[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 12 (Friday, January 19, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H574-H581]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             MARCH FOR LIFE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be here on the floor 
of the House of Representatives to carry on some of the discussion that 
is taking place around this city and around this country today on March 
for Life day.
  It would take you back 45 years ago to January 22, 1973, when the 
case of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton came before the United States 
Supreme Court. They manufactured a legal opinion out of the emanations 
and conundrums to quote the decision that resulted in abortion on 
demand in this country. Some say abortions soared up to as many as 6 
million a year in some of those years in the 1970s.
  America wasn't ready for such a decision. We didn't understand, in 
1973, the magnitude of the decision the Supreme Court had made. We knew 
that it was going to open up abortion. We suspected it would be 
abortion on demand. We did not expect that, 45 years later, we would be 
here in this city still marching, marching for life, marching to defend 
the lives of the innocent unborn, and praying in most, if not every 
single church in America, to defend innocent, unborn human life.
  Some of the questions that have come before us in that period of time 
as two generations of Americans have grown up with the guilt of 
abortion, with the shadow hanging over our heads, two generations of 
Americans have grown up having to answer this question: Is human life 
sacred? Is it the value, is it the measure that we put up when we 
evaluate all things we do?
  Our Founding Fathers understood that when they laid out the original 
founding document of the Declaration of Independence. They wrote that 
we have the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness.
  Now, it is no coincidence that life is first in that list, Mr. 
Speaker. Our Founding Fathers understood that they were prioritized 
rights, that the right to life is paramount and that the right to life 
is sacred, but that liberty comes from God. He confers his God-given 
liberty on us, and we have to handle it responsibly. And behind that 
came pursuit of happiness.
  Now I will take it from the bottom up, Mr. Speaker.
  Pursuit of happiness was understood differently by our Founders than 
I think we understand it today. It seems to me that, if you go into a 
high school classroom, those who have been studying our founding 
documents--our Declaration and our Constitution and the Federalist 
Papers--and ask them what does ``pursuit of happiness'' mean, they

[[Page H575]]

might say: ``Well, a good tailgate party,'' or ``a fun time with your 
friends,'' or any one of a number of other things that they do for 
recreation.
  But, truthfully, Mr. Speaker, that is not how our Founding Fathers 
looked at that pursuit of happiness. They don't even call it the rich 
things we draw from our families, exclusively. But they understood 
``pursuit of happiness'' as the term is understood in Greek, which is 
the foundation for that term. It is the word ``eudaimonia,'' spelled E-
U-D-A-I-M-O-N-I-A.
  Eudaimonia, the breadth of the pursuit of happiness, if described and 
understood properly, is this: It is becoming the whole human being, the 
whole person; developing yourself physically with the God-given bodies 
that we have with exercise and nutrition; developing our skill sets 
with the gifts that we have that are physical skills. And it includes, 
also, the intellectual component, where we develop our minds as far as 
we can, educate ourselves and fill that God-given brain up with all the 
information that is relevant and useful. That is the second component.

                              {time}  1215

  The third component is spiritual. They expected and called upon this 
pursuit of happiness, this eudaimonia--the effort to become a complete 
human being, a complete human being spiritually, intellectually, and 
physically, that was the package of eudaimonia, the pursuit of 
happiness--but even that couldn't trump another individual's liberty, 
couldn't take aside the God-given liberty to live free and be free and 
have free movement and rights to property and a number of those 
components.
  So our effort to pursue happiness can't trample on someone else's 
God-given liberty. We understand that. You can't take away somebody's 
property because it makes you happy. It is a pretty simple equation. 
Neither, then, can a pursuit of liberty be allowed to justify the 
taking of a human life, because life is the highest priority.
  It is always prioritized, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness; or in 
Burke's language, life, liberty and property. Life, liberty, and 
pursuit of happiness is always prioritized with life as the highest 
priority that stands above all else.
  I would remind you, Mr. Speaker, that when you want to know how we 
measure, the meter, invented by a Frenchman, is set to be that 39-
point-something inches, and they have a platinum meter stick that is 
set up so that they could have a finite measure that they keep in a 
controlled atmosphere so it doesn't expand or contract, and it is the 
most precise measurement of a meter. That is the basis for distance 
measuring in the metric world, most of the rest of the world. That is 
the basis to distance measuring.
  That meter stick--that platinum meter stick is the measure itself 
that they measure everything else against in components of or multiples 
of that meter stick.
  Well, I would take you to the former Governor of Pennsylvania, Bob 
Casey, Sr., who has passed away and who was the father of Senator Bob 
Casey. He made this statement:

       Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself 
     against which all other things are weighed.

