[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 133 (Thursday, September 25, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H8942-H8944]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE CASE FOR LIFE
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. PENCE. Mr. Speaker, I rise at the end of a week of activity here
on Capitol Hill to do nothing less than to begin a process and an
effort that I hope will be a part of the fabric of my career for
however long I have the privilege of serving in the United States House
of Representatives.
I rise very simply, Mr. Speaker, to make the case for life; to make
the arguments, philosophical, intellectual, moral and historical, on
this blue and gold carpet, on a regular basis, for the sanctity of
human life.
My inspiration, oddly enough, Mr. Speaker, for this series, was just
mentioned by the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) in his remarks
immediately preceding mine. It is almost uncanny to me to have heard
it. For my inspiration in rising today on the House floor is none other
than a former Member of this body who served as a Member of Congress
from 1827 until his death in 1848.
Prior to being a Member of the House of Representatives, John Quincy
Adams was President of the United States, and his father President
before him. But, remarkably, after one term in Congress, John Quincy
Adams felt compelled, Mr. Speaker, to be elected to Congress from the
State of Massachusetts and to come to this place. And more than any
other purpose, it is clear as one studies his speeches and
pronouncements on this floor, that he was a man deeply committed to the
abolition of slavery in America.
Just as the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) reflected, it is reported
that oftentimes on a weekly basis or more throughout the nearly 20
years that John Quincy Adams served as a Member of this Congress, in a
Chamber, as you know, Mr. Speaker, just down the hall, the great, grand
old man and former President would come, history records, and bring his
papers with him and make the moral and the intellectual and the
historical and even the Biblical case against slavery in America.
We are even told that some of his colleagues at the time during the
course of those two decades actually tried to change the procedural
rules of the House, because they thought it rather impolitic to have
old Mr. Adams coming down and bringing up that difficult issue again.
But he did it, and he did it well, and he did it without apology. And
as I rise today to begin what I hope for however many years I serve in
Congress to be a series on the case for life, I am inspired and
magnetized by John Quincy Adams.
Now, many may say that John Quincy Adams, who perished, we are told,
in the midst of a session of Congress, fell over backwards in his
Chair, was carried into a waiting room where he died the next day, some
may say that his death in 1848, long before slavery would vanish from
this continent, proved that he had failed in his endeavor.
But God works in mysterious ways, Mr. Speaker, and I cannot help but
feel to this day that at some time from heaven John Quincy Adams smiled
down when he realized that on the back row of the Congress in which he
gave those lectures arrived in the year 1847 a tall, lanky man from the
State of Illinois who served for one term in Congress, and Abraham
Lincoln would later reflect that the speeches on the abolition of
slavery that he heard from the great man John Quincy Adams deeply
impacted his thinking and his life. And when Abraham Lincoln would then
run for the Senate in Illinois and lose, and then be propelled on that
same issue to the Presidency, he, no doubt, as is all of our posterity,
was in debt to the rantings of that old man.
And here is hoping that my rantings may cast seeds, somewhere, Mr.
Speaker, whether in this Chamber or through the means whereby people
observe what we do here, that some might reflect on the principles that
we share over the course of this series on the case for life and be
inspired by it, because it matters.
Despite the fact that ever since Roe v. Wade became law in 1973
America has looked across the street to the U.S. Supreme Court to
define this business of the rightness and the legality of abortion, and
despite the fact that, frankly, even in this Congress we pay scant
attention to the issue, it, nevertheless, is a colossal issue about
which our Nation must attend, for one reason and one reason only: 1.6
million abortions are performed in the United States each year. Ninety-
one percent are performed during the first trimester, twelve or fewer
weeks gestation. Nine percent are performed in the second trimester.
Approximately 1.5 million U.S. women with unwanted pregnancies choose
abortion every year, and most are under the age of 25 years and
unmarried. And as psychologists across America now reflect, post-
abortion stress syndrome, which seems to viciously take hold of women
at or around the age of menopause, where in many cases women are led
into therapy because of a deep sense of remorse about decisions they
made decades before, it is a decision that those 1.5 million women make
not just for that day, but for many, Mr. Speaker, a decision that
colors much of the rest of their life.
Approximately 6 million women in the United States become pregnant
every year. About half of those pregnancies are unintended, and 1.5
million elect to terminate them with legal abortion.
