Roe V. Wade

Floor Speech

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Mr. BUDD. Mr. Speaker, the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade was decided 47 years ago this month. Since abortion was made legal, more than 60 million unborn children have had their lives prematurely ended.

This is a matter of conscience, and just like the plurality of American people, I believe that life begins at conception.

In recent years, advances in science and medicine have given us an increasingly vivid picture of what life in the womb is like. A child has a heartbeat at just 6 weeks. A child feels pain at just 20 weeks. Science makes it clear that life exists in the womb, and, therefore, an unborn child is entitled to the most fundamental of human rights, and that is the right to live.

Even the plaintiff in that landmark case, Norma McCorvey, who at that time went by the name Jane Roe, changed her view and worked on behalf of the pro-life movement. She said: I think I have always been pro- life, but I just didn't know it.

Roe v. Wade is not only a human tragedy but a constitutional one as well.

In our Constitution, power is divided among three branches: Article I, Congress; Article II, the Presidency; and Article III, the courts. Congress makes the laws, the Executive enforces them, and the courts apply them.

Courts should not be in the business of striking down acts of Congress or State statutes simply because the individual judges have political disagreements with what the people's representatives have decided. In our constitutional system, judges may strike down laws only if those laws conflict with the Constitution, our country's supreme law.

But that is not what happened in Roe v. Wade. Five Justices created a right to abortion by reinterpreting the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. That clause says that no State may deprive anyone of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

But even supporters of the decision have cast doubt on this justification. Harvard Law School's Laurence Tribe wrote: ``One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.'' And even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had called the decision ``heavyhanded judicial intervention'' that was ``difficult to justify.''

Essentially, the Court went out of its way to commit one of the most dramatic cases of judicial overreach in history. Instead of letting each State decide the issues for themselves, five Justices circumvented the system and created a decades-long human tragedy that continues to this day.

Since Roe, individual States have been valiantly trying to impose some sort of moral and legal safeguards on abortion. They have enacted laws prohibiting racial and gender discrimination in abortions; laws requiring women to see ultrasounds of their babies before committing to ending the unborn child's life; laws prohibiting abortion after a fetal heartbeat has been detected; and laws banning dismemberment abortions, where the doctor would have to physically tear the baby apart. Sadly, all of these laws have been struck down by judges claiming to follow the precedent of Roe v. Wade.

The human toll of this tragic overreach is staggering. Not only have over 60 million innocent children lost their lives, but the mothers of these children have had to live with the lasting psychological impacts that these abortions have had on them. Scientific studies have shown that women who have had abortions have a higher risk of mental health conditions like depression.

How could anyone turn a deaf ear and blind eye to the suffering of these vulnerable children and mothers? This issue transcends what it means to be an American and goes to the core of what makes us human.

Complex issues like this one are often fraught with controversy and, yes, heated tempers; but at the heart of that complexity and emotion lies a simple fundamental truth, and that is that unborn children deserve human rights.

I hope that one day soon the Supreme Court corrects their constitutional error so that the American people can reassert their voice in determining the moral question of our time.

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