  Now, here is the comparison that I have drawn. The meter stick is the 
measure itself of distance, but human life is the measure of all of our 
values.
  Human life is sacred, it is finite, and the value of life from the 
moment of conception until natural death is the same. We don't punish 
people differently when they commit murder against someone who is 101 
years old versus someone who is 1 year old. Somebody who has, perhaps, 
a century of life ahead of them, we don't say their life is worth more 
than someone who almost certainly doesn't have a decade of life ahead 
of them, because human life is sacred and it is the measure itself 
against which all other things are weighed.
  So once we understand that human life is sacred in all of its forms, 
there is only one other question to ask, and that is: At what moment 
does life begin? At what instant does life begin?
  We can look through this whole period of human development and we can 
make arguments about viability and trimesters and ability to breathe or 
live outside the womb. Those things are always vague, you can never 
nail that down to anything precise, because even the Pain-Capable 
legislation that we passed out of this House a couple of months ago 
that bans abortions after 20 weeks, we say that baby can feel pain at 
20 weeks, so that is abhorrent to our conscience and we reject aborting 
a baby that can feel pain.
  We don't know whether they can feel pain prior to that or not, but 
that is not a precise moment. It is a relatively vague moment that is a 
consensus conclusion of OB/GYN doctors, perhaps, but life itself cannot 
be measured and neither can we take that life and say: Well, we might 
not have.
  I have often stood in a high school or even a middle school gymnasium 
and talked to the youth in there whose ears and minds are open, and I 
asked: If someone walked by the door of this gymnasium and looked away 
from you and poked a gun in the door and pulled the trigger, did he 
kill somebody?
  And they looked at each other and said: Well, we don't know.
  And I said: Neither does he. But if there is somebody laying there in 
the bleachers that is dead, then what happened?
  They said: Then we know he killed somebody.
  I said: Well, can you take a chance with that? Is he guilty of murder 
if he poked a gun in the door and the crowd was full and he pulled the 
trigger and somebody died?
  They said: Yes.
  Mr. Speaker, so neither can we take a chance with innocent unborn 
human life and say it really isn't a life prior to 20 weeks, or it 
really isn't a life prior to viability, or it really isn't a life until 
the third trimester.
  So what we have done in this Congress is we have brought in a number 
of pieces of legislation, incremental pieces of legislation to try to 
put an end to this killing, because the pro-life community knows and 
believes--all the pro-life community is convinced that life begins at 
that moment of conception, that instant of conception, and we have to 
protect that life from that moment.
  Anybody who has picked up a little baby, especially if it is your 
own, in awe at the miracle of this little child created in God's image 
from the DNA of mom and dad, to be nurtured and shaped, to live, to 
love, to learn, to laugh, to worship, to have children of his or her 
own, understands that miracle and how precious it is to us.
  There are at least 500,000 couples in America that are waiting to 
adopt because they want a baby to love so badly, yet we have watched as 
60 million babies have been aborted since 1973, in the last 45 years; 
60 million babies weighing on the conscience of America, a sin 
committed by the government of our country. There have been people 
complicit in this that have advocated for it.
  Just a little bit ago, we had the vote on the Born-Alive bill here on 
the floor that enhances the penalty. If an abortionist isn't successful 
on the first try, what they often do is put that baby in a cold room 
and close the door and let that baby die in that cold room. There are 
other more ghastly methods that get used as well.

  So we moved legislation here on the floor to statutorily protect that 
baby that survives the abortion. In essence, what it really says in the 
end is this: If you try to end the life of this baby through abortion 
and fail, we are going to punish you if you need a second try.
  Mr. Speaker, I don't think it is nearly enough. I think it is a 
start, but it is not nearly enough. Actually, we need to be 
accelerating our pace in incrementalism, not taking our foot off the 
throttle on the incremental approach to ending abortion.
  So in 45 years, 2 generations, 60 million babies. I am glad we have 
passed the legislation that protects a born-alive baby from being 
killed by the abortionist. I am glad we did that today, but we should 
not see it as a premier piece of legislation that is going to end even 
one abortion. Instead, it might end some of the killing post-abortion. 
So it says something about our defense of life, but it doesn't say 
nearly enough about our defense of life.
  Through the time that I have been here in this pro-life movement in 
Iowa and here in this Congress, 2 decades more altogether, I have gone 
from trying to get legislation passed that required that if a young 
mother was

[[Page H576]]

seeking an abortion--a minor mother was seeking an abortion--that she 
needed to have parental notification. That was about all we could get 
back when I started on this in 1996. Notify a parent, even then they 
defined the parent as, well, she can notify a mom or a dad, a stepmom 
or a stepdad, a grandmother or a grandfather, an aunt or an uncle, a 
brother or a sister in the whole or half blood.
  That is how Planned Parenthood lobbied to define this parent that 
would be notified that this child mother was going to get an abortion. 
There is still not parental consent in my State, but, instead, it is 
parental notification with this long list of what a parent is: a 
father, a mother, a guardian, a legal guardian--those are okay--then 
grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters in the whole or half 
blood.
  I said: You left out the neighbor, the family cat or the family dog. 
Couldn't you just name everything as a parent? Maybe you could seal an 
envelope up and put it in a safety deposit box, and they could open up 
the archives in 100 years, and that would be the notice, for all the 
impact they had.
  They did everything to restrict anything that might protect an 
innocent unborn baby. That is what it was like in 1996 for me in my 
State.
  So through that time, we have marched through this march of 
incrementalism.
  Prior to that--God bless Henry Hyde. From where I stand and from the 
floor of this House, time after time he stood up and he defended life. 
The Hyde amendment, along with the Mexico City policy, over the effect 
of these many years along the way, has cumulatively saved somewhere in 
the neighborhood of 2 million lives. Now, that sounds like a big 
number, 2 million lives, and it makes me feel good about Henry Hyde.
  I recall going to his funeral and saying good-bye to Henry. I know 
that if there is anybody who has stood here and talked at the podium 
who is in heaven, it is Henry Hyde. The number one pro-life activist, 
effective worker here as a former chairman of the House Judiciary 
Committee, he used the tools of his job and his character and his faith 
to save roughly 2 million lives.
  Then I try to figure out: How many others did we save with the 
incrementalism that we have?
  I was involved in the effort. I want to tip my hat to Steve Chabot, 
who was the chairman of the Constitution Committee at that time when I 
came to this Congress, and we had the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. 
That was passed out of this Congress and written into law, but they 
litigated that to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court came down and 
turned it down in a decision that said you can't ban partial-birth 
abortion because that procedure is written too vaguely within the law, 
so the physician--put that in quotes, the ``physician''--can't 
determine exactly what is lawful and what isn't. On top of that, we 
hadn't determined that a partial-birth abortion is never necessary to 
save the life of the mother.
  So we went back to work and we rewrote that legislation to conform 
with the Supreme Court's ``no'' decision. We precisely defined the 
ghastly act of partial-birth abortion in law. We held multiple 
hearings. Through the course of that, we established congressional 
findings that a partial-birth abortion was never medically necessary to 
save the life of the mother.
  So we answered both of the Supreme Court's objections, and that went 
back out again, where it was litigated through the three circuits that 
were converging before the Supreme Court. I was part of that, and I sat 
through one of those cases in Lincoln, Nebraska, and then came to hear 
the case here in the United States Supreme Court as well, and there we 
prevailed.
  Now, I don't know how many lives we have saved with the ban on 
partial-birth abortion. They will find another way to abort that baby, 
but at least we put another principle in place. We are still stuck at 
about 2 million babies saved over the course of 45 years.
  I look at some of the other legislation we passed out of the House 
but not the Senate. Senate Democrats are blocking piece after piece of 
legislation, but a couple of months ago we passed the legislation over 
to the Senate that, as we call it, Pain-Capable, or the 20-week 
abortion ban, and that legislation is the legislation I mentioned a few 
minutes ago. We have determined that a baby can feel pain. We have 
evidence of them squirming and struggling to get away from the 
surgeon's tools, and we have got the testimony of abortionists that 
tell us how a baby struggles and exhibits pain.
  Many of you, I believe, Mr. Speaker, have seen the surgery that was 
being conducted on about a 7-month gestational baby. The incision went 
into the womb, and that baby reached outside his mother's womb and held 
the finger of the surgeon. That picture will be in my mind forever. We 
can't think that a baby that can grasp the finger of a surgeon 2 months 
before he is born is not a human being and not a human life. Of course 
they are.

