[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 1 (Tuesday, January 27, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E17]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page E17]]
                          ABORTION'S CHILDREN

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                            HON. JIM TALENT

                              of missouri

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, January 27, 1998

  Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I request the following eloquent article be 
inserted into the Congressional Record.

                [From the New York Times, Jan. 22, 1998]

                           (By Peggy Noonan)

       On the 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we know certain 
     facts. We know that at this point about 1.5 million abortions 
     are performed each year in the United States. And we know 
     that the fight over whether legalized abortion should 
     continue has not waned with time, as many thought it would, 
     but grown.
       The debate has always been by adults about adults. What are 
     the effects on women when they terminate a pregnancy? Do they 
     suffer unusual depression a year or two after the procedure?
       Opponents of abortion also talk about the effects of 
     abortion on the fetus being aborted. Does it feel pain?
       But there is another group of children who have been 
     overlooked in the debate--the children who have grown up in 
     the abortion culture, the children now 10 or 15 or even 20 
     years old who have had it drummed into them by television and 
     radio and in magazines, what abortion is and why and how it 
     became legal. It is part of the aural wallpaper of their 
     lives. They have grown up knowing phrases like ``abortion on 
     demand'' and ``the right to abortion'' and hearing nice 
     adults, the people next door, talk about supporting 
     politicians who will ``protect'' these ``rights.''
       I wonder if such talk has not left many of these children 
     confused, so deeply that they do not even know they are 
     confused, and morally dulled.
       We all know the recent horror stories. According to 
     prosecutors and news accounts, a girl at a prom delivers a 
     baby in the bathroom and lets it die, then rearranges 
     herself, washes up and goes back to the dance. A pair of 
     college-aged lovers from ``good families'' in ``pricey 
     suburbs,'' as news accounts put it, rent a motel room, where 
     he delivers their child, which they throw into a Dumpster.
       Is it too much to see a connection between the abortion 
     culture in which these young people came of age and the moral 
     dullness they are accused of displaying? Of course, such 
     crimes have occurred throughout time; history and literature 
     are full of them. But what is new, I think, is the apparent 
     surprise of the young girl at the prom, and of the young 
     couple at the motel, at the disapproval society has shown 
     toward them.
       And why should society disapprove? What, after all, is the 
     difference between what the girl at the prom is accused of 
     doing and a late-term abortion, something she would have 
     heard discussed, explained and defended on television and in 
     the newspaper?
       A late-term abortion means pulling a fully formed but not 
     yet born baby out of the womb, piercing its brain with 
     scissors, sucking out the brain, collapsing the skull and 
     then removing the dead baby. In the girl's home state, New 
     Jersey, this was legal. Why wouldn't she think there is no 
     difference, really, between that and choking a baby to death 
     in a bathroom stall and then dropping it in a trash bin? And 
     what, in fact, is the difference? Only that one death 
     occurred in a bathroom stall, and the other happened in a 
     hospital with clean white sheets and a doctor.
       Consider, too, the young couple in the motel and the 
     reasoning that may have left them free of any sense of sin or 
     crime. If the accusations are true, what did they do that was 
     wrong besides refuse to suck into life an inconvenient baby? 
     Isn't that what the culture they were born into, and grew to 
     young adulthood in, does?
       I think that's the great ignored story--what we have done 
     to our children by legalizing abortion and championing it. 
     The daily abortion stories and abortion polls and abortion 
     editorials and abortion pictures and stories showing how the 
     movement to ``protect these rights'' is faring--all this has 
     drummed into their heads the idea that human life is not 
     special, is not sanctified, is not a life formed by God but a 
     fertilized ovum that makes demands and can be removed.
       What we teach the young every day is moral confusion about 
     the worth of an ordinary human life. This has wounded, in a 
     very real and personal way, big pieces of an entire 
     generation. And I suspect it has left them frightened, too.

     

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