[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 5 (Tuesday, January 25, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H175-H176]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  ABORTION CLINICS: NOT ONLY KILLING MILLS BUT TORTURE CENTERS AS WELL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, yesterday, 100,000 human rights 
advocates endured the numbing cold and snow in a great witness for life 
here in our Nation's Capital. Their presence on behalf of those who 
have no voice of their own was truly inspiring. It was gratifying 
beyond words to see so many teenagers full of idealism and full of 
compassion and love for their littlest brothers and sisters and for all 
human life that is at risk.
  Indeed, Mr. Speaker, the pro-life movement is the greatest human 
rights movement on Earth.

                              {time}  1945

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. It is a struggle based on unconditional 
love, even for the proabortionists, unconditional empathy for the 
victims, both the child and his or her mother, and unconditional 
courage.
  We are a movement with deep hope and expectation, that with God's 
all-powerful grace, and through that all-powerful grace, the culture of 
death will soon be vanquished by the culture of life, where all human 
life is cherished and respected. We pray for the day when branding an 
unborn child as unwanted will no longer mean a death sentence in 
America.
  Mr. Speaker, I have always found the term ``unwanted child'' 
dehumanizing, for it relegates a child to the status of a commodity, an 
object, a thing, something that can be chosen or unchosen at will, not 
unlike any other consumer product.
  Mr. Speaker, with each passing year, the horrific toll of abortion on 
women's lives becomes more evident, and it is time the media especially 
stopped censoring the truth. Women deserve better than abortion, and 
the compelling stories of the brave women, the postabortive women who 
are silent no more need to be heard. These very special women bear 
witness not only to the agony and the trauma of their own abortions, 
but to the hope of healing, reconciliation and inner peace as well.
  Wounded women like Dr. Alveda King, the niece of the late Dr. Martin 
Luther King, who has had an abortion, Jennifer O'Neill, singer Melba 
Moore, civil rights activist, like I said, Dr. King, and so many 
others, and cofounder of this group called Silent No More Awareness 
Campaign, Georgette Forney, have all called on us to listen to their 
heart-wrenching stories and take seriously our moral duty to protect 
women and children from the predators who ply their lethal trade in 
abortion mills throughout the land.
  These brave women are the new champions of life. They have refused to 
be silent any longer. They care too deeply about other women and their 
children, and they want others to be spared the anguish that they 
themselves have endured. And to the millions of women who have aborted, 
they are uniquely equipped to convey the breathtaking love and healing 
and reconciliation that God provides to those who ask. They do have a 
connection, the silentnomoreawareness.org, if those who might want to 
contact them just go on the Web and check them out. They are 
unbelievably full of compassion.
  Mr. Speaker, let me also point out that with each passing year, the 
child body count from abortion in America grows. Since the infamous 
decision in 1973, more than 46 million babies have been killed by 
dismemberment or chemical poisoning, a number fast approaching the 
total worldwide deaths attributable to World War II; that is civilian 
and military deaths.
  And as we have feared, Mr. Speaker, the much touted baby pesticide, 
RU-486, rushed to approval by a very biased

[[Page H176]]

FDA, is poison not only to the baby, but women are dying from it as 
well.
  And now we learn, Mr. Speaker, from science and medicine that due to 
nerve cell development, unborn children from at least 20 weeks onward, 
and most likely even earlier, feel excruciating pain, two to four times 
more painful than you or I would feel from the same assault.
  Today, along with 75 cosponsors, I have reintroduced legislation, the 
Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, to require in part that women seeking 
abortions at this stage of development be informed of this gruesome 
reality. These kids feel pain, and we need to make that known to those 
women who are procuring abortions at that gestational period.
  The bill would also require that women be given the option of having 
anesthesia administered directly to the unborn child, because indirect 
administration does not cross the placenta to numb the pain that the 
child feels as they are being slowly dismembered by these later-term 
abortion methods. One of those methods, the D and E, takes about 30 
minutes as the arms and the legs and the body and the torso are all 
hacked off. And the baby feels pain during this hideous procedure.
  Interestingly, Mr. Speaker, the partial-birth abortion legal trials 
in various courts around the country drew new attention to the pain 
that unborn children feel during an abortion. In expert testimony 
during these trials, Dr. Sunny Anand, Director of the Pain Neurobiology 
Lab at Arkansas Children's Hospital, said, and I quote him, ``The human 
fetus possesses the ability to experience pain from 20 weeks of 
gestation, if not earlier, and the pain that is perceived by a fetus is 
more intense than that perceived by newborns or older children.''
  He went on to explain that the pain inhibitory mechanisms, in other 
words the fibers that dampen and modulate the experience of pain, do 
not begin to develop until 32 to 34 weeks of gestation. Thus these 
children feel pain, and they feel it excruciatingly so.
  Abortion is violence against children, Mr. Speaker, and these kids 
feel that pain.
  Abortion clinics, if we look at them as what they really are, are not 
only killing centers, they are torture chambers as well. I hope that we 
all can move on this legislation as quickly as possible.

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