[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 41 (Friday, March 22, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E437-E440]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          THE AMERICA WE SEEK

                                 ______


                           HON. HENRY J. HYDE

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, March 22, 1996

  Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, there is no more troubling issue confronting 
Americans than that of abortion. The highly respected publication, 
National Review, March 25, 1996, has performed a signal service by 
publishing a very thoughtful article on this question signed by 45 of 
America's finest scholars, all of whom have thought long and hard about 
this volatile subject. I commend this article to my colleagues' careful 
attention.

   The America We Seek; A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern

       Americans are conducting the sixth presidential election 
     campaign since the Supreme

[[Page E438]]

     Court decreed a virtually unlimited ``right'' to abortion in 
     Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton. Over the 
     past 23 years, the abortion debate has been about abortion, 
     of course; but it has also been a debate about the kind of 
     society America is and seeks to be. Throughout our national 
     history, few issues have so sharply focused attention on the 
     fundamental purposes of the American democratic experiment. 
     For, in the abortion debate, we are required to confront an 
     urgent moral issue: Who is to be included in the community of 
     the commonly protected?
       The following statement of principle, endorsed by a broad 
     spectrum of pro-life organizational leaders and scholars, is 
     the result of consultations held over the past several months 
     at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. 
     The statement aims to clarify the principles on which the 
     pro-life movement stands, to articulate a pro-life vision of 
     the American future, and to suggest a set of political, 
     legal, and cultural strategies that are capable of 
     translating that vision into reality. The signatories, who 
     join the statement as individuals, offer this statement to 
     the pubic in the hope that it will raise the level of public 
     discourse on this highly controversial issue, and thus 
     strengthen American democracy. The signatories are deeply 
     grateful to NATIONAL REVIEW for opening its pages to their 
     ideas and concerns.
       Twenty-three years after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade 
     and Doe v. Bolton decisions, the conscience of the American 
     people remains deeply troubled by the practice of abortion on 
     demand. Because of these two decisions, abortion is legal at 
     any time in pregnancy, for virtually any reason, in every 
     state. This constitutes an almost completely unrestricted 
     private license to judge who will live and who will die.
       That America has the most permissive abortion regime among 
     the world's democracies is a betrayal of the American promise 
     of justice for all. That is why a new sense of moral concern 
     is stirring throughout our country in this election year. 
     That is why millions of Americans have refused to accept the 
     Court's 1992 admonition in Planned Parenthood v. Casey to 
     stop debating the issue.
       2. To those weary of this argument, it may seem that there 
     is nothing more to be said on this matter of abortion. We 
     disagree.
       Survey research tells us that the American people do not 
     want a legal regime of abortion on demand for any reason, at 
     any time during a pregnancy. We believe we have an obligation 
     to employ the arts of democratic persuasion to help 
     reinstitute legal protection for all unborn children.
       The extent of the abortion license and its reach into other 
     areas of law and public policy is widely underestimated. We 
     believe that, as citizens of the United States, we have the 
     responsibility to discuss with our fellow citizens the facts 
     of the abortion license and its impact on our common life.
       Many women in crisis earnestly seek alternatives to 
     abortion. We believe we ought to encourage those alternatives 
     and help to provide them.
       3. Pro-life service to women in crisis and pro-life 
     advocacy on behalf of legal reform are expressions of our 
     highest ideals as citizens of the United States. We affirm 
     the nobility of the American democratic experiment in ordered 
     liberty. We affirm the rule of law and the principle of equal 
     protection under the law, even as we work to reform 
     constitutional and statutory law so that the American legal 
     system is, once again, congruent with the Founders' claim 
     that the inalienable right to life is one of the great moral 
     truths on which American democracy rests. We want an America 
     that is open, hospitable, and caring--a community of civic 
     friendship in which neighbors reach out to assist neighbors 
     in distress.
       4. The abortion license has helped to erode the moral 
     foundations of the American civic community. Right now we are 
     not the country we ought to be. That distress is, to us, a 
     sign of moral vitality. We speak now because we seek to 
     defend the America we love. We speak to promote the cause of 
     an America in which women and men, together, rebuilding the 
     fabric of civil society by acknowledging our common 
     responsibility to serve and protect the weakest and most 
     vulnerable among us. We speak for a rebirth of freedom in 
     these United States: a freedom that finds its fulfillment 
     in goodness.


