[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 18]
[House]
[Pages 25369-25375]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           THE CASE FOR LIFE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kline). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. PENCE. Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to come before the House 
tonight in a continuous series that this Member of Congress had the 
privilege of beginning scarcely a month ago, but a series of speeches 
that I hope will periodically and intermittently be a part of the 
fabric of my congressional career for howsoever long the Lord permits 
me to serve here.
  I simply call it, Mr. Speaker, the case for life, and it is my 
ambition from time to time to time to come onto this blue and gold 
carpet of this Capitol and speak to my colleagues, and anyone else who 
may be listening, on the moral and intellectual and historical 
arguments for the sanctity of human life; and to perhaps, Mr. Speaker, 
in some small way enliven the moral sensibility of a Nation and be a 
part of an ongoing debate in America on this topic.
  Mr. Speaker, this is a debate that continues at this very hour in the 
other body of this Congress. At this very moment, I am pleased to say, 
as a pro-life Member of Congress, that the United States Senate is at 
this very moment passing a conference report on the Partial-Birth 
Abortion Ban Act. That legislation, as of today, will have three times 
passed the Congress since 1995 and will be delivered for the first time 
to the willing desk of President George W. Bush, where, unlike the veto 
stamp of President Clinton that met the ban of partial-birth abortion 
not

[[Page 25370]]

once but twice, President George W. Bush, upon returning from his tour 
of the Asia-Pacific Rim, will no doubt, in an emotional ceremony, put 
his pen to this legislation and end a practice that has no place in 
civilized society.
  So it is especially poignant for me, just a few steps down the 
hallway from that Chamber, to rise tonight and continue my discussion 
of the case for life. And particularly tonight, Mr. Speaker, I feel 
prompted to speak about abortion and American women. You see, it has 
always been my belief, since first having my conscience enlivened on 
this issue, that there is not one victim of abortion, but there are 
two. There is undoubtedly the nascent human life that is ended abruptly 
and in darkness, but there is the other life that goes on that pays a 
price that psychologists are talking about today, but many Americans 
simply choose to ignore.
  There are also other voices that I want to reflect on tonight as 
well, chiefly from our own history. As we think about the great 
American women who led this Nation in increasing measure towards equal 
status for women in voting rights and in property and in station in our 
society, women like Susan B. Anthony, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Cady 
Stanton come to mind.
  I just came from a stroll in the rotunda, Mr. Speaker, where I 
grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled the names of a few of those 
heroic women that actually appear on a statue at the very center of our 
Capitol. In the rotunda, there is a statue that bears the likeness of 
the three great heroes of the suffrage movement. Two of them I would 
like to speak about tonight as we talk about great American women and 
abortion, but then also talking about what women of America today face 
in the struggle over the sanctity of human life.
  One of the faces on that statue is Susan B. Anthony, a name that is 
almost like mom and apple pie for most Americans. Susan B. Anthony was 
born February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts. She was brought up in a 
Quaker family that had long activist traditions. Early in life, she 
developed a deep sense, historians tell us, of justice and what could 
only be described as moral zeal.
  After teaching for 15 years, Susan B. Anthony became active in the 
temperance movement. Because she was a woman, she was not allowed to 
speak at rallies, and this experience, as well as her acquaintance with 
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, led her to help form what became the Women's 
Movement in 1852. Soon afterwards, she would dedicate her entire life 
to winning women not only the right to vote, Mr. Speaker, but Susan B. 
Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were about winning women a seat at 
the civic table; the opportunity not to be viewed, as women were in 
some aspects of common law, as the property of their husbands, but 
rather to be seen as coequal heirs of everything that freedom offers.
  Ignoring opposition and abuse, Susan B. Anthony traveled, lectured, 
and canvassed across the Nation for the vote. She also campaigned for 
the abolition of slavery, women's rights to their own property and 
earnings, and even women's labor organizations. In 1900, she achieved a 
major victory in convincing the University of Rochester to admit women 
for the first time in their storied history.
  Susan B. Anthony, who had never married, and was remembered as an 
aggressive and compassionate person with a keen mind and the ability to 
inspire, she remained active in the movement that she began until her 
death in March of 1906.
  And Susan B. Anthony was pro-life. Let me read, if I may, from her 
publication, ``The Revolution,'' on this topic, published July 8, 1869. 
Susan B. Anthony wrote: ``No matter what the motive, love or ease or a 
desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully 
guilty who commits the deed.'' Referring to abortion. She went on to 
write: ``It will burden her conscience in life; it will burden her soul 
in death. But, oh,'' she wrote, ``oh thrice guilty is he who drove her 
to the desperation which impelled her to the crime.''
  So wrote Susan B. Anthony, words that we will reflect on before I 
take my seat tonight. Brokenhearted words of the suffering of the 
unborn innocent and also of the suffering of the American woman who 
would burden her conscience in life and burden her soul in death, but 
of the guilt of the man who drove her to the desperation which impelled 
her to perform the abortion.
  Susan B. Anthony, memorialized in marble in the rotunda of the United 
States Capitol, a woman whose name is synonymous with the voting rights 
and the equal status that women of 21st century America enjoy, was pro-
life and understood the moral consequences of the act on an American 
woman and the deplorable position of a man that would force the 
outcome.
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton also appears on the monument in the rotunda. 
And she, like Susan B. Anthony, her friend and colleague and colaborer 
for women's issues in America, was pro-life. Elizabeth Cady, the 
daughter of Daniel Cady, a lawyer and a politician, was born in 
Jonestown, New York, 12 November 1815. She studied law under her 
father, who became a New York Supreme Court judge, and during that 
period of time she became a very strong advocate for women's rights.
  In 1840, Elizabeth married the lawyer, Henry B. Stanton. The couple 
became active in the American antislavery movement, and later that year 
Stanton and Lucretia Mott traveled to London as delegates to the World 
Antislavery Convention. Both women, history records, were furious when 
they, like the British women at the convention, were refused the 
permission to speak at the meeting to denounce slavery.
  Stanton later recalled, ``we Resolved to hold a convention as soon as 
we returned home and form a society to advocate the rights of women.'' 
And so she did. But it was not until 1848 that Stanton and Lucretia 
Mott organized the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. Stanton's 
resolution, that it was ``The duty of the women of this country to 
secure to themselves the sacred right to the elective franchise,'' was 
passed, and this became the focus of the group's campaign for years to 
come.

