[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 44 (Tuesday, March 13, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H1536-H1540]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       STANDING UP FOR THE UNBORN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to 
address you here on the floor of the United States House of 
Representatives.
  I would say in defense of the K-9 Corps--and I appreciate the 
presentation delivered by Dr. Yoho and my great friend from Florida, 
who gets common sense right in this Congress--that I am a fan of the K-
9 Corps.

[[Page H1537]]

  I am also a fan of the ``benign corps.'' And I want the ``benign 
corps'' to be thinking about what that means. It is not just a bingo 
game, but it is bingo for a cancer patient. So when you get the 
diagnosis of K-9 or benign, I am taking benign over K-9 because that is 
the thing that we celebrate more than anything else, is that lease on 
life, that if it goes 5 years, you are cancer-free. Benign cancer-free 
for 5 years, that gets the job done.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for standing up for the K-9 Corps, 
and I am now going to stand up for the ``unborn corps.''
  Mr. Speaker, I came here to the floor to speak this evening about 
this Nation and about a nation that has granted to its Supreme Court--
sometimes just because we weren't paying attention or we didn't have 
the confidence of our convictions--I suppose there was a time when 
Americans were no better informed on constitutional principles than we 
are today. Over 216 or so years, we have had this experience of 
accepting the idea of Marbury v. Madison, a Supreme Court decision that 
over time, with accumulated decision by decision rooted back in 
Marbury, that the Supreme Court of the United States was the final word 
on what the Constitution says.
  The Constitution doesn't say to the Supreme Court that they have the 
final word. Instead, it is court precedence, case precedence, that laid 
the foundation in about 1802 that has been built upon ever since.
  The longer we accept the tradition of a Supreme Court decision being 
the final decision on what the Constitution says, the more deeply 
ingrained is the commitment to that decision and the less our 
Constitution itself means and the more the traditions of the acceptance 
of a decision of the Supreme Court means. So here we are today.
  Mr. Speaker, if people aren't quite understanding what that means, I 
would describe it a bit of another way. There is a practice in this 
country called birthright citizenship.
  There is nothing in the Constitution that requires that a baby born 
in the United States is an automatic citizen. In fact, the 14th 
Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, says: ``All persons 
born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the 
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States . . . . `'
  Well, in post-Civil War, they knew what they were doing. They didn't 
think we would confuse it over the years the way we have, but they 
wanted to make sure that the babies born to the newly freed slaves as a 
result of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War would be 
American citizens.
  They expected that those babies born to the former slaves would be 
full-fledged citizens with all the rights of citizenship bestowed upon 
them as those created in the image of God, just like everyone else. But 
what happened was, even though the amendment was there that said all 
persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction 
thereof are American citizens, over time, in the latter part of the 
19th century, they began to bestow citizenship on any baby born in the 
United States. And it wasn't successfully challenged, neither is any 
case on point in all of the full history of the litigation that has 
taken place that has found its way to the Supreme Court. There is no 
on-point precedent case that determines that the Constitution requires 
that a baby born in America be automatically an American citizen, but 
the practice has prevailed.

  The practice has prevailed along the way that a baby born on U.S. 
territory, with certain exceptions, is an American citizen, even though 
the Constitution doesn't require it, because the ``subject of the 
jurisdiction thereof'' clause that is in there meant a number of 
things.
  First, that meant loyalty. Where is your allegiance.
  There were Native American Tribes--called Indian Tribes at the time 
and still today--that if the children born on that reservation were 
American citizens automatically, they were automatically removed from 
membership in the Tribe. So the folks who drafted the 14th Amendment 
wanted to exempt them. That is one of the reasons they inserted the 
clause, ``subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'' because the allegiance 
of those born on reservations wasn't viewed to be equivalent to that of 
those born in the other territorial areas of the United States of 
America.
  Then, of course, they wanted to exempt the children born to 
ambassadors, the children born to diplomats, the children born to their 
staff.
  Could you imagine if there was an invading army and babies were born 
to the folks who followed along on that army, that they would be 
American citizens?
  No. They weren't subject to the jurisdiction thereof. They didn't owe 
their allegiance to the United States. It was clear they owe their 
allegiance to other foreign princes and potentates, to borrow a phrase 
from the naturalization oath.
  So the clause, ``subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'' exempted 
those who were not obligated to owe allegiance to the United States, 
but the practice persisted. It persisted to this day. In fact, some 
years ago, about a decade ago, we had hearings. In those hearings, the 
research, at least the testimony, said that somewhere between 340,000 
and 750,000 babies were born in the United States where both parents, 
the mother and the father, were illegal, yet they have been bestowed an 
automatic citizenship.

