[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 44 (Thursday, April 1, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H1793-H1794]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           COURT OF APPEALS CONSIDERS PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION

  (Mr. BURGESS asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. Speaker, currently, the Court of Appeals is working on the 
partial-birth abortion ban which we passed in this House twice during 
the past year and the President signed into law in December.
  Mr. Speaker, it has been over 25 years since I first learned of the 
procedure of newborn circumcision, not something we normally think of 
in this House, but, Mr. Speaker, it would be unthinkable today to 
perform that procedure without some type of anesthesia, because we all 
know that a newborn feels pain.
  But we are asked to discount the possibility of fetal pain perception 
when

[[Page H1794]]

dealing with the language of partial-birth abortion. We are asked to 
suspend our knowledge of pain pathways and assume that a scalpel 
laceration, skull fracture, dural tear, and brain laceration will pass 
unnoticed by the child, as long as his or her head is still in the 
birth canal.
  By any measure, intact dilatation and extraction performed in the 
last trimester of pregnancy is never the only option for concluding a 
pregnancy when the mother's health is compromised. Induction of labor 
or Cesarean section may both be used to complete a pregnancy when the 
mother's health is threatened.
  The only theoretic advantage of a partial-birth abortion is this: It 
guarantees that the baby will be dead upon delivery.

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