Obama: A tricky strategist

Obama has opposed many bills either banning partial birth abortions, or requiring parents of teens to be informed before the teens have an abortion, and even on one bill which provided that if a child who was supposed to be aborted, somehow was born-alive, that a physician should immediately care for the child's health and treat it as it's own living person. But in order to make everyone happy (as politicians try to do) he claimed that he opposed the bills merely because there were no provisions for a mother's health, stating:
"On an issue like partial birth abortion, I strongly believe that the state can properly restrict late-term abortions. I have said so repeatedly. All I've said is we should have a provision to protect the health of the mother, and many of the bills that came before me didn't have that." (http://www.ontheissues.org/Social/Barack_Obama_Abortion.htm)
Logic alone should tell us that there is no reason for a provision of the mother's health in a ban of partial birth abortion. After all, under what circumstances would it be too dangerous for a woman to deliver a baby and let it live, and yet somehow be okay to deliver a baby and kill it. It really doesn't make sense. But if plain old logic isn't good enough for you, why don't we go ahead and look at the actual facts. In the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Ban, congress did extensive studying of partial birth abortions and found that they are in fact very dangerous for the mother. They found that there is NEVER a situation where a partial birth abortion is more safe than any other sort of abortion and in fact holds risks of harming the mother permanently or even killing her. Even the physician who invented the partial-birth abortion procedure stated that there is NEVER any situation where partial-birth abortion would be the only appropriate procedure. Congress also found that there have been NO medical studies on partial birth abortions to prove their safety, efficacy, or necessity, nor is their any written manual or official training in which to teach the procedure to physicians or medical students. Despite all of these problems that congress found with partial birth abortion, they STILL provided a clause (in the first paragraph, in fact!) that stated that this procedure would be permitted if necessary for the physical health of the mother. (http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/abortion/2003s3.html )So, what is the problem with the ban?
So, why is it that Obama says he's never seen a ban that had provisions for the mother's health? Maybe the problem is that Obama finds it too difficult to listen to the WHOLE bill, or maybe he is just too busy to actually read it for himself. Maybe actually looking into the facts and evidence is too time consuming and so he opts to go with his first instincts. That's definitely a quality that I look for in a presidential candidate...or not.
But where Obama's strategy gets really tricky, is that he made a strategic deal with Planned Parenthood (an abortion rights group), so that he would vote "present" instead of "no" on each of the anti-abortion bills (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/02/obamas_voting_record_on_aborti_1.html). That way, he effectively voted no, because it still counts against the yes's, but no one can attack Obama for ACTUALLY voting "no." Very tricky. Sounds like he's too much of a coward to stand up for what he believes in, to me.

But if you don't want to take my word for it, you can take a closer look at the bills that Obama actually opposed--which did in fact have provisions for the mother's health. (See http://www.ilga.gov/default.asp to read the actual bills, or see http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/02/obamas_voting_record_on_aborti_1.html)