[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 17]
[House]
[Pages 23281-23284]
[From the U.S. 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

[[Page 23282]]

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 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,

[[Page 23283]]

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 23284]]



                              {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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