John Edwards, trial lawyer, has spoken out in the behalf of the unborn. This is from a profile piece found in today’s New York Times:

In 1985, a 31-year-old North Carolina lawyer named John Edwards stood before a jury and channeled the words of an unborn baby girl.

Referring to an hour-by-hour record of a fetal heartbeat monitor, Mr. Edwards told the jury: “She said at 3, `I’m fine.’ She said at 4, `I’m having a little trouble, but I’m doing O.K.’ Five, she said, `I’m having problems.’ At 5:30, she said, `I need out.’ “

But the obstetrician, he argued in an artful blend of science and passion, failed to heed the call. By waiting 90 more minutes to perform a breech delivery, rather than immediately performing a Caesarean section, Mr. Edwards said, the doctor permanently damaged the girl’s brain.

“She speaks to you through me,” the lawyer went on in his closing argument. “And I have to tell you right now — I didn’t plan to talk about this — right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.”

The jury came back with a $6.5 million verdict in the cerebral palsy case, and Mr. Edwards established his reputation as the state’s most feared plaintiff’s lawyer.

From Antioch Road, here is Edwards speaking on the topic of abortion:

I believe that the difficult question of abortion should be left for a woman to decide in consultation with her family, her physician, and her faith. However, once the fetus has reached viability, I believe we have a responsibility, and a constitutional ability, to protect the unborn child.”

Yet this is from last Monday’s ChronWatch:

As a moderate Senate candidate from North Carolina, Edwards opposed partial-birth abortion. ‘’I think partial-birth abortions should be banned,'’ Edwards told the Associated Press on September 19, 1998. ‘’These are terribly gruesome procedures.'’

But the very next year, Edwards flip-flopped, voting against the partial-birth abortion ban in 1999. Now Edwards the presidential candidate strongly supports abortion on demand.

Perhaps Edwards believes in the sanctity of human life, a least of the nebulous point of “viability,” but national Democrat politics demand the wearing of a Roe v. Wade costume. So he plays politics with human life.

This strikes me as strikingly craven.