  So we in this House banned abortion after 20 weeks under the 
definition that they are capable of feeling pain. That is a step in the 
right direction and it is a pretty big chunk of incrementalism as well 
that goes further than maybe anything that has come off the floor of 
this House so far.
  We also have legislation waiting here that has pieces of 
incrementalism, but the Born-Alive legislation that passed this morning 
here is incrementalism, and it is a small incrementalism that actually 
doesn't stop a single abortion, but does put a statement down on the 
value of that baby.
  Then there is legislation here that prohibits sex-selected abortion, 
because we are seeing now with ultrasound that you can determine at an 
early stage whether it is a boy or whether it is a girl. We have people 
who say: Well, I think I will abort the girl because I want my first 
child to be a boy. I will take my chances the next time.
  How do you do that? How do you do that? If you believe that human 
life is sacred in all of its forms, how can you take the life of a 
little baby and say, ``I don't want this child to be the sibling to my 
next child because it is a girl instead of a boy,'' or, and less often, 
``a boy instead of a girl''?
  We know what that has done statistically in China with the one-child 
policy in China, which they have just lifted to some degree, and you 
have family after family that will abort any pregnancy that is not a 
boy because they want a boy to carry on the name.

                              {time}  1230

  I have a former constituent named Gill Copper, now passed away. Gill 
Copper was one of Merrill's Marauders who fought down out of the Asian 
subcontinent in the Second World War. For a while, he was stationed in 
India, and there, under the Ganges River that goes through New Delhi, 
or Delhi, India, I believe that is the river--but he would go down and 
wait under that bridge, especially towards evening, and he would just 
stand in the water, say, up to here, and he would listen and watch and 
listen for the splash.
  When he heard the splash, he knew what brought that about. The splash 
was, many times, a little girl baby who was being thrown off the bridge 
into the river because they didn't want a little girl. Gill Copper 
would swim out there, in that dirty river, get ahold of that little 
baby, bring that baby and swim back to shore with that baby, dry that 
baby off, get that baby breathing, and carry that baby down to the 
orphanage and start that baby's life there.
  He saved dozens and dozens of little girl babies by posting himself 
in that river in India, as a warrior defending our freedom in the 
Second World War, and he became a pro-life activist. He already was. He 
came back to America a pro-life activist.
  I want to do all we can to support his sacrifice in his memory, and 
in Henry Hyde's, and in Joe Pitts', and in Chris Smith's, and in Trent 
Franks'. Those are the names of the people who have led on this issue 
since I have been in this Congress and before. All of them deserve a 
special place in all of our heads and hearts for the work that they 
have done.
  We are at a place now where the pieces of legislation that have come 
through this House of Representatives and have been sent to the Senate, 
or are poised to come through this House and sent to the Senate, now it 
comes down in the House to this: we have the bill that prohibits sex-
selected abortion. Let's see. We have no sex-selected abortion, and 
Pain-Capable legislation has already passed.

[[Page H577]]