                         victims of the license

       5. Americans of every race, economic condition, religion, 
     and political persuasion share a common concern today for 
     what some have called a national ``virtue deficit.'' As a 
     country, we have not paid sufficient attention to nurturing 
     those habits of heart and mind that make democratic self-
     government possible and that undergird what the Framers of 
     the Constitution called ``civic virtue.'' We believe that the 
     abortion license is a critical factor in America's virtue 
     deficit.
       6. Abortion kills 1.5 million innocent human beings in 
     America every year. There is no longer any serious scientific 
     dispute that the unborn child is a human creature who dies 
     violently in the act of abortion. This brute fact is the root 
     of our national distress over the abortion license. Abortion 
     kills: few would now deny that. But in order to defend the 
     private ``right'' to lethal violence that is the essence of 
     abortion, proponents of the license frequently resort to 
     euphemisms like ``products of conception'' and ``the 
     termination of pregnancy.''
       The public dialogue is not coarsened by depictions of the 
     reality of abortion. But a coarsening of our common life has 
     taken place; it is evident in the lack of moral revulsion 
     that follows one newspaper's accurate description of an 
     abortion procedure that ``breaks . . . apart'' the ``fetus'' 
     before ``it'' is ``suctioned out of the uterus'' or 
     ``extracted.''
       7. The abortion license hurts women. Some (including the 
     narrow Supreme Court majority in the 1992 Casey decision) 
     contend that the license is necessary to ensure social and 
     economic gains for women. It is ever more clear, though, that 
     women pay a huge price for abortion. By providing an alleged 
     technological ``fix'' for unintended pregnancy, the license 
     has encouraged widespread male irresponsibility and predatory 
     male sexual behavior. Abortion-on-demand has given an excuse 
     to a man who shirks his responsibilities, claiming that the 
     child he helped conceive ought to have been aborted, or that 
     the woman who declined to abort may not impose on him any 
     responsibility for her ``lifestyle choice.''
       Fathers have also been harmed and dehumanized by the 
     abortion license. Some watch their children killed against 
     their will; others learn to their distress only much later 
     that a child they would have raised is dead. Even when 
     agreeing to support the abortion decision, fathers, like 
     mothers, suppress their grief deny heir protective instincts, 
     and otherwise damage themselves when they allow the killing 
     of their own children. Abortion contributes to the 
     marginalization of fatherhood in America, which many agree is 
     a primary cause of the alarming breakdown of American family 
     life.
       The license has thus poisoned relationships between women 
     and men, even as it has done serious harm to the thousands of 
     women who now suffer from the effects of post-abortion grief. 
     The women of America do not need abortion to be full 
     participants in our society. To suggest otherwise is to 
     demean women, to further distort relationships between 
     women and men, and to aggravate the difficulties of re-
     creating in America a community of virtue and mutual 
     responsibility.


