born baby who has survived an abortion an individual.
"Individuals who receive food assistance in utero or as children may continue to reap the benefits decades after initial exposure," says the paper.
Are these the kind of "individuals" Obama believes you can constitutionally kill?
The very next sentence of the White House paper says, "A growing body of research suggests that health investments in utero have important long-run implications."
Yes -- and so does the truth.
The Republican leadership in Congress fled from the truth last week when it passed an omnibus spending bill that permits funding of Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider. These Republicans feared that if they forced a national debate over this issue with Obama and his pro-choice allies in the liberal media, they would lose.
They were wrong. The only time you can lose a debate on whether children have a right to life is when you lack the courage to start one.
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