{time} 1530
Each year, more than 1 million U.S. teenagers become pregnant, and
the teen pregnancy rate has moved in the last 30 years to truly
startling statistics. Eighty percent of women having abortions are
single, 60 percent are white, 35 percent are black, 82 percent of women
having abortions are unmarried or separated, and almost half, this is
almost incomprehensible to me, but statistics from Planned Parenthood's
National Center for Health Statistics suggest that almost half of
American women, 43 percent, will have an abortion sometime in their
life. Yet, we rarely talk about it here. A procedure of deep physical
and emotional and moral and perhaps even spiritual consequences
reflected on through the millennia is scarcely talked about in the
center of the most powerful government on Earth.
Today I would like to speak, if I may, about a few of the historical
aspects of the case for life. Oftentimes, when I am standing before
groups of young people, I will say, rather obliquely, that for roughly
3,000 years in Western Civilization, until 1973, it was the unanimous
position of medical ethicists throughout Western Civilization that
abortion was immoral and unethical. And I am always amazed at the
startled look on children's faces. Because, of course, every student
that I see in a classroom was born in the post Roe v. Wade America
where abortion is a settled fact. It is a settled legal reality. But to
begin with the realization that for 3 millennia through, if I can use
the word, through the gestation of Western Civilization, there was, as
Mother Teresa often reflected, that core principle that human life is
sacred. Often rejected, even by nations and peoples in the midst of our
civilization, nevertheless, the sanctity of human life rises out of the
march of our civilization, almost like no other.
We all are familiar with the founding documents of this Nation that
speak of certain unalienable rights endowed by our Creator, and among
them are life. It is an astounding thing to consider. But what did our
Founders think of when they thought of life? They were men who
reflected on the ancients; they reflected on history. The Founders of
this Nation, some of whom are remembered on the walls and carved in
stone throughout this building, were truly learned men. So it is
important when we think about a reference to the unalienable right to
life, what did our Founders think about when they said life? What did
they think of as human life? In the context of our common law and in
the context of the history of the ancients or the Middle Ages, or even
the early church fathers who so deeply
[[Page H8943]]
influenced the Founders of this country, it is a consistent, one after
another element of the law in history that argues beyond a doubt that
abortion was considered a deep moral offense.
In the Lex Cornelia 81 B.C., the Jurist Iulius Paulus applied a text
of this law that applied to poisoners and those who dispensed drugs
specifically intended to cause abortion, saying that whoever dispenses
an abortion pill, regardless of its intention, the law read, set a bad
example and was condemned to work in the mines in 81 B.C. One thinks of
that story of a young girl who may have had medical complications just
last week from having taken the pill RU486 and died. And one thinks of
the wisdom of Lex Cornelia from 81 B.C., the dispensing of a pill and a
poison that causes an abortion and its harm.
Cicero actually placed it beyond doubt that the offense of abortion
was a capital offense punishable even by death. In the Persian Empire,
criminal abortions were severely punished. And so it goes.
In fact, the Ephesian, Soranos, often described as the greatest
ancient gynecologist from whom we obtain the word and the practice of
gynecology were, as history records, deeply opposed to Rome's
prevailing free abortion practice. Soranos found it necessary to think
first of the life of the mother and resorted to an abortion when he
thought the life of the mother was in danger, but it was otherwise
unacceptable. At the time of Soranos, Greek and Roman law afforded
little protection to the unborn until Christianity took root in the
Roman Empire, and then it changed. And from that point forward, after
the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, infanticide and
abortion were treated as equally criminal acts, alongside murder.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the severe penalty for abortion remained
in force in all countries of Europe well into the Middle Ages, and it
was reflected in many of the writings. I think of John Calvin, one of
the early church fathers and someone who deeply influenced the
development of common law and Christian theological thinking. He said,
John Calvin now, ``The fetus, though enclosed in the womb of his
mother, is already a human being, and it is a monstrous crime to rob it
of life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible
to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house
is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more
atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light,''
John Calvin wrote in the commentary in the Book of Exodus.
Truly astonishing words, but not at the time that he wrote them. To
think of that time and to think of that context, what John Calvin wrote
about, what the ancients embraced was what was common accepted law,
and, of course, our own common law was given birth by those historical
moorings.
As James S. Cole wrote in an essay entitled ``Abortion at Common
Law,'' long before the settlement of the English colonies on this
continent, the common law of England, that is, the law recognized as
common to all Englishmen, defined abortion as a crime. In accord with
the limits of biological knowledge of the day, it was believed that
there was no life until what was known as ``quickening,'' when the
movements of the baby could be discerned. Abortion was therefore
declared by the earliest authorities a lesser crime than criminal
homicide until quickening, and then it was a felony after quickening.