  And then Chris Smith has legislation that prohibits abortion on the 
dismemberment. To describe this, Mr. Speaker, is also ghoulish and 
ghastly, and that is the process of the dismemberment abortion, where 
the surgeon reaches in with specially made forceps and grips a part of 
a baby and pulls--we had a doctor who had committed I don't know how 
many thousands of abortions describe this before the Judiciary 
Committee--and pull with very strong force, pull hard and come out with 
an arm or a leg or a part of a torso, and arrange those pieces in a 
stainless steel pan to see if he got all the pieces of the baby who he 
was tearing apart.
  Chris Smith's legislation stops that ghastly process. It doesn't end 
abortion, but it ends the ghastly process of dismemberment abortion, 
and I support that legislation. In fact, I have signed on to every 
piece of pro-life legislation that has come through this House of 
Representatives, unless I just missed one somewhere. I believe it is 
every single one.
  But as I watched this incrementalism take place, I have always looked 
for, when do the stars align themselves right? How do we get to this 
place where we do what we know is true, and right, and just? When will 
it be aligned right?
  And the alignment, we have known this for 45 years. We can save these 
lives, those who will be aborted in the future; we can save them if we 
have a pro-life majority in the House of Representatives that is 
willing to take action, if we have a pro-life majority in the United 
States Senate that can figure out how to get past the 60-vote 
filibuster rule, if we have a President who will sign the legislation, 
and if we have a Supreme Court that will uphold that legislation.
  Four windows, Mr. Speaker, four windows we need to have open. And 
they almost have to be open, they have to be open in sequence, and they 
have to be open at the right time.
  So, today, we have a pro-life majority in the House of 
Representatives ready to move, if we can get it to the floor, any 
reasonable piece of pro-life legislation that is consistent with the 
philosophy that I have articulated here in the last half hour. The 
House is ready.
  The Senate has a pro-life majority. They don't have, yet, a way to 
get past that 60-vote threshold of the filibuster; except, all Mitch 
McConnell needs to do is go out there and make a motion to amend the 
rule, by suspending or deleting the filibuster rule, and that can pass 
by a simple majority in the United States Senate. So all he needs is 51 
votes. And I will bet you Mike Pence would fly back from the Middle 
East to cast that 51st vote if it meant opening up the door to save 
these lives and put an end to the discretion of aborting babies because 
they happen to be inconvenient, or for other purposes.
  So the House is ready. The Senate has a pro-life majority. They have 
got to get past the filibuster. The President will sign legislation to 
save lives; and he is giving a speech, maybe about now, talking about 
the value of innocent, unborn human life.
  We have never had such a pro-life President. We have never had--and I 
will say this twice--we have never, never had such a pro-life Vice 
President, Mike Pence, who sat next to me on my elbow on the Judiciary 
Committee for, I believe it was, 10 years. I understand his 
convictions, and I know what he will be saying to the President. I 
understand the President's convictions.
  We need to get legislation to the President's desk. What a tragedy if 
we failed to move when we had the chance to move. What a tragedy if we 
weren't bold when we had the opportunity to be bold. What a tragedy if 
we are stuck in the rut of incrementalism and this little, dinky war of 
attrition that goes on between factions here within the House and 
within the Senate when we know what is the true, right, and just thing 
to do.
  But I have described how we have to be precise in the way we draft 
legislation that prohibits practices; it prohibits abortion, along with 
other things. And we have to determine the rationale for our decisions 
here in the House and in the Senate.
  So I drafted legislation a year and a half ago, and it is called the 
Heartbeat Protection Act. The Heartbeat Protection Act is H.R. 490, and 
it does this: it directs that, if an abortionist is planning to commit 
an abortion, he must first check for a heartbeat. If a heartbeat can be 
detected, the baby is protected. That is the center of the legislation. 
It is only a few pages. It is not complex. We stripped it down so it 
was clean and everybody could understand it.

  We define the check for the heartbeat to be within the parameters of 
modern medicine. We can determine a heartbeat, we know the heart will 
beat as early as 18 days, but it can be determined with confidence at 
about 6 weeks. So the 20-week bill is the Pain-Capable. This Heartbeat 
bill can be thought of in, say, roughly 6 weeks from conception. But 
our definition is the heartbeat, not any time frame. The heartbeat is 
precise.
  You can say then to the Supreme Court, we are not going to end the 
lives of these babies if their heart is beating. We can determine 
whether the heart is beating or not.
  One hundred percent of the time that a baby's heart is beating, you 
have got a live baby; and so we know if we stop that beating heart, we 
have ended the life of a baby. It is really clear and simple, and it 
doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to figure that out, even at the Supreme 
Court level.
  It is within our hearts, and I look across the countryside, and the 
miles and miles, thousands and thousands of miles, that I have driven 
over the last 45 years, and each year, I see more and more of the 
billboards up, many of them put up by the Knights of Columbus, that 
say, ``Abortion Stops a Beating Heart,'' or ``We All Start Small.''
  They have gotten into our heads and into our conscience and into the 
culture of America. When we see those billboards, we know what that 
says. It says, defend these little innocents. They might be the ones 
who produce the miracles going forward. Every one of them is a miracle; 
every one of them created in God's image.
  But we know that abortion stops a beating heart, and we have all 
heard that rhythm of the ultrasound. We have all heard that sound of a 
beating heart. If the rules didn't prohibit it, I would take out my 
iPhone and play this into the microphone because I have got one of 
those glorious things that is really close to me in my iPhone right 
now, the beating of that little heart, 158 beats per minute, a healthy, 
healthy little child. I have had them sent to me by constituents. They 
want me to listen, and they will show me the ultrasound.
  I have a district representative who framed the first ultrasound for 
his firstborn, and that little guy now--that frame has been in his 
office for all these years. That little guy now, his name is Joseph 
Dean Anderson, is 9 years old, and he is my godson. His first picture 
is of his ultrasound. It is still framed, it is still cherished by his 
parents, and he is cherished by me.
  These lives are utterly precious. They are the future of our country. 
Today, we have 102 million Americans who are working, they are of 
working-age, simply not in the workforce.
  We are hearing debates here and in the Senate going on this week and 
next week, and many weeks thereafter, about how we don't have a 
workforce in America to do the work; so we have to go to foreign 
countries and bring people here who bring with them a different 
culture, which, if they embrace ours, is fine. They will assimilate to 
Americanism.
  But we have got a large segment of America that is coaching them not 
to do that, to stick with the old ways, rather than our ways. There is 
a consequence to that that is for another discussion, another time, Mr. 
Speaker.
  But I will submit this: 60 million babies aborted since Roe v. Wade 
in 1973. Roughly half of them were girls. I went back through this 
decade by decade and did the math to calculate how many babies would 
those 30 million girls who would have grown by now, many of them into 
women, how many babies would they have had?
  By my measure--and it is back-of-the-envelope only, but it is all we 
really need to understand the concept--another 60 million. We are not 
only missing 60 million babies in this country who were aborted since 
Roe v. Wade, we are missing another 60 million babies who were not born 
because their mothers were aborted. Now that is 120 million Americans 
who are missing,

