Abortion

Floor Speech

ABORTION--(House of Representatives) January 21, 2009

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Mr. Speaker, President Barack Obama's eloquent inauguration speech yesterday was uplifting and historic. The 44th President of the United States of America said in part: "The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry that precious gift, that noble idea; passed on from generation to generation: The God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.''

Powerful rhetoric indeed, Mr. Speaker. Yet for many of us, even as the President spoke those wonderful words, something seemed amiss, disconnected, and inconsistent with what we understand his true agenda to be.

Clearly not all are free in America. All are not equal or have a chance at happiness.

Today, by direct government action and ongoing complicity, enabling or indifference, especially by Congress, those God-given promises President Obama spoke about are systematically denied to an entire class of American children: Unborn babies.

By reason of their age, dependency, immaturity, inconvenience, or unwantedness, unborn children have been legally rendered persona non grata, and expendable.

Let's be honest, Mr. Speaker. Abortion is violence against children. It dismembers and chemically poisons a child to death. It hurts women physically and psychologically and spiritually. There is nothing whatsoever compassionate, benevolent, ennobling, or benign about abortion. It is a violation of a child's fundamental human rights.

Which begs the question, will our new President extend the ``God-given promise,'' as he put it, of hope and freedom, justice, respect, compassion, and protection and a simple chance at happiness to America's unborn children? Will the President's words be matched by deeds that rescue and save the most vulnerable among us?

Sadly, waiting in the wings, barely visible in the shadows, ready to pounce, lurks the most extreme pro-abortion agenda in American history. If even a portion of the Obama agenda advances by executive order, reinterpretation of existing law, or enactment of new laws like the so-called Freedom of Choice Act, millions of children will die and their mothers will be wounded. And President Obama will be remembered forever not just as a smart, savvy, gifted and eloquent man, but as the Abortion President.

Recently, more than 50 pro-abortion organizations conveyed a 55-page blueprint to promote abortion to the Obama transition team. The document, marching orders, will result in the death for millions of children in America and in foreign countries and will impose incalculable harm and pain on expectant mothers everywhere. The Obama administration and the pro-abortion nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, that prepared it are, as of today, in lockstep. Indeed, many personnel from pro-abortion NGOs have already been embedded in strategic places in the administration where they can foment anti-child policies often undetected and with a degree of stealth.

What follows in the days and months ahead will be a highly choreographed, highly deceptive message amplified by a pliant supportive news media to market the agenda. The propagandists will try to sell the agenda by repeating ad nauseam that their goal is to reduce abortions.

Curiously, the very people who claim to want to reduce the number of abortions will seek to degrade, undermine, and if they get away with it, repeal outright hundreds of Federal and State pro-life laws that have demonstrated over time to have saved millions of innocent human lives.

Both the pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher Institute and pro-life advocates agree on one thing, and that is that the Federal prohibition on taxpayer funding for abortion significantly reduces the number of abortions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, between 18 and 35 percent of Medicaid patients who would have had an abortion carry their babies to term when Medicaid funding is not available. Similarly, a recent study showed that when laws requiring one parent consent before a minor girl obtains an abortion were enacted, the minor abortion rate was reduced by 19 percent and 31 percent when parental consent was required from both parents. These time-tested policies that have already reduced abortion are now in jeopardy.

The Freedom of Choice Act, if enacted, would repeal taxpayer bans on funding for abortions, including the Hyde Amendment, which has been in effect for over 30 years. It would repeal parental notification for minors; women's right to know statutes; conscience protections for health care workers who want no part of this grizzly business; ethical safeguards for embryo-destroying stem cell research; the repeal of even the recently enacted ban on partial birth abortion, one of the most hideous methods of abortion imaginable, where the child is half born in the birth canal only to have his or her brain sucked out to effectuate the death of the child. A hideous method of child abuse. That would be repealed if the Freedom of Choice Act were to be enacted into law. Nearly every pro-life, life-affirming policy over the past three decades would be gone, nullified, vitiated if this extreme piece of legislation, sadly, backed by our President, were to be enacted.

Are these changes that we can believe in, Mr. Speaker? Hardly.

The administration, sadly, will also seek to enrich and empower pro-abortion organizations, most likely maybe today, tomorrow, the next day will repeal the Mexico City policy, which separates abortion from family planning and says that the U.S. taxpayer and our overseas population control programs will have nothing whatsoever to do with the promotion of abortion or the performance of abortion as a matter of family planning.

Much well-deserved respect, finally, Mr. Speaker, has been directed to the man and the legacy of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, this week especially. And for that reason we need to hear the courageous voice of another Dr. King: His niece, Dr. Alveda King, who has had two abortions and now speaks out for both victims of abortion: The unborn child and his or her mother.

As Dr. King has said, defending human life is part of the civil rights struggle; and as we remember the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., let us also remember the words of Dr. Alveda King when she asks, how can the dream survive and we murder the children?

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I want to thank our very distinguished conference chair for his eloquent defense of innocent human life, for his steadfastness on this issue, and point out when my good friend and colleague mentioned Planned Parenthood, I think most Americans would be shocked and dismayed and even discouraged to learn that Planned Parenthood alone performs approximately 300,000 abortions in their own clinics every year, and that number is going up.

They seek even more money from the Federal Government, in part to expand their capability, their capacity. More clinics equals more dead babies and more wounded mothers.

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Mrs. Bachmann, thank you so much for your not only eloquent, but your passion for innocent life, and especially for the women who are so seriously injured by each and every abortion. Very often it doesn't manifest itself immediately. There's a post-traumatic stress element to this. And you certainly get it. And I think your passion and your voice is indispensable in this Congress. So I thank you for your leadership on behalf of all human life.

I yield to my good friend, Mr. Lamborn

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