[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 28 (Monday, February 13, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H1617]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                        IN SUPPORT OF DR. FOSTER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 1995, the gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder] is 
recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, I take the floor today to proudly say I 
support Dr. Foster, and I am anxiously awaiting the first moderate 
Republican who does not live in Tennessee to join me.
  I think what has happened to Dr. Foster is absolutely scandalous. 
There has been more distortion of the truth and more churning around 
this than I have seen in a very, very long time.
  Let us talk about what is going on today. Today we see Vice President 
Gore going to Tennessee to visit Dr. Foster's program, the I Have a 
Future Program. The I Have a Future Program is targeted at teens, at 
teens who are highly vulnerable, and the fact that they might become 
pregnant. And guess what, it has had a long, long track record, and it 
is working and working very well.
  It has worked so well that George Bush gave Dr. Foster one of his 
points of light for this program. Not only that, he was part of Lamar 
Alexander's advisory team. Now those are both Republicans the last time 
I looked, and they were both aware of this program and thought it was a 
great program.
  But when you look at America and America's problems, if we have a 
future, we have to have a national program dealing with teen pregnancy.

                              {time}  1250

  We have thrown a lot of words at it. We have done a lot of finger 
waiving at it, we have done the Federal nanny role. We have done all 
sorts of things, but we have not had very many programs that work.
  I think this administration is to be complimented for finding a 
gentleman who has bipartisan support, a gentleman who has a program 
that works and wants to put him in the national level so we can learn 
from that and tackle it.
  If America has a future, babies having babies is not the way to go. 
That is the way to end up as a Third World, developing nation because 
many, many of the boxes are already colored in when babies have babies, 
and so many sad cases.
  I think we should salute him.
  Let me talk of some of the things that you have heard thrown around 
that I think are on the verge of being ridiculous. The latest has been 
that Dr. Foster sterilized some very, very critically mentally retarded 
patients in the 1970's and wrote about it. Well, first of all he wrote 
about it. He is not trying to hide it.
  And second, over 60,000 severely mentally ill people were sterilized 
from the turn of the century into the late 1970's when we found new and 
better ways to do this.
  Why did the medical practice do it? Why did they do it? It sounds so 
cruel and so awful by 1995 standards. Well, because at that time there 
was a sanitation reason, that young women who were severely mentally 
handicapped had no idea how to deal with their monthly period, and it 
was a terrific sanitation problem. Plus, the chances of their becoming 
pregnant because they had no idea what this was all about was also a 
critical problem.
  The entire medical community was doing this as a means of handling 
it. Thank goodness we now have medication; we have much better ways 
that seem more humane to us.
  But, yes, he did it, yes, he admits he did it. The entire medical 
profession was doing it at that time. And he wrote about it. And I am 
sure he wished he did not have to do it, and now he has the tools to do 
it, so no one has to do it.
  Now we are going to hang a man on this? For crying out loud, 
everything in everyone's profession changes from time to time because 
of advances.
  So I think that is the latest one that comes forward that everybody 
gets very upset about for no reason except they just want to get rid of 
Dr. Foster.
  The other issue we have heard about is, when he was first asked about 
abortion, he did not give the same number he gave a little later. He 
said less than a dozen, and it turned out to be 39.
  This is a man in his sixties who has been in practice for a very long 
time. If he was making a living by doing abortions, he would have 
starved to death by now. No one could accuse him of doing these 
lightly; 39 is not a large number.
  But the other thing, as a woman, that troubles me is no one ever 
asked what were these cases like? Was the woman's life in danger? Had 
this been a rape or incest case? Just as no one asked about the cases 
of the severely mentally retarded, what condition they were in, why the 
medical profession thought that was the only choice to go forward? No, 
all we are hearing is that this man cannot go forward, this is terrible 
the administration has done it again, on and on and on.
  I hope that we say a woman does have a right to choose, and that 
means nothing if the doctor does not have to listen, and that we as 
Americans are mature enough to get on with their nomination and get on 
with fighting teen pregnancy.


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