                          THE PUBLIC DIMENSION

       8. Abortion is not simply a matter of private ``choice.'' 
     Rather, the abortion license cuts to the heart of America's 
     claim to being a law-governed democracy, in which equality 
     before the law is a fundamental principle of justice. The 
     abortion license also threatens the cultural foundations of 
     our democratic political community. For if it becomes a 
     settled matter in American law and in American public 
     morality that there is, in fact, a private ``right'' to use 
     lethal violence to ``solve'' personal, family, or social 
     problems, then the claim of American democracy to be an 
     expression of the people's commitment to ``establish 
     justice'' will be undermined, just as it was when the law 
     claimed the ``right'' to exclude certain Americans from its 
     full protection on the basis of race. Thus the abortion issue 
     is the crucial civil-rights issue of our time.
       9. A sweeping abortion license was defined unilaterally by 
     the Supreme Court without recourse to the normal procedures 
     of democratic debate and legislation. This in itself wounded 
     American democracy. And the Court's persistent refusal to 
     permit the American people to debate the basic issue of an 
     alleged ``right to abortion'' in their legislatures continues 
     to damage our democracy by alienating tens of millions of 
     Americans from their institutions of government.
       10. The Court's definition of a ``right to abortion''--
     first enunciated as a ``privacy right,'' then as a ``liberty 
     right'' under the Fourteenth Amendment--has had other 
     damaging effects. The language of ``rights'' puts the dilemma 
     of unwanted pregnancy into a legal-adversarial context, 
     pitting mother against child, and even father against mother. 
     But as the common experience of humanity--and, increasingly, 
     the findings of science--demonstrates, what hurts one party 
     in this most intimate of human relationships hurts both 
     parties. The America we seek is an America in which both 
     mother and child are the subjects of our concern and our 
     community's protection. To abuse the language of ``rights'' 
     in this matter further advances the demeaning practice of 
     reducing all human relationships in America to matters of 
     adversarial adjudication. This is a prescription for 
     democratic decay. For democracy rests on the foundations of 
     civil society, and in a truly civil society, relationships 
     between people have a far richer moral texture than that 
     suggested by adversarial procedure.
       11. The Court's vain attempt to justify the abortion 
     license in terms of an all-encompassing right of personal 
     autonomy has begun to infect other areas of the law. Thus the 
     ``autonomy'' logic of the Court's 1992 Casey decision is now 
     invoked as a warrant for a constitutional ``right'' to 
     euthanasia. And if it were followed to its conclusion, this 
     logic would require us to consider such profound human 
     relationships as the bond between husband and wife, or the 
     bond between parents and children, to be nothing more than 
     matters of contract, with the claims of the autonomous 
     individual trumping all other claims. Enshrined by the Court 
     to legalize abortion on demand, this autonomy logic threatens 
     to give us an America in which the only actors of consequence 
     are the individual and the state; no other community, 
     including the community of husband and wife, or the 
     community of parents and children, will have effective 
     constitutional standing.

[[Page E439]]

       12. The Supreme Court's insistence on a ``right'' to 
     abortion has had other disturbing effects on our public life. 
     This ``right'' has been used to justify the abridgment of 
     First Amendment freespeech rights, as when sidewalk 
     counselors are threatened with legal penalties for proposing 
     protection and care to women in crisis at the crucial moment 
     of decision outside an abortion clinic. This ``right'' has 
     been used by the Federal Government to coerce state 
     governments into providing abortions, even when state 
     legislatures or popular referenda have clearly registered the 
     people's unwillingness to use public funds for elective 
     abortions. The abortion ``right'' has distorted our national 
     health-care debate, as well as the debate over welfare 
     reform. It has even had an impact on U.S. foreign policy. 
     American attempts to impose the ``right'' on the rest of the 
     world at the 1994 Cairo world conference on population and 
     the 1995 Beijing world conference on women have been deeply 
     resented by other countries, as have U.S. attempts to promote 
     abortion overseas through foreign aid.
       13. The Court's attempt to define a ``right'' to abortion 
     has polarized institutions and professions that were once 
     among the bulwarks of American civil society. Professional 
     associations of lawyers, academics, teachers, and civil 
     servants have been divided by attempts to enlist their 
     resources and prestige in support of abortion on demand, and 
     in opposition to any effort to regulate abortion even in ways 
     held constitutional by the Supreme Court. The medical 
     profession has been deeply divided over its relationship to 
     the abortion license. That the practice of abortion on demand 
     is now widely recognized within the medical community as 
     contradictory to the most deeply held values of the 
     profession of healing is, we believe, a sign of hope. Yet 
     some medical groups now threaten to reverse this trend by 
     coercion--for example, by requiring medical residency 
     programs to teach and perform abortion techniques. There are 
     also disturbing signs of the corrupting influence of the 
     abortion license in other professions. History has been 
     rewritten to provide specious justification for Roe v. Wade. 
     The teaching of law has been similarly distorted, as have 
     political theory and political science. Such extremism 
     underlines the unavoidable public character of the 
     abortion license. The abortion license has a perverse 
     Midas quality--it corrupts whatever it touches.