                              {time}  2015

  And it has created this birth tourism where, back during that 
testimony time--now the price has surely gone up--if there is a 
pregnant mother in China, she could buy a $30,000 ticket to fly into 
the United States, be smuggled into the United States, get her OB care, 
live in an apartment next to the hospital, deliver the baby, and have 
that little baby's feet stamped on the birth certificate. And that 
little birth certificate made that baby an American citizen. Then they 
loaded the baby up and flew the mom and baby back to China, and 18 
years later that baby could begin to petition to bring in the family 
reunification plan.
  That is how a practice gets started that hasn't been successfully 
blocked because of litigation that would go to the Supreme Court with a 
decision made based upon justice.
  So this situation persists. Three-quarters of a million babies a 
year, or more--I mean, the entire population of the Dreamers, every 
single year--born in America to illegal parents, granted automatic 
citizenship and the ability, once they reach of age, to begin the 
family reunification process and bring in the whole kit and caboodle of 
family into America and start them on a path to citizenship.
  What kind of nation would do that?
  A nation that is steeped in a precedent of habit--a bad habit--that 
persists in delivering a policy that is not constitutional but rooted 
in a murky understanding of what the Constitution actually says; I 
wouldn't say a dishonest, but a misunderstanding of what the 
Constitution actually says.
  So that, Mr. Speaker, I think sets the foundation for the decisions 
on Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton and Planned Parenthood v. Casey and a 
number of Supreme Court precedents that built us up to this situation 
that we have today.
  And I am speaking of abortion in America, abortion on demand in 
America, babies who have a chance to live outside the womb being killed 
because they are inconvenient. They may be, at the time, not wanted by 
the mother. We are seeing data that shows that a significant percentage 
of mothers who have abortions are coerced into that by the biological 
father who doesn't want to carry that responsibility.
  And what is this based upon?
  Supreme Court precedents that are--looking back on it, how did they 
ever build to the position that we are in today?
  Back in the sixties, there was a case known as Griswold v. 
Connecticut. That case was one where a family in Connecticut, a husband 
and a wife--I don't know if they were parents--wanted to be able to buy 
contraceptives. And because of the Catholic influence in Connecticut, 
they had outlawed contraceptives in Connecticut. So they went to the 
Supreme Court, the Griswolds, and said: We have a constitutional right 
to purchase contraceptives. It is not the business of the State 
legislature to tell us that we can't purchase contraceptives. We want 
to take care of our own reproductive rights by managing our 
contraception.
  So the Supreme Court stuck their nose in what should have been a

[[Page H1538]]

States' rights issue and came down with a decision that created, 
manufactured out of emanations and penumbras--not even whole cloth, but 
the imagination that there was some cloth there to manufacture it out 
of--the right to privacy. The Supreme Court concluded that the right to 
privacy would guarantee the privacy for the Griswolds to be able to 
purchase contraceptives even though the State of Connecticut said it is 
against the interests of the people in the State of Connecticut that we 
control birth through contraceptives.
  That was their decision in Connecticut. If people wanted to vote with 
their feet, they could have left Connecticut. But, instead, the United 
States Supreme Court decided they had the power and the authority to 
manufacture a whole new right that doesn't exist in the constitution, a 
right to privacy; and a right to privacy guaranteed the ability for the 
married couple to purchase contraceptives.
  Well, that was sometime in about the mid-sixties, and not very long 
after that the Eisenstadt case came up. It was this: An unmarried 
couple said: Why are we excluded? We have the same constitutional 
rights as the married couple has. If they have a right to purchase 
contraceptives because they have a right to privacy, unmarried people 
have also a right to privacy.
  So the Supreme Court decided: We had started down the slippery slope 
and had granted this right to privacy and a right to purchase 
contraceptives and keep the government out of the private lives, 
especially the reproductive lives, of people, consenting adults. How 
can we deny the unmarried couple the manufactured constitutional right 
that we have always granted to the Griswolds?
  So the Griswold case became the Eisenstadt case, and the non-married 
couples had the same rights as the married couples.
  Along came 1973. Two cases came before the Supreme Court: Roe v. Wade 
and Doe v. Bolton.
  Roe v. Wade took that concept of a right to privacy that was 
manufactured, not out of the Constitution, manufactured out of thin 
air--out of the emanations and penumbras, which means in the shadows 
of, where the text of the Constitution is--and they decided that a 
woman had a right to abortion, and it was an inherent right rooted in a 
right to privacy: You have a right to a contraceptive. You have a right 
to put an end to the life of that innocent, unborn baby under the same 
standards of privacy.
  Who gets to take the life of a baby, or a child, or a young adult, or 
a mature adult, or a senior adult? Who gets to do that by saying, It is 
only my business; I control that; it is my right to privacy?
  But the Supreme Court concluded exactly that. But they did say that 
it could only happen in the first trimester.
  But the simultaneous case that came down was Doe v. Bolton. And in 
the Doe v. Bolton case, they gave exceptions, Mr. Speaker, and said: 
Well, we are going to restrain this right to an abortion that we have 
created and manufactured in Roe v. Wade; but we really can't say that 
if the woman has danger to her life, she shouldn't be able to get an 
abortion. Sure. We will give her the right to abort her baby if it 
risks her life.