[[Page H578]]

and they weigh on our conscience. That is a third of our population, or 
320 million Americans.
  So I can say to a school auditorium, to two girls, two boys, or to a 
boy and a girl, I can say: You two look at each other. And they look at 
each other.
  And then I will say: Do you know what's missing? Your classmate. Your 
friend would be sitting between you now if it had not been for 
abortion.
  For every two we have, there is another one that would be sitting--
every two Americans we have, there is another one that would be sitting 
in between that would have needed a pair of shoes and a ball glove and 
maybe a dance contest costume, all the little things that come from 
little boys and girls, all the joy and all the laughter.
  Can you imagine shutting down a third of the laughter in a country? 
Or can you think about what America would be like if we were a country 
that we just stopped having babies? I mean, it is dialed down even 
worse in other countries, but that is where the joy and the laughter 
comes from.
  Without babies, there is no joy. Without babies, there is no 
laughter. It slowly silences itself as the years go by, if we had no 
more babies born in America. That means the 1-year-olds would be where 
we get the giggles and the laughs from. They laugh and giggle for a few 
more years, and by the time they got into their twenties, that would 
diminish down some.
  They don't have any children, remember. They don't have children to 
love; so their joy is going to be less. And as they get older, the hope 
would be gone because what would you be preparing for, except your own 
death?
  But we live for the next generation, and I want that next generation, 
all of them, to be born. I want them to live, to love, to learn, to 
laugh, to play, to work, to be parents, to have children of their own, 
to raise those siblings, to broker the disagreements that come along 
with that, to develop themselves and feel how full you are when you are 
a person that is completely gifted by the blessings of children and 
grandchildren.

  But that has been snuffed out by shortsightedness because of the 
permissibility of the Supreme Court decision in 1973, Roe v. Wade, and 
Doe v. Bolton. And we are here in this town today marching, marching 
from the Mall to the Supreme Court Building for, I guess it would be 
technically, the 44th time.
  What did we accomplish? Some things. We supported Henry Hyde, the 
Hyde amendment. The Mexico City policy has saved about 2 million lives. 
We banned partial-birth abortion. We have passed a bill out of the 
House of Representatives that bans abortion after 20 weeks, when we 
believe that they are--and they are--pain-capable of suffering the 
grueling pain of abortion. We have done that.
  But we sit here with the Heartbeat bill. It is the strongest, best 
supported pro-life bill at this stage of it that is before the United 
States House of Representatives ever. Even Pain-Capable came in to the 
announcement that there would be a floor vote on it with about 151 or 
153 signatures on it.

                              {time}  1245

  The Heartbeat bill--which requires the abortionist to check for a 
beating heart, and if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is 
protected--has today 170 cosponsors on it. It has another good, long 
list of people who say: I am not ready to sign on, but if you put it on 
the floor, I will vote for it.
  We can pass that bill off the House of Representatives and send it 
over to the Senate. And if there are those who think, ``Well, we don't 
want to let the Heartbeat bill get ahead of the Pain-Capable bill,'' I 
don't know why we wouldn't do that. I think that is a better policy, 
actually, and anybody who wants to save lives ought to be for that. But 
if that is their decision, fine. The Heartbeat bill can push the Pain-
Capable bill out onto the floor of the Senate and there can be a debate 
and a vote on Pain-Capable, the 20-week bill, in the Senate.
  But there is no debate going on over there today. They don't have 
pro-life legislation moving through the United States Senate today. It 
is blocked up and balled up because they have a filibuster rule, and 
they are a little preoccupied, by the way. But if all this United 
States Congress can do on March for Life day is to bring a bill that 
deals with post-abortion, born-alive, saving those babies, I am glad we 
did it. We should have done another bill. We should have done the 
Heartbeat bill here today.
  Mr. Speaker, the circumstances are this. The whip team for the 
Heartbeat bill deserves a lot of credit. Janet Porter, Faith2Action, 
deserves a lot of credit. She is a driving force on this, Mr. Speaker.
  Our former whip and majority leader, Tom DeLay from Texas, has been 
working pro bono on this case for a long time, for a good year. He has 
been strategizing on that. He has been pulling votes together on it. 
His greatest regret as a now-retired majority leader in the United 
States House of Representatives is that he wasn't able to end abortion 
while he was the leader here in this Congress.
  And his word to our leadership here and to all of us is: Don't let 
this opportunity get away from you. This is the best opportunity. This 
is the best scenario. The window is open with a pro-life majority in 
the House and it is open with a pro-life majority in the Senate. The 
President will sign the bill, and the Vice President will stand next to 
him, feeling good about it.
  By the way, the Vice President and his wife, Karen, will probably 
hold hands and offer a prayer right before an act like that would 
happen.
  And the Supreme Court is poised for one or two more appointments to 
that Supreme Court; and those appointments being, I expect, consistent 
with President Trump's pledge that he will make those nominations out 
of the list that was produced by The Federalist Society and confirmed 
and supported by The Heritage Foundation and by me, by the way, and 
many other pro-life activists within this Congress and across this 
country. The selection that President Trump made out of those 21 
potential Justices to the Supreme Court was excellent.
  Neil Gorsuch, there is no better choice, in my view. And one of the 
things that I think is important that goes into the Congressional 
Record is some, I will say, very solidly confirmed back-channel 
information is this: that the White House interviewed all 20 or 21 of 
those candidates for the Supreme Court. Out of those, they asked the 
same question of each one of them. And it was this, Mr. Speaker: If it 
is not going to be you as the nominee to the Supreme Court, who shall 
it be?
  Every other candidate, every other Judge under consideration for 
appointment to become a Supreme Court Justice, said: If it is not to be 
me, it needs to be Neil Gorsuch.
  You could not get a higher endorsement on such a high-level position 
than that, that all of your peers that were in the running said: If it 
is not to be me, it needs to be Neil Gorsuch.
  We are going to be very happy with his process and his decisions that 
he makes for us, and I have a lot of reasons to have great confidence 
in him. But I offer that for consideration, Mr. Speaker.
  But our job here needs to be all we can do. When the window is open, 
we have got to go through that window. The window is open to pass the 
Heartbeat bill now. 170 cosponsors. We have 129 national organizations 
and leaders that support the Heartbeat bill. It is about as close to 
unanimous across the entire movement in this country as it could 
possibly be.
  So with 170 cosponsors and another high number of those who say, ``I 
will vote for it, put it on the floor,'' the vast majority of the Pro-
Life Caucus wants it to come to the floor, the vast majority of the 
Values Action Team wants it to come to the floor. I actually don't know 
who the dissenters are here in the House that say it is a bad idea to 
have the Heartbeat bill in law.
  There are a couple of people who disagree with the strategy, but they 
don't disagree with the policy, at least on this side of the aisle, Mr. 
Speaker.
  So when the leadership tells the top pro-life organizations in the 
country, ``You must be unanimous in this and be on the same page,'' and 
when one organization says, ``I don't want to see this moved,'' then we 
have a problem. We have a problem because the will of the people needs 
to be reflected here in the House of Representatives.
  This is a republican form of government by constitution. The 
Constitution guarantees a republican form of