                             the way ahead

       14. Our goal is simply stated: we seek an America in which 
     every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life. 
     Legal reform and cultural renewal must both take place if 
     America is to experience a new birth of the freedom that is 
     ordered to goodness. We have just described, in this 
     statement, the nature, sources, and dimension of our concern. 
     Now, as pro-life leaders and scholars, we want to propose a 
     program of action which we believe will appeal to Americans 
     with open minds and hearts on this issue.
       15. Means are always available to enable women to overcome 
     the burdens that can accompany pregnancy and child-rearing. 
     There are always alternatives to abortion. To legacy of Roe 
     v. Wade involves a massive denial of this truth and 
     deformation of social attitudes and practices so pervasive 
     that women are actually encouraged to have abortions as the 
     ``easier'' road to the goals that an unexpected pregnancy 
     appears to threaten. As individuals and as a society, we bear 
     a common responsibility to make sure that all women know that 
     their own physical and spiritual resources, joined to those 
     of a society that truly affirms and welcomes life, are 
     sufficient to overcome whatever obstacles pregnancy and 
     child-rearing may appear to present. Women instinctively 
     know, and we should never deny, that this path will involve 
     sacrifice. But this sacrifice must no longer remain a one-way 
     street. In particular men must also assume their proper share 
     of the responsibilities that family life--indeed, 
     civilization itself--requires.
       16. The pro-life movement must redouble its efforts to 
     provide alternatives to abortion for women in crisis. There 
     are now over 3,000 pregnancy-care centers in the United 
     States, providing medical, educational, financial, and 
     spiritual assistance to women who, facing the dilemma of a 
     crisis pregnancy, bravely choose to carry their unborn 
     children to term. We support an expansion of this service to 
     our neighbors, so that by the turn of the century what we 
     believe to be true today has become unmistakably clear to 
     every American woman: No one in the United States has to have 
     an abortion.
       17. The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that 
     adoption is preferable to abortion. We must streamline and 
     simplify the legal procedures involved in adoption, while 
     providing effective support to those married couples who 
     choose to adopt.
       18. the abortion license is inextricably bound up with the 
     mores of the sexual revolution. Promotion of the pro-life 
     cause also requires us to support and work with those who are 
     seeking to re-establish the moral linkage between sexual 
     expression and marriage, and between marriage and 
     procreation. We believe that a renewal of American democracy 
     as a virtuous society requires us to honor and promote an 
     ethic of self-command and mutual responsibility, and to 
     resist the siren song of the false ethic of unbridled self-
     expression.
       19. Service to women in crisis, the promotion of adoption, 
     and the restoration of sound sexual morality are essential if 
     we are to experience a national cultural renewal that will 
     help to sustain legal reform of the abortion license. The way 
     in which we pursue the latter is also crucial, both to 
     cultural renewal and legal reform.
       We pledge ourselves to exercise the arts of democratic 
     persuasion in advancing our legal agenda. We urge Congress 
     and the courts to reconsider their ill-advised restriction on 
     the rights of pro-life activists.
       We unequivocally reject the use of violence in the pro-life 
     cause as contrary to the central moral principles of our 
     movement. For more than 23 years, we have worked within the 
     democratic process to advance the protection of all innocent 
     human life, and we will continue to do so.
       20. The unborn child in America today enjoys less legal 
     protection than an endangered species of bird in a national 
     forest. In this situation, we believe a broad-based legal and 
     political strategy is essential. There are many steps to be 
     taken on the road to an America in which every unborn child 
     is protected in law and welcomed in life. Thus we find no 