  How about if it risks her health? What if it damages her health? What 
if it affects her psychological health? What if her familial 
relationships are going to be upset if she doesn't abort the baby? In 
other words, what if a young lady doesn't have a husband and it would 
be disturbing to her family for her to have the baby? We want to give 
her the right to abort the baby because it would upset her familial 
health, her family life.
  And, of course, if it affects her economically and it affects her 
psychologically, it might affect her familial life as well. So if it 
affects her economics, her psyche, her physical health, risks her life, 
then abort the baby. She has a right for all that.
  So when you take them together--Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton--it was 
abortion on demand, manufactured by the Supreme Court of the United 
States, Mr. Speaker, not written into the Constitution, but pulled out 
of the emanations and penumbras, the shadows of, that little shadow 
around the cloud out there that maybe we can't see it because we are 
just laypeople with normal perceptive abilities. We might have the best 
eyesight. We could have 20/20 vision. Well, we could even have 20/20 
rear vision to see what is going on, but the Court put on their black 
robes, they looked up at the sky and they decided: We know what is 
written in that place around the edges of the clouds in the emanations 
and penumbras. We know that it is there because we want it to be there. 
And we can't read it exactly into the language in the Constitution, but 
we want it, we see it, and we are going to shape society around it. And 
they did.
  And they came down with the Roe v. Wade decision and the Doe v. 
Bolton decision the same day: January 22, 1973. Abortion on demand. And 
how many of us at that time knew what that would mean, Mr. Speaker? How 
many of us understood the devastating debacle that was served up to the 
American people?
  I remember those times. I remember those years. Marilyn and I were 
married in 1972. As we looked around at our friends, our 
contemporaries, there were young couples who were getting started and 
starting with their families at the time. We knew a decision came down, 
but we had no idea how bad it would be; and no one in 1973 would have 
predicted that, 45 years later, we would have experienced 60 million 
abortions in the United States of America, 60 million babies whose 
precious lives--perfect little babies, little babies created in God's 
image. No one would have expected that there would be 60 million on the 
conscience of America.
  No one would have expected that we would hear the business community 
clamoring for labor saying: We don't have enough people to go to work 
in America; we have to go to foreign countries and bring in millions of 
people to do this work.
  Nobody out here is even doing the math to say: What happens when 60 
million babies are gone, ripped out of the generations over the last 45 
years? What does that do to society? What does it do to our economy? 
What does it do to our mortality, the conscience, the guilt of America, 
the sins on the soul of the United States of America? What does it do 
to all that?
  But what does it do also to the next generation and the next 
generation? What about the guilt that is carried by the people who 
stepped in and took the advice of Planned Parenthood and decided it 
really isn't a life and there aren't any repercussions--I can be free 
of the burden of raising a child that I had not planned to raise and 
walk away and life will be fine again?
  What has happened to the people who bought into that story? What has 
happened to the--let's just say--family force, the workforce of 
America?
  Sixty million babies ripped out of America, ripped out of the womb, 
ripped apart out of the womb, ripped out of America. Sixty million 
babies. Forty-five years.
  Mr. Speaker, if you do a back-of-the-envelope calculation and you 
think, of those little girls who were aborted, many of them would be 
mothers again today, would be mothers by now--and I did a back-of-the-
envelope calculation, and I will say that I just figured that, if each 
little girl that had been aborted since 1973, in those years that they 
would be of reproductive age--and some of them wouldn't be of that age 
yet; but if each of those who would be had had three babies, as Marilyn 
and I have had, that is another 60 million babies. Sixty million.
  So now the hole in our society is 60 million babies plus another 60 
million babies: 120 million Americans. You could dial it down a little 
bit. You could say, well, they aren't going to average 3. That is 
probably true. They could average maybe 2\1/2\ or a little better. If 
you take the 120 million and you dial that down a ways--I can tell you, 
Mr. Speaker, what the population of America was 100 years ago.
  Let's pick the 1920 census. Mr. Speaker, 106 million Americans was 
the total population of the United States of America in the census of 
1920, which comes up in a couple of years. It will be a century in a 
couple of years. 106 million Americans. That is how many we are missing 
today, all of that many babies, all of that many million developed 
adults, young people who would have lived, loved, learned, laughed, 
played, raised families of their own, gone to school and gotten 
educated,