[[Page H579]]

government, which means a representative form of government. That is, 
each one of us who have been elected here has a district of about 
750,000 people, and it is our job to draw from them their best ideas 
and couple them with the principles that we have said we stand for, 
come here and bring those ideas into the House of Representatives, and 
then let those ideas, out of 435 congressional districts, compete 
against each other so that the best ideas rise to the top.
  The ideas that rise to the top need to be the ideas that have the 
most support, not something that was pulled off the shelf and dropped 
in down here in a bit of a token for something to do here on March for 
Life day.
  What is the most important thing we can be doing?
  Saving innocent, unborn human life.
  What is the highest priority we should have--the highest priority for 
the Members of the House of Representatives? What pro-life bill has the 
most cosponsors on it by far?
  That is the Heartbeat bill.
  So why wasn't it on the floor here today, Mr. Speaker? Why not?
  The reason is because I believe that there was--shall I call it--an 
arrangement made by a previous Speaker that pro-life legislation only 
moves when it is unanimously supported by the top three pro-life 
organizations in the country.
  I will name them. I count them all as people who have done a lot of 
good for this country.
  Family Research Council, led by Tony Perkins, who is a tremendous 
pro-life, pro-family warrior. And that is also true, we know, because 
his office has been targeted in the past and they face violence down 
there in the entryway to his office. Tony doesn't blink. He is a former 
marine. We have ridden the road together and been out there in those 
battles. They are a strong, strong pro-life organization, one of the 
top three.
  Susan B. Anthony List, another one of the top three. That is led by 
Marjorie Dannenfelser, who has a terrific heart, who is very driven and 
awfully intelligent, and who has a terrific memory about the components 
of the movement that have gone on.
  Her sidekick--I will call her that--is an even closer friend, Marilyn 
Musgrave, who I served here in the House of Representatives with for a 
good number of years, and she was a mentor to me, and she braced me up 
sometimes when I was trying to make sense of things that didn't make 
sense.
  Mr. Speaker, I count them as friends and pro-life warriors, terrific 
workers, and people who are go-to people who I count on keeping things 
on the rails while I am distracted with other things. But we are always 
on the same page together. Almost always on the same page together, Mr. 
Speaker.
  The other organization is National Right to Life. National Right to 
Life has been granted also a de facto veto power, which the effect of 
it is to block a bill from coming to the floor of the House of 
Representatives.
  Now, I have said there are 129 organizations and leaders that have 
endorsed and/or support the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490. There is only one 
that does not, and that is the National Right to Life, and that is led 
by Carol Tobias and David O'Steen. And I have spoken with both of them 
at great length, not in person. I have been trying to get those kinds 
of meetings. But I spoke on the phone with Carol Tobias, the president, 
a week or so before our Christmas break, about 45 minutes of intense 
discussion. And throughout all of that, she has insisted that they are 
not going to endorse the bill, they are not going to promote the bill. 
I couldn't get her to move one inch, even though every other 
organization is on board. I couldn't get her to move one inch.
  She told me that they had had a board meeting, sounded to me like a 
couple months earlier, and that nobody on the board supported the 
Heartbeat bill.
  How big is that board?
  This is back channel. I am told about 50.
  Can you imagine 50 pro-life activists sitting on the board of 
National Right to Life and not one of them thinks that protecting a 
baby that has a detectible heartbeat is an endeavor that they want to 
support right now when their mission statement says something entirely 
different?
  Well, that didn't seem right to me, and I hoped there was another way 
to get this resolved, so I told her at the end of the conversation: I 
guess we have got a couple weeks before the tension starts to build, 
but I don't have many nice things I can do yet, and I don't think your 
advice is going to be, to me, to just give up and put the Heartbeat 
bill in a drawer and say: H.R. 490 was a nice try, but we came up short 
so I guess it wasn't a good idea.
  How would I go to those 129 organizations and leaders and say to 
them, ``Well, I think we will just give up now because National Right 
to Life is not supporting our bill because Carol Tobias and 50 members 
of the board, presumably, and also David O'Steen, don't think it is a 
good idea to move the Heartbeat bill out of the House of 
Representatives, that they want to wait until the Supreme Court is 
ready to receive such a bill, apparently without calculating that it 
takes time to get legislation through the House and the Senate and to 
the President's desk''?
  And it may not happen this year if we put the Heartbeat bill on Mitch 
McConnell's desk in the Senate. It may not happen that the bill would 
even be taken up. We have got to have time to bring that bill to the 
floor of the Senate. We are going to have to work on it. I want time to 
do that.
  The longer we stall, the closer we get to the next election. If we 
get to the next election and lose seats in the House of 
Representatives, Mr. Speaker, this window in the House could close, and 
then what do they say? They will say: Well, it was our judgment. We 
wanted to wait until the Supreme Court was ready. It wasn't our fault 
that the window closed in the House or the Senate, or perhaps the 
Presidency.
  When you have the opportunity to move the agenda, you move the 
agenda. We have the opportunity to do that. And it is de facto veto 
power right now that the National Right to Life has because of that 
arrangement that was put together some years ago that says these top 
three pro-life organizations have to all be in agreement before we are 
going to move any legislation off the floor of the House.
  Why would any Speaker grant de facto authority to an outside 
organization, none of whom have been elected in this republican form of 
government? Why would that be allowed to trump the will of the people? 
Why would that have more value than the considered judgment of the vast 
majority of the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives? 
How can we say to any one of those 170: Your opinion doesn't matter at 
all because you don't yet have the unanimous enthusiasm of the top 
three pro-life organizations in the country?

