[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 130 (Thursday, September 19, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1656-E1657]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION IS CHILD ABUSE

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 19, 1996

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, partial-birth abortion is child 
abuse.
  That some otherwise respectable and pleasant and well-mannered people 
would permit killing babies in this way--which Congress can stop if it 
has the will--is both baffling and extremely sad.
  That some otherwise smart and even brilliant people have been so 
easily fooled by the abortion industry's outrageous lies, distortions, 
half-truths, and surface appeal arguments is, at best, disappointing 
and unsettling.
  How can anyone in this Chamber or in the White House defend sticking 
a pair of scissors into a partially born baby's head so as to puncture 
the child's skull so a suction catheter can be inserted to suck out the 
child's brains? How can anyone support this and then say they're for 
kids?

[[Page E1657]]

  My wife, Marie, is an elementary school teacher, and she said this 
morning that if a young student were to stab her doll in the back of 
the head, alarm bells would go off and we would say that this child 
might have deep psychological problems, was in need of professional 
help, and posed a potential threat to others.
  If anyone did such an act to a young animal--a puppy or a kitten--we 
would say that he or she was sick and guilty of animal abuse.
  Yet the abortion President Bill Clinton, seeks to continue legal 
sanction for this gruesome assault on children. Finally, we're seeing 
what the right to choose really means: Executing untold thousands of 
children by stabbing them and sucking out their brains?
  Let's face it. Partial-birth abortion is a gross violation of human 
rights--it's child abuse.
  Why the blind spot?
  Why the unwillingness to see the brutality and savagery of brain-
sucking abortion?
  I guess we now know how far the so-called pro-choice movement will go 
to sustain the Orwellian super-myth that abortion is somehow sane, 
compassionate--even pro-child.
  Americans will now see that the real extremists are not the people 
who insist on calling attention to the grisly details of abortion, such 
as dismemberment of the unborn child, injections of high concentrated 
salt solutions and other kinds of poisons that chemically burn and then 
kill the baby, or this particular method, a brain-sucking method of 
abortion. They will see that the real extremists are those who actually 
do these acts.
  The dangerous person is not the one who shows us the pictures or who 
describes abortions, the dangerous person--the child abuser--is the 
person holding the scissors at the base of the baby's skull.
  I would respectfully submit to my abortion-minded friends on both 
sides of the aisle, that the coverup is over. For more than two decades 
the abortion industry has sanitized abortion methods by aggressively 
employing the shrewdest and most benign euphemisms market research can 
buy.
  I say to my friends on the other side of this issue, choose the path 
of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder of NARAL--the National Abortion 
Rights Action League--and former big league abortionist who turned pro-
life because he finally had to admit, in a fit of intellectual honesty, 
that the unborn child was a patient, too, in need of nurturing and 
caring and love, just like his or her mother.
  For the first time ever, the debate over partial-birth abortion 
requires us to begin coming to grips with the grisly specifics of how 
abortion actually pains, tortures, and destroys innocent human babies. 
If slaughtering a partially born child is wrong, why is it OK to slice 
and suction a baby in utero with a high-powered vacuum, 20 to 30 times 
more powerful than an average household vacuum cleaner, a procedure 
that turns the baby into bloody pulp. In a later term D&E abortion, the 
baby is decapitated and dismembered, limb by limb, inside the womb.

  The dirty secret of the abortion rights movement--the violent, 
painful methods of abortion--are finally getting scrutiny because of 
this debate. The partial-birth abortion debate is allowing us to just 
scratch the surface of the usually secret, hidden, and Byzantine world 
of abortion and the methods used to painfully kill unborn children. 
Even the Washington Post shed some light on the methods this week. The 
Post article says, in part,

       Most abortion doctors circumvent this problem by 
     dismembering the fetus and removing it in pieces small enough 
     to pass through the cervix . . .
       The physician generally injects the fetus with one or more 
     toxic substances a day before surgery, a maneuver that 
     softens the tissue and makes dismemberment easier. It also 
     eliminates any possibility a live birth will occur. 
     Alternatively, some doctors cut the umbilical cord, which 
     kills the fetus, 15 or 20 minutes before the procedure.

  Perhaps some of you are having--or beginning to have--second thoughts 
concerning the bill of goods the abortion lobby has been selling all 
these years.
  They even lied about the number of partial-birth abortions performed 
each year in the United States.
  This past Sunday, The Record of Bergen, NJ, published a lengthy 
investigate report about the partial-birth abortions. I was appalled to 
read that a single facility in New Jersey--Metropolitan Medical in 
Englewood--performs at least 1,500 partial-birth abortions every year. 
This is three times the number of brain suction abortions that the 
National Abortion Federation, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and other pro-
abortion groups have estimated are performed annually throughout the 
country.
  This revelation belies the statement of Bill Clinton that the process 
of sucking a baby's brains out moments before his or her full delivery 
is limited to 500 children per year nationally. Even if the lower 
number were true, however, I am stunned that he or anyone else could 
belittle the horror of partial-birth abortion by saying it ``only'' 
kills 500 children each year. This is a higher death toll than the 
Oklahoma City bombing--an act that has been rightfully condemned.
  What is equally as frightening is the fact that the same Record 
article reveals that most partial-birth abortions in New Jersey were 
done to teenagers, and they were done as elective procedures, not for 
medical reasons. Let me quote from the article.

       ``We have an occasional amnio abnormality, but it's a 
     minuscule amount,'' said one of the doctors at Metropolitan 
     Medical, an assessment confirmed by another doctor there. 
     ``Most are Medicaid patients, black and white, and most are 
     for elective, not medical, reasons: people who didn't 
     realize, or didn't care, how far along they were. Most are 
     teenagers.''

  And let us not forget Dr. Martin Haskell, the medical doctor who 
boasts about this grisly procedure and goes on tour teaching it to 
others. Dr. Haskell says 80 percent of his partial birth abortions are 
``purely elective.''
  This contradicts everything the abortion President has said to 
justify his veto of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban bill passed by both 
the House and the Senate. President Clinton should stop hiding from the 
truth.
  Override this antichild veto.

                          ____________________