[[Page H1539]]

started businesses, created jobs, improved the quality of life of all 
of us, enriched our lives.
  The love that would flow from over 100 million babies growing up in 
America who were denied the right to life, the right to live, and were 
taken from this world before they ever had a chance to fill their own 
lungs with air and scream for their own mercy, that is the burden that 
America is carrying today.
  Mr. Speaker, when that day comes that abortion is over in America and 
we respect and we revere life again, as it once was and one day ever 
shall be, when we reach that point, that doesn't mean that America is 
absolved from this sin on our Nation. What it really means is we can 
begin to put our pieces back together and build a history and a legacy 
of a love and a respect and a reverence for life. All life. Life from 
the moment of fertilization until natural death.

                              {time}  2030

  By the way, that life, from moment of fertilization till natural 
death, is the mission statement of the National Right to Life. The 
National Right to Life's mission statement--and I am not reading it; I 
am going from memory, so if I miss a word--says they are dedicated to 
protecting life from the beginning of life until natural death.
  I embrace that mission statement. I embrace that ideology and that 
philosophy that shaped that mission statement for the National Right to 
Life, the country's oldest and largest pro-life organization. But I did 
ask the question: How do they define the beginning of life?
  I looked down through their website, and it is defined from 
fertilization. Life begins at fertilization. That is the mission of 
National Right to Life, and we agree. I applaud that position, and I 
applaud the work that they have done over the last more than 45 years, 
because they formed themselves before Roe v. Wade, I believe, 1968. So 
they should be applauded for the work that they have done over the 
years.
  But National Right to Life is married to a concept of incrementalism; 
and when you read through the statements, the testimony that they have 
supported before various State legislatures, the positions that they 
have taken, Mr. Speaker, become--and as I have done, sat down and 
talked with their leadership and tried to convince their leadership to 
be stronger, more bold, the same answer came back from each one of them 
that I talked to at National Right to Life, and it is this: they are 
committed to doing what can be done around the edges.
  The Supreme Court has built a fence around what they call a right to 
abortion. There is no right to abortion. There is no constitutional 
right to abortion. It is manufactured, as I said earlier.
  But National Right to Life, the Nation's oldest and largest pro-life 
organization, has built a fence around the Supreme Court decisions, and 
they are working with incrementalism to try to get as close to that 
fence around the Supreme Court decisions as they can without being 
reversed by a decision of the Court.
  That is their strategic approach, and they have been granted a de 
facto veto power to any legislation that would come to the floor of the 
House of Representatives that doesn't have their support. I said ``de 
facto.'' That is the net result of it. In fact, that is the result of 
it.
  So we have 170 cosponsors on the Heartbeat Protection Act, the piece 
of legislation that says, before a doctor can perform an abortion, 
commit an abortion, he must first check for a heartbeat, and if a 
heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected.
  We know, if there is a beating heart, there is life. And if there is 
a beating heart and you go in and stop the beating of that heart, you 
have ended that life. The most innocent lives that there are are those 
unborn little babies; and if there is a heartbeat that can be detected, 
the baby must be protected. That is the bill. That is the Heartbeat 
Protection Act.
  But National Right to Life doesn't support, and they say it this way, 
Mr. Speaker. National Right to Life, they say: National Right to Life 
does not oppose the Heartbeat bill--does not oppose--which is a little 
bit of semantics, Mr. Speaker.
  So I struck through the ``does not oppose,'' and I will put it there 
in exactly the same meaning: they do not support.
  If you are the National Right to Life and you are committed to 
protecting life from the moment of fertilization till natural death, 
how do you not step up to support the Heartbeat bill that protects 
babies? From the moment a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is 
protected.
  The rationale is: our strategy is not here on Heartbeat; their 
strategy is try not to ever challenge the Supreme Court of the United 
States.
  So how can we have the Nation's oldest and largest pro-life 
organization that is entrenched in a philosophy and a legislative 
strategy that says that they are never going to challenge the Supreme 
Court of the United States? If you are not going to challenge the 
Supreme Court of the United States, then it is on your head and on the 
conscience of anybody, not just National Right to Life, but anybody who 
says: I am not willing to challenge the Supreme Court of the United 
States; I am not willing to challenge Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, or 
Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Then you are de facto accepting the idea 
that there will be--no, accepting the actual reality of a million 
abortions a year, as far as the eye can see.
  This language here that says the National Right to Life does not 
oppose the Heartbeat bill, I say they do not support the Heartbeat 
bill. Both statements are true, but opposing challenging the Supreme 
Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton guarantees a million 
abortions a year as far as the eye can see over the horizon of history 
and out of sight, a million a year.
  We have seen 60 million abortions in the United States of America in 
the last 45 years. This ratio that we are on today, if the population 
doesn't grow and if the ratio stays the same, and it sure looks to, 
unless we do something, we are looking at a million a year and, 45 
years from now, another 45 million abortions. In another 15 years, we 
are back another 60 million, and then it is 120 million babies, and we 
know how that works.
  Then those babies not born to the mothers who would have been giving 
birth to them, you can double the number again. But already we are 
missing the entire population of the United States of America of 100 
years ago as a result of the abortions since 1973.
  This Nation must step up to the moral principle that every human life 
is sacred. They are sacred in all of their forms. In fact, Governor Bob 
Casey, Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, since passed away, God rest 
his soul, said: ``Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure, 
itself, against which all other things are weighed.''
  Well, I am prepared and at least 170 House Members are prepared to go 
to the Supreme Court again if challenged. Pass the Heartbeat bill out 
of the House. Pass it out of the Senate. Send it to the President's 
desk. The President will sign it. The other side, the pro-abortion 
people, will litigate it, and it will end up in the Supreme Court.