  It comes back to National Right to Life. They put out a statement 
that says: We do not oppose the Heartbeat bill. We do not oppose the 
Heartbeat bill. The other side of that coin is, and it is the same 
coin: We do not support the Heartbeat bill. That is the message.
  That is the message that Speaker Ryan gets, and that is why this bill 
wasn't on the floor today. It is the blockage that comes from 
inactivity. And all that needs to happen is David O'Steen or Carol 
Tobias needs to pick up the phone, call Speaker Paul Ryan--call my 
office if you like, and I will patch you through--and say: Do you know 
what? We want to move it while we have got the chance.
  The window is open in the House of Representatives. You don't have to 
do a single thing beyond that. You don't have to whip the bill. You 
don't have to go visit any Members. You don't have to spend a single 
dime of those hard-earned dollars that are being raised in the pro-life 
movement except for the cost of the phone call, and I will pay for it.
  Call the Speaker. Call Leader McCarthy and say: Do you know what? We 
do think it is a good idea.
  Instead of saying: We do not oppose, when really it is you do not 
support, all you have to do is say: Let that bill go.
  Just like Charlton Heston as Moses, let our people go. Let those 
little babies with heartbeats live. Get a bill out of the House to the 
Senate, and then let's turn the pressure up in the Senate. It isn't 
going to happen unless we take the first step like a little baby that 
is wobbling and tottering. They

[[Page H580]]

learn to walk. They need a chance to get that chance to walk.

