In light of the excitement and anticipation surrounding Hillary Clinton's speech at this week's Democratic National Convention, some may have missed the short address delivered by Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a few hours earlier. In her short oration, Richards praised Barack Obama's commitment to women's health care and admonished his opponent by pointing out that the presumptive Republican candidate "voted against real sex education, against affordable family planning and, if elected, John McCain has vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade."

She has little to worry about. Roe v. Wade is here to stay and come mid-November, I suspect we will all be referring to her preferred candidate as president-elect Obama. Nevertheless, Richards brought to mind an interesting question: aside from being generally pro-choice and believing that the issue of when life begins is above his "pay grade" (that certainly doesn't leave the rest of us any hope of understanding the issue, especially when he starts earning a president's salary), what do we know about Obama's position on abortion? The most revealing way to answer this question is to take a look at the senator's voting record.

Planned Parenthood is right in endorsing Obama as the candidate who will stand by the organization's principles, most notably, a woman's right to choose. He has repeatedly shown his support for the expansion of abortion rights by, for example, voting against bills that would prohibit tax funding of the procedure. This is in spite of stating at the recent Saddleback Faith Forum that he would like to reduce the number of abortions that take place in this country. But perhaps most disturbing is Obama's record on partial-birth abortion.