  The Supreme Court needs to decide are they going to reflect and honor 
life. The 14th Amendment requires that we protect life, life over 
liberty; and, in fact, there are prioritized rights of life, liberty, 
and property in the 14th Amendment. In the Declaration of Independence, 
it is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but always life is 
number one, Mr. Speaker. Life is always number one.
  This country must step up and defend human life. And I want to, from 
the floor of this Congress tonight, put a shout-out out in 
congratulations to the Iowa Senate, who moved a very similar Heartbeat 
bill by a vote of 30-20, passed it off the floor of the Iowa Senate 
with a 24-minute debate was all the longer it took, 24 minutes, and a 
30-20 bipartisan vote came off the floor and got messaged over to the 
Iowa House of Representatives.
  There they are in serious deliberations today. I don't know the 
results of those discussions. I left there last night with optimism 
that the Heartbeat bill in Iowa would come to the floor there soon, 
perhaps as early as next week. And should it pass, then it is likely to 
go to the Governor's desk.

[[Page H1540]]

  I do not have her public statement, but I will just say that I have 
confidence that Governor Reynolds will sign the Heartbeat bill if it 
gets to her desk. She is a solid, principled, clear-thinking leader who 
is also pro-life, Mr. Speaker.
  So we are doing the things that we can do to protect the lives that 
we can protect, but it is not good enough to play a perpetual strategy 
of incrementalism. Incrementalism of a little bit here, a little bit 
there, try this, try that, what has it done for us?
  It has saved a few lives, it really has, and every life is precious 
and worth saving, but it is not good enough. It is not good enough to 
accept the idea that we are going to see a million babies aborted in 
America every year as far as the eye can see.
  So that is why the House of Representatives needs to get the 
Heartbeat bill to the floor where I believe the votes are there for it 
to pass. National Right to Life needs to lead, follow, or get out of 
the way.
  Right now, the number one entity in the entire United States of 
America that is holding the Heartbeat bill off the floor of the House 
of Representatives is right here, the Nation's number one pro-life 
organization, the National Right to Life.
  Justice Kennedy has announced--it is announced, at least, and not by 
Justice Kennedy yet, that he is likely to retire midsummer. We will 
have a pro-life Court by September, and it is time to move now.
  That is my message, Mr. Speaker, and I ask all of us to stand up and 
protect innocent, unborn human life, and let's start to cleanse, again, 
the soul of America.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________