Last night, just an hour before the two presidential candidates squared off in their second debate, Edward N. Ney Professor in American Institutions Hadley Arkes spoke on the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act as it relates to this election in a talk entitled, “Obama: Covering Up His Opposition to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.” Arkes discussed the origins of the law, the place of the law in the current presidential election, and equated the issue of protection of unborn fetuses and infants surviving abortions to the protection of slaves in the Civil War.

The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, Arkes explained, traced its origins to debate preparations for Vice President George H.W. Bush before the 1988 presidential debates. “People who called themselves pro-choice would still respect some restriction on abortion depending on circumstances,” Arkes said, referring to national polls that suggested as many as 60 percent of Americans were opposed to up to 90 percent of abortions. Nevertheless, “most people were disinclined to overturn Roe v. Wade,” he said.

The goal was not to outright overturn Roe v. Wade, but to close what Arkes called a legislative gap. “Out of a vast body of 1.3 million abortions each year, we might save a handful,” Arkes said. “The ultimate goal is to remove the assumption that there is a right to end a life,” he later added

The lecture, presented as “The Audacity of Deceit,” tied the law to the current election by highlighting Democratic Presidential Candidate Senator Barack Obama’s opposition to a 2003 Illinois bill designed to mirror the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. Arkes explained that Obama not only opposed the act, but led the opposition to the act in the Illinois legislature, only to later backtrack and try to revoke his previous opposition.

“His first move was to explain that it lacked a clarifying amendment,” Arkes explained. The amendment included in the federal legislation simply stated that the act did not abridge existing abortion rights. “That was a fig leaf—It was simply there for the Democrats trying to convince people that it did not challenge Roe v. Wade,” Arkes said of the amendment. “It did not challenge Roe v. Wade, only the premises of Roe v. Wade.”

Arkes dismissed Obama’s explanation, saying that not only did the bill contain the same amendment, but also that Obama voted in favor of that amendment in committee. “Obama saw [in the bill] precisely what [the abortion-rights group] NARAL saw,” Arkes said. “It did not prevent any abortion, but recognized that a child marked for abortion would be protected by law at some point. What would prevent the law from recognizing the child seven minutes, seven weeks, seven months earlier?”

Arkes called Obama’s denial of his earlier opposition a “classic moment in politics—he was a candidate caught in a lie.” Arkes explained that Obama changed his explanation for his opposition to the bill, citing an earlier Illinois law that was intended to protect children born alive in abortion procedures. However, the law, Arkes said, had been determined to be too narrow and it wouldn’t apply in the same way as the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. “Laws that apply to a child born alive just do not apply to children born in an abortion,” he said. “This is the unlucky truth of the position.”

Arkes compared the debate over Roe v. Wade to the question of slavery in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of the 1850s. While slavery was not the single dominant issue of the debates, it shaped the discussion because of the implications of the question of the definition of humanity with respect to who is deserving of human rights and the protection of the law. “It’s just something more fundamental,” he said. “Who out there counted as persons whose interests and injuries mattered?”

“What counts as a human person?” Arkes asked. “Why do you afford them the status of ‘person’ and not others? Law always deals with the righting of wrongs. In every one of those issues, it hinges on the prior question” of who is worthy of protection.

Within the context of the discussion of Roe v. Wade, Arkes explained, “Now we’re asked in turn to talk ourselves into the notion that killing a child out of our self interest is in the scale of things no big deal. That kind of people is not the kind of people we should wish to be.”

The underlying question, Arkes said, is the question of granting or denying the standing of a human person. “It’s not a person, it’s a nigger. It’s not a person, it’s a fetus,” Arkes said, likening the argument for the continuing practice of slavery to the argument promoting the right to abortion. “We are shifting a whole class of people to something not deserving of a right. It’s a moral question.”