     contradiction between a rigorous adherence to our ultimate 
     goal and the pursuit of reforms that advance us toward that 
     goal. Legal reforms that fall short of our goal, but that 
     help move us toward it, save lives and aid in the process of 
     moral and cultural renewal.
       21. In its 1992 Casey decision, the Supreme Court agreed 
     that the State of Pennsylvania could regulate the abortion 
     industry in a number of ways. These regulations do not afford 
     any direct legal protection to the unborn child. Yet 
     experience has shown that such regulations--genuine informed 
     consent, waiting periods, parental notification--reduce 
     abortions in a locality, especially when coupled with 
     positive efforts to promote alternatives to abortion and 
     service to women in crisis. A national effort to enact 
     Pennsyvlania-type regulations in all fifty states would be a 
     modest but important step toward the America we seek.
       22. Congress also has the opportunity to contribute to 
     legal reform of the abortion license. A number of proposals 
     are now being debated in the Congress, including bans on 
     certain methods of abortion and restrictions on federal 
     funding of abortions. We believe that Congress should adopt 
     these measures and that the President should sign them into 
     law. Any criminal sanctions considered in such legislation 
     should fall upon abortionists, not upon women in crisis. We 
     further urge the discussion of means by which Congress could 
     recognize the unborn child as a human person entitled to the 
     protection of the Constitution.
       23. The right to life of the unborn will not be secured 
     until it is secure under the Constitution of the United 
     States. As it did in Brown v. Board of Education (when it 
     rejected the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of ``separate but 
     equal'' as an adequate expression of rights secured under the 
     Fourteenth Amendment), the Supreme Court could reject the 
     ``central finding'' of Roe v. Wade, that abortion on demand 
     is required by an unenumerated ``right to privacy'' protected 
     in part by the Fourteenth Amendment. The claim that such a 
     correction of error would damage the Court's authority is 
     belied by the experience of Brown v. Board of Education, and 
     by the fact that the Court has corrected its own erroneous 
     interpretations of the Constitution on scores of other 
     occasions.
       A more enduring means of constitutional reform is a 
     constitutional amendment both reversing the doctrines of Roe 
     v. Wade and Casey, and establishing that the right to life 
     protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments extends to 
     the unborn child. Such an amendment would have to be ratified 
     by three-fourths of the states: a requirement that underlines 
     the importance of establishing a track record of progressive 
     legal change on behalf of the unborn child at the state and 
     local levels.
       Even with a constitutional amendment, every path to the 
     protection and welcome we seek for unborn children requires 
     the re-empowerment of the people of the United States and 
     their elected representatives to debate and resolve the 
     specific statutory enactments that will govern the question 
     of abortion. A constitutional amendment, in other words, is 
     not a self-executing instrument that will end the debate on 
     abortion. It will, rather, correct a gross misinterpretation 
     of the Constitution (as was required to reverse the grievous 
     errors of the Dred Scott decision) and require states to 
     debate and adopt policies that do not violate the unborn 
     child's right to life.
       Such a process does not, we emphasize, amount to the 
     determination of moral truth by majority rule. Rather, it 
     requires conforming fundamental constitutional principle to a 
     fundamental moral truth--that abortion is the unwarranted 
     taking of an innocent human life. Such a process also 
     respects the role of representative government in fashioning 
     policies that will ultimately secure that principle in 
     practice. The project of constitutional reform on this issue, 
     as on the precedent issues of slavery and segregation, is to 
     bring our legal system into congruence with basic moral 
     truths about the human person.


