[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 80 (Thursday, June 18, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H4825]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                SUPPORT THE CHILD CUSTODY PROTECTION ACT

  (Mr. Smith of New Jersey asked and was given permission to address 
the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I urge support for the 
legislation of the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ros-Lehtinen), the 
Child Custody Protection Act.
  Mr. Speaker, my colleagues may recall that when the partial-birth 
abortion ban became an issue, many pro-abortion organizations, 
including Planned Parenthood Federation of America and their research 
arm, the Guttmacher Institute wrote a letter saying there are 500 
partial-birth abortions every year in the entire country. That 
statement, just like other statements that they made, turned out to be 
bogus, turned out to be a lie.
  It was a New Jersey newspaper that broke the story that just one 
clinic in my State, the Metropolitan Medical Associates in Englewood, 
did about 1,500 partial-birth abortions each and every year, many of 
them on teenagers.
  Now we find that the Metropolitan Medical Associates and other 
abortion mills in the State of New Jersey advertise and market their 
business in Pennsylvania and elsewhere and use the fact that New Jersey 
does not have a parental consent or parental notice statute as a way of 
luring young girls to that clinic and to other clinics. If we look at 
this ad, it stresses that pregnancies are terminated up to 24 weeks 
without parental knowledge or consent.
  These ads are telling teens ``Hey, we can end your pregnancy and your 
baby's life and your parents don't have to know.'' But if a teenager's 
secret abortion leads to complications, what happens then? Where is it 
written that the person driving the frightened and vulnerable 13 or 14-
year-old to an abortion mill is responsible? No, her parents will be 
responsible for and involved in her care after the abortion--when the 
disaster hit. They should have had the chance to be involved at the 
beginning--and they would have if the state law had not been evaded.
  We need to say that the law does matter. We need to say that parents 
matter. And we need to help those vulnerable children who are being 
carried across state lines and pushed into abortion clinics by relative 
strangers who, in most cases, have their own reasons for making sure 
that these girls get abortions.
  Support the Child Custody Protection Act.

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