[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 170 (Tuesday, October 31, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H11460-H11461]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         VOTE AGAINST H.R. 1833, PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION BAN ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder] is recognized 
during morning business for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, I must say, as I stand here to discuss 
the bill H.R. 1833, it is appropriate we do this, I guess, on 
Halloween, because this is such a ghoulish issue and it is so very 
distressing to me that this body is moving forward to deal with this 
issue.
  In America, it is wonderful because most people when they become 
pregnant have no problems. But not all people. Last year, this country 
was fortunate in that it only had to have about 600 late-term 
abortions. But let me tell you, every one of those was terribly 
critical, dealing with the life of the mother or fetal abnormalities 
that could not be treated in utero, that could be incompatible with 
life, totally incompatible with life and could harm the mother and her 
future ability to go on and have a normal family.
  Luckily, most people are not going to be affected by this bill. But 
let me tell you, for anyone who is going to be affected by this bill, 
they are going to be outraged.

  As the gentlewoman from New York talked about, when any family has 
decided to have a child and is very excited and very enthusiastic about 
it, and these are the people we are talking about, and they suddenly 
get toward the end and find some horrendous, awful thing has derailed 
their dream, if they find the Congress of the United States has started 
practicing medicine without a license and has decided that the safest 
procedure a doctor might recommend cannot be given, a procedure that 
would allow that family to go forward and have another child without 
really threatening the reproductive organs of the woman or her life is 
no longer allowed by order of the U.S. Congress, that the fact that her 
life cannot be taken into account or anything else, I think that family 
is going to be totally outraged, has every reason to be totally 
outraged. You have got to really ask, why do we think we have that 
power?
  What we are going to be doing as we deal with this issue is we are 
really attempting to demonize women who are put in this position and 
demonize doctors who are trying to treat them. We are trying to say, 
this is a procedure that is so awful and so terrible that only demons 
would get into this.
  Well, let us think about this. Is trying to save the life of the 
mother something that you would demonize someone for? If you have a 
fetus with abnormalities that are not correctable, that are 
incompatible with life, and we are talking about very severe things, 
like absence of a head, brain outside the head, one heart, one chamber 
of the heart, these types of things, where the fetus can die in utero 
and then start decomposing and cause all sorts of life-threatening 
things to the mother.

[[Page H11461]]


                              {time}  0915

  Are we just saying to her, ``Well, risk it. You risk it, and that is 
what you are going to do?'' If we pass this bill, we are really rolling 
back the tremendous progress this country has made on safe motherhood. 
If you look at earlier years, we were running 800 deaths per 100,000 
births. We are now down to 8, but part of that is because we have 
allowed doctors and families, when they get into these awful, awful, 
awful conflicts to sit down and decide what the family wants to do and 
what medical professionals think is the best to do, and we are going to 
take that away. We are going to take that away if we vote on the bill 
1833. We are going to say to them, we know better, and we are going go 
to back, rolling back the safe motherhood progress that we have made in 
this country.
  You are going to hear all sorts of things on this floor. I beg people 
to, please, look at the doctor's testimony about how the charts you see 
are inaccurate and wrong, how the terms you hear are not medically 
accurate terms, and they do not describe accurately what transpires, 
how the person that they base all of this on was really fraudulent; it 
was a person who never participated in these events. We have letters 
and documentation on all of that.
  So here we are taking this urban myth, blowing it up, trying to 
demonize, trying to undo and get Congress involved in something that is 
a great, great tragedy, and if we pass this bill, we are only going to 
make these tragedies much greater.
  I plead with my colleagues to find their spines, to stand up and to 
really not get involved in this demonization of women, doctors, and 
their families who have nothing but terrible choices to make.

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