Much later, in the 1600s, there was some hesitation to prosecute
abortions in which a child died in the womb as opposed to those in
which the baby was expelled before dying, because of the problems of
proving that the act of beating the mother's abdomen or giving her a
poison had caused the death of the child. However, there was no doubt
that abortion of a woman who was either ``quick or great with child''
was unlawful.
In colonial America, abortions were prosecuted under the common law.
After the Revolution, the new American States adopted the common law of
England as the basis of their own law, including common law crimes.
Within a generation, the independent States began to outgrow the
English common law, and State legislatures increasingly defined crimes
in their States. However, common law crimes survived until superseded
by legislative enactment.
Although common law prohibitions on abortion were largely replaced
over time with legislative enactments through the 19th century, there
was never a gap in which the common law had anything other than a
prohibition of abortion. Abortion was a crime during the hundreds of
years before the founding of this Nation, and it remained a crime in
every State at the beginning of our Nation and throughout the 19th
century.
Until the advent of Roe v. Wade that, it is worth noting, struck down
simultaneously those laws promulgated from the common law in all 50
States, abortion was considered a crime, a deep moral offense, and
anathema to medical ethicists.
It is altogether appropriate to point out as well as we consider the
ancients today, Mr. Speaker, that the Hippocratic Oath itself carved,
depending on who you believe of the historians, and doctors will argue
the point, but somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, the
Hippocratic Oath authored by the great physician Hippocrates begins in
many versions with the phrase, ``First, do no harm,'' and in its most
classic versions will make reference to abortion; that it was
altogether and always inappropriate for the healer ever to end human
life, either born human life or unborn human life. It is contained in
the Hippocratic Oath. It was what it meant to be a doctor, that you
heal; your charge was to heal human beings. And so the bright line, to
put it in modern terminology, Mr. Speaker, the eight-lane superhighway
in Hippocrates' mind, it seemed to me, was that the doctor does not
kill human beings. Doctors do not end human life. And for 4,000 years,
the advance of medical ethics, and every doctor in my State of Indiana
and every doctor who takes an oath throughout the Western world raises
their hand, in many cases, and takes the Hippocratic Oath.
Now, the edited version oftentimes does not include reference to
abortion, but it still includes that line, ``first, do no harm.'' And
it is why today so many doctors in America refuse as a professional
decision to perform abortions. They simply choose not to be a part of
it. In fact, there seems to be some evidence in the medical community
of a diminishing availability of abortion in America, because men and
women that wear the white smocks and the green smocks of physicians are
less and less interested in that fundamental compromise of their
mission and their ministry as a healer, according to the Hippocratic
Oath.
I spoke of the English common law, which specifically forbade
abortion. It did, in some cases, as I mentioned, treat it as a felony
and, in other cases, treated it as a misdemeanor; but in all cases it
was immoral, wrong, and illegal. Blackstone, who wrote, as I learned in
law school, the famous Blackstone Commentaries at the founding of the
country; it can be accurately observed that a practicing lawyer could
literally consider themselves as having an entire legal library if they
possessed one book, not counting the Bible, but Blackstone's
Commentaries on the Law. It is taught even to this day in the most
secular of law schools, and people understand that Blackstone was, for
people practicing the law in the colonies and in the States and in the
territories, it was the ultimate resource. And Blackstone was clear on
abortion, writing in one of his commentaries, ``If a woman is quick
with child and by poison or otherwise killeth it in her womb, or if
anyone beat her whereby the child dieth in her body and she is
delivered of a dead child, this, though not murder was, by the ancient
law, homicide or manslaughter.''
So whatever may have been the exact view taken by common law of any
specific offense, in and around 1803, there was no question that
abortion was a crime. And yet, in America today, by a judicial decision
and by judicial fiat, that has fundamentally changed.
So why does all this matter? As I talked to some colleagues today,
they said to me, now, why are you doing that? Is there some legislation
coming to the floor that is going to change things in abortion? And I
granted the point that ever since Roe v. Wade, we, in the people's
House, in the Congress, and in the State legislatures of all 50 States
have very little to say about this issue.
[[Page H8944]]
{time} 1545
It comes down to nine men and women in black robes and the Presidents
who appoint them. But it seems to me to be altogether fitting that
something that so deeply troubles the heart of half of the American
people ought to be something that resonates in the heart of our
national government.