                       An Appeal to Our Neighbors

       24. We believe the pro-life cause is an expression of the 
     premise and promise of American democracy. The premise is 
     that we are all created equal; the promise is that there is 
     justice for all. For all the reasons cited above, the 
     abortion license has done grave

[[Page E440]]

     damage to America: it has killed tens of millions of unborn 
     children, caused untold anguish to their mothers, and 
     marginalized fathers in our society. The renewal of American 
     democracy according to the highest ideals of the Founders 
     requires us to stand for the inalienable right to life of the 
     unborn, to stand with women in crisis, and to stand against 
     the abortion license.
       25. Few Americans celebrate the abortion license today. For 
     many who are troubled by the license and its impact on our 
     society, to be ``reluctantly pro-choice'' is now thought to 
     be the responsible position. We respectfully urge those of 
     our neighbors who hold that position to reconsider. We ask 
     them to ponder the relationship between the abortion license 
     and the crisis of family life in America. We ask them to 
     reconsider whether radical autonomy is a sufficient 
     understanding of freedom. We ask them to reflect, again, on 
     the morality of abortion itself. We ask them to think about 
     the social impact of a legally defined private ``right'' to 
     lethal violence.
       We ask them to ask themselves: ``Is American society, 
     today, more hospitable, caring, and responsible than it was 
     before Roe v. Wade?'' We believe the answer is ``No.'' 
     Problems that the proponents of abortion claimed the license 
     would help alleviate--such as childhood poverty, 
     illegitimacy, and child abuse--have in fact gotten worse, 
     throughout every level of our society, since Roe v. Wade. 
     Thus we respectfully ask our neighbors to consider the 
     possibility of a connection--cultural as well as legal--
     between the virtue deficit in contemporary American life and 
     the abortion license.
       26. The pro-life movement is about affirmation. Thus we ask 
     our neighbors, of whatever political persuasion or current 
     conviction on the matter of abortion, to engage in a great 
     national debate about the America we seek, and the 
     relationship of the abortion license to that future. We ask 
     all Americans to join with us in providing effective, 
     compassionate service to women in crisis. Work on 
     alternatives to abortion and on the reform of adoption laws 
     and procedures can create the conditions for a new dialogue 
     on the future of abortion law and practice in America. We are 
     ready for that new conversation. We invite all our neighbors 
     to join us.

         Mary Cunningham Agee, The Nurturing Network; Don Argue, 
           National Association of Evangelicals; Hadley Arkes, 
           Amherst College; Gary Bauer, Family Research Council; 
           Robert P. Casey, Fund for the American Family, Campaign 
           for the American Family; Samuel B. Casey, The Center 
           for Law and Religious Freedom, Christian Legal Society; 
           Charles W. Colson, Prison Fellowship; Guy M. Condon, 
           Care Net; Marjorie Dannenfelser, Susan B. Anthony List; 
           Midge Decter, Author; John J. DiIulio, Jr., Princeton 
           University; Bernard Dobranski, The Catholic University 
           of America, School of Law;
         James C. Dobson, Focus on the Family;
         Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago;
         Clarke D. Forsythe, Americans United for Life;
         Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Emory University;
         Wanda Franz, National Right to Life Committee;
         Edward McGlynn Gaffney, Valparaiso University, School of 
           Law;
         Robert P. George, Princeton University;
         Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard University;
         David P. Gushee, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary;
         Russell Hittinger, Catholic University of America;
         Kay C. James, Robertson School of Government, Regent 
           University;
         Phillip E. Johnson, University of California at Berkeley, 
           School of Law;
         William Kristol, Project for the Republican Future;
         Beverly LaHaye, Concerned Women for America;
         Richard Land, Christian Life Commission; Southern Baptist 
           Convention;
         Glenn C. Loury, Boston University;
         Frederica Mathewes-Green, National Women's Coalition for 
           Life;
         Michael W. McConnell, University of Chicago, School of 
           Law;
         Gilbert Meilaender, Oberlin College;
         Bernard N. Nathanson, MD, Center of Clinical and Research 
           Ethics, Vanderbilt University;
         Richard John Neuhaus, Institute on Religion and Public 
           Life;
         David Novak, University of Virginia;
         Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute;
         Marvin Olasky, University of Texas at Austin,
         Frank A. Pavone, Priests for Life;
         Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition;
         Victor G. Rosenblum, Northwestern University;
         Ronald J. Sider, Evangelicals for Social Action;
         David M. Smolin, Cumberland Law School, Samford 
           University;
         David Stevens, MD, Christian Medical and Dental Society;
         Jim Wallis, Sojourners;
         George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center; and
         Jack C. Willke, MD, Life Issues Institute.

                          ____________________