                              {time}  1300

  We need to be able to move the bill off the floor of the House of 
Representatives. This isn't a stretch for public opinion. The public 
opinion is with us. In fact, the polling has been a little higher in 
support for H.R. 490, the Heartbeat bill. It is even a little higher 
than it is on the 20-week Pain-Capable one, which has been out there. 
They have been working on it for years, and I respect that and 
appreciate it.
  But there isn't some kind of a rule that says you have to struggle 
for years before your bill can be heard. The strongest and best ideas 
that have weathered the debate need to come forward and be moved off 
the floor of the House of Representatives.
  Here is what it is: 170 Members signed on; 129 organizations or 
leaders support the bill. I don't know why one group has veto power, de 
facto veto authority over this bill. We need a vote on the Heartbeat 
bill, and it is now being blocked because of that inaction. One phone 
call, or, if they just wanted to post it on their website, instead of 
``we do not oppose the Heartbeat bill,'' just post on there ``we now 
support the Heartbeat bill.'' God bless them if they will do that, 
because things will move.
  Now, this Heartbeat bill is the most popular pro-life bill that is 
pending in the House of Representatives today, and it has been for a 
long time, for almost this whole Congress. It prevents about 95 percent 
of the abortions. And this does push the Senate. It pushes Pain-Capable 
off of Mitch McConnell's desk and perhaps to the floor of the Senate 
for a vote. It moves the agenda. It helps the other pieces of 
legislation as well.
  Here is a polling, though, Mr. Speaker, that I think should give 
people some confidence; and that is that, all in all, across the 
spectrum of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, the Heartbeat 
bill, as written, has 69 percent of adults all the way across the 
spectrum.
  This is a Barna poll that took place last year--not that long ago--
and here is how it breaks down by party, in case people are worried 
about that: 86 percent of Republicans support the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 
490; 55 percent of Democrats support the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490. A 
majority of Democrats support the Heartbeat bill, 55 percent, and 61 
percent of Independents.
  When you put that all together and you match it up for the 
demographics--so the percentages that are Democrats versus Independents 
and Republicans--and you merge that together, 69 percent support the 
Heartbeat bill. That is a little better than the 20-week Pain-Capable 
bill. People understand this.
  That beating heart is in our hearts, and so are these little babies. 
And I would say to National Right to Life, whose mission statement 
almost commands them to support the Heartbeat bill, you ought to amend 
your mission statement or support the Heartbeat bill.
  Here is one of their founders, a founder of the pro-life movement and 
the founder and former president of National Right to Life--now passed 
away, sadly--and he surely did his part, Dr. John C. Willke. Here is 
what he had to say:
  ``When I founded the pro-life movement, it wasn't to regulate how 
abortions would be done; it was to bring the abortion killing to an 
end. We have waited too long, and that wait has cost us too much''--Dr. 
John C. Willke.
  Take this back to 1973. The missions there were to end abortion. And 
yet we are stuck in a rut of incrementalism, moving a tiny little bit 
at a time. We saved 2 million lives in all of this--maybe a few more 
than 2 million lives, no more--and we watched 60 million babies be 
aborted. And I am hearing the argument of, well, we really can't move 
because the Supreme Court is not ready, and we don't know if there are 
going to be any retirements in the Supreme Court.
  I know there will be retirements in the Supreme Court. I am certain 
of it. There will be that. There are three ways out of the Supreme 
Court, and those folks who were there 100 years ago aren't there now. 
So we know there is going to be a change in the Court. What we don't 
know is this Court may well uphold Heartbeat because it is more 
precisely written and more carefully drafted, and it answers the right 
kind of questions. I think it has a better chance of being upheld 
before the Supreme Court than Pain-Capable.
  But those who pushed Pain-Capable, 20-week didn't have those 
reservations on their bill, but they seem to wonder about this one and 
say we shouldn't move Heartbeat until we have another appointment to 
the Supreme Court.
  How can you let that happen? Well, perhaps the window closes in the 
House or the Senate or Presidency. Sitting here twiddling our thumbs 
and watching babies be aborted at a rate of--oh, by the way, I did get 
this piece from National Right to Life in a conversation just yesterday 
that, when they began this effort, there were as many as 6 million 
abortions a year in America--I hadn't heard that number before, and I 
didn't go back to verify it, but that is what my ears heard yesterday--
and we have now gotten that number down to under 1 million abortions a 
year. That is considered progress, and it is progress.
  Then he gave me the exact number 900-and-some thousand abortions last 
year. I didn't commit that number to memory, but it means something 
different to me. That is 1 million abortions a year, every year. That 
means, in 45 years, we will have another 45 million abortions on our 
conscience. And that 60 million abortions for today turns into 105 
million abortions if we just double the time span from Roe v. Wade 
another 45 years.
  And to take pride in getting it down to less than 1 million, as if 
that is a milestone, troubles me considerably. It might not have if I 
had just only heard it in that context, but I heard it in a different 
context 4 or 5 months ago, standing over here on the floor, Mr. 
Speaker.
  There is a gentlewoman from the Democratic Party who is one who--
really, there are only a couple of pro-life people over here anymore, 
so you know that she is not pro-life. She asked me why I have this 
heart on my lapel, and I told her it was for the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 
490, and I want to protect these babies. From the moment a heartbeat 
can be detected, the baby must be protected. And she said: I don't know 
why you want to do that, Steve. We have got abortions down to under 1 
million a year.

  I said: I want to save them all. I want to save every single one of 
them. That is why I am going to wear this on my lapel until we get this 
job done.
  But it was stunning to me that she would say that, being a pro-choice 
Representative here in the United States House of Representatives. And 
when I match that up with almost the same thing from a leader in the 
National Right to Life, I think: We have got to take a fresh look. They 
are too stuck in their ways. We will never get to the end of abortion 
if we are married to tiny incrementalism. We have an obligation to take 
the opportunities that God has given us and the voters have given us 
and act on them.
  I would go to personhood, the moment of conception, and do that in an 
instant if we could get that done, but we can't define medically and 
precisely that moment of conception. But we have defined medically and 
precisely the heartbeat. That is our marker, the heartbeat in that 
ultrasound.
  We had a little witness come before the Constitution and Civil 
Justice Subcommittee, which I chair. We held a hearing on the Heartbeat 
bill. And this little guy was the youngest witness to testify in the 
history of the United States Congress, I believe. He is an 18-week 
developed little boy in his mother's womb. And we had the ultrasound 
sitting next to his mother, but the tape of the ultrasound that they 
had taken hours before.
  This little boy's name is Lincoln Glenn Miller. And that little guy, 
we showed his ultrasound and we showed him there in his mother's womb, 
and we listened to his heartbeat. His arm was out like this. And I said 
into the microphone, ``Lincoln, will you move your arm?'' and, in an 
instant, he jerked his arm toward his mouth. And I said, ``Lincoln, can 
you suck your thumb?'' and, in a moment, he put his thumb in his mouth 
and began to suck his thumb.
  And I said, a little bit later, ``Lincoln, can you talk to us?'' and 
you can see his mouth moving as if he is trying to talk in this 
ultrasound on the big screen in the United States Congress in

[[Page H581]]

the House Judiciary Committee, the Constitution and Civil Justice 
Subcommittee. We watched this little guy, Lincoln Glenn Miller, testify 
to the humanity of an 18-week developed little child.
  We know this life begins at the moment of conception. We know that we 
can precisely define that heartbeat. We know that, if you have to check 
for that heartbeat, it is awfully hard to lie about it when you have to 
keep the records. We know that it has gotten into our conscience that 
abortion stops a beating heart, and we all, in our mind's ear, can hear 
that rhythm of that beating heart.
  I used 158 beats per minute. That is what is in my iPhone right now. 
And I can listen to that little baby as that little baby grows and 
develops. I want to see all of these babies grow and develop. I want to 
see every one of them come to birth and full term. I pray that they are 
mentally healthy and that they are physically healthy, and I don't have 
any more asks after that.
  Boys or girls, God, bring them to me in whatever order they might 
come, but let's get them born and let's take care of them and nurture 
them in mind, in body, and in faith, as our Founding Fathers envisioned 
when they wrote the language into our Declaration of Independence and 
prioritized life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
  God bless them. Let's do the right thing.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________