That is how I see this Chamber, Mr. Speaker. I said it shortly after
9/11 in a speech that I gave on this same floor, that I viewed the
House of Representatives as the heart of the American government and
that it ought to resonate with the hearts of the American people. When
the hearts of the American people are troubled about an issue at home
or abroad, this should be a troubled room. When the hearts of the
American people are quiet and at rest, this should be a quiet and
amicable place.
It may be over-literalizing it, trying to turn the government into
some homotropic version of man, but I think it has merit. And the truth
is that while there are millions of Americans who embrace the right to
choose an abortion, who take to the street to defend it, who take to
the polls to support it, there are, by any measure, a growing number of
nearly half of this country who are deeply troubled to live in an
America where innocent human life is so callously discarded. It was as
Meghan Cox Gurdon called it in an article in the Wall Street Journal a
number of years ago, it is, in my judgment, the mother of all rights.
Meghan Cox Gurdon, and I borrow from her essay now, wrote, ``The Roe
versus Wade anniversaries make me think of the last scene in
Schindler's List, the film about Oskar Schindler, the German
industrialist who saved a small number of Jews during World War II. The
final scene,'' for those who have seen it, ``features actual Schindler
survivors with their children and grandchildren line up to place stones
on his grave in Israel. What makes the scene so powerful is not just
the surprising number of progeny already produced by the Holocaust
escapees, but the staggering number of men, women and children who are
not there, who never had a chance of life because the Nazis gassed
those who would have been their parents and grandparents.''
Meghan Gurdon goes on to write compellingly, ``When Roe comes up, it
has a Schindler-like reverberation in my own family. The fact is, my
husband and I, our four children, his three siblings and their combined
eight children all owe our lives to the fact that the famous Supreme
Court decision did not come until 1973 (and its British equivalent
until 1967). For all 17 of us, all descended from two unwanted
pregnancies--two pregnancies that produced hasty marriages, some
unhappiness, rather more sadness, and even actually two divorces. And I
have to say, boy, am I glad that those pregnancies, dismaying and
unexpected as they were, entailing the compromises that they did for
those involved, were not tidied up in a clinic so that the young
mothers in question could `get on with their lives.' You, gentle
reader, would have been deprived of nothing more than my editorial
voice. I and 16 kinsfolk would have been robbed of everything.''
It is in every sense, as Meghan Gurdon writes, ``the mother of all
rights.'' I think it is why our founders listed life first, that they
knew from the spilled blood that had happened on our shores and would
happen at the hands of a despotic king. They knew that if a man does
not have an unalienable right to life, he has nothing. That if a man or
a woman cannot anticipate that government cannot deprive them of their
life without due process of law and cannot deprive any human person of
their right to life without due process of law, then they are, in the
words of John Calvin, like that man in his own home, most grievously
offended to have been attacked in what is to be his safest place.
Alexander Hamilton cautioned us against forgetting the ancient
parchments, the teachings of ancients, and cautioned those who believed
that we could create a society that separated law from moral truth
saying, ``The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among
old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in
the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the Divinity and can
never be erased or obscured by mortal power.''
It is a truth, Mr. Speaker, I have tried humbly to advance today for
your and my colleagues' ears and for anyone else who is listening and
in the weeks and months and, if the Lord wills it, years ahead. I hope
from time to time to come to this floor and do likewise. To begin to
take a break from the arguments of the day at home and abroad and to
take a longer-view perspective on this Nation and on the vitality of
its legal and moral traditions. For it seems to me that abortion is the
issue of our time.
I used to say to people when I was younger that I thought abortion
was the most important moral issue of our time, and I have since
abandoned the adjective because I really do believe that as the late
Mother Teresa would say often, that it is the defining issue of our
age, and on some days, I believe in a hopeful view of the future, that
our posterity will look back and say there was a time when America lost
her way, but largely because of a broken heart, she came back. She came
back to the truth of the ancient, not because she returned to a
puritanical society that judged people in their hour of need, but
because America again became a broken hearted society that said, we
want to be a place where there are no unwanted children. We want to be
a society where crisis pregnant centers come to replace entirely
centers where innocent life is destroyed; where women know that there
are better choices, not only for their unborn child, but for them than
ever the choice of ending that life.
That is my hope and that is my dream that they will look back on this
time and they will say, Mr. Speaker, America got off the path, but she
reflected on the truths of the ancients. She reflected on the
unalienable rights that she had alienated for a while, of life, and
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And by God's grace, she found her
way back, to be a compassionate society and a caring society, but a
society that once again embraced the unalienable right to life.
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