                              {time}  1800

  In 1866, Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone 
established the American Equal Rights Association. The following year, 
the association became active in Kansas where Negro suffrage and 
women's suffrage were to be decided in a popular vote, although both 
ideas were sadly rejected at the polls. Stanton was a historian, a 
scholar, and one of the founders of the American Woman Suffrage 
Association formed in the 1880s and from which the suffragette movement 
was born that ultimately resulted in the passage and adoption of the 
19th amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.
  This great American woman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, is by all 
definitions a hero of American women. Like Susan B. Anthony, her 
friend, who also appears on that extraordinary monument in the Rotunda, 
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was pro-life, and unapologetically so. Think 
about these two women who appear on a miniature version of Mount 
Rushmore right here in the Capitol. We have three women who essentially 
represent a life-size smaller version of Mount Rushmore for women's 
issues in America; and they were women committed to equal rights, to 
the right to vote, and they were women committed to the right to life.
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton classified abortion as a form of infanticide. 
She wrote in a letter to Julia Ward Howe, which is recorded in Howe's 
diary at Harvard University library on October 16, 1873, Elizabeth Cady 
Stanton wrote, ``When we consider that women are treated as property, 
it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property 
to be disposed of as we see fit.''
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton in essence saw a connection, Mr. Speaker, 
between that vile reality that was part of American life that the woman 
herself was property and the belief that an unborn child within the 
woman was property as well. She saw them as equal

[[Page 25371]]

evils, related together; and so they are. On 12 March, 1868, Elizabeth 
Cady Stanton wrote, ``There must be a remedy even for such a crying 
evil as this,'' referring to abortion, ``but where shall it be found, 
at least where it begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and 
elevation of women.''
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton looked at abortion that was a reality in 
America in 1868 and said the antidote to end this evil is to raise 
women up. She saw abortion as a natural consequence of the 
subordination of women in our society. It is an astounding historical 
fact and a dark irony, Mr. Speaker, when one thinks of the 
extraordinary sacrifices and advancements of Susan B. Anthony and 
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the great American women that won women 
their equal status in our society, that that same momentum would be 
used in 1973 to rejustify the practice of abortion, which those same 
heroic American women loathed to the depths of their being.
  Think about those words, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the three 
heroes of the women's movement in America that is memorialized in this 
Capitol building in stone. In the Rotunda where only Presidents, 
Alexander Hamilton, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., are 
memorialized, there are also these three women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton 
saw a relationship between reducing women to property and reducing the 
unborn children growing within them to property.
  Let me read these words again. She said, ``There must be a remedy for 
even such a crying evil as this, but where shall it be found, at least 
where it begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of 
women.'' A powerful thought that the heroes of the suffragette movement 
would look to future generations and say that the abortions that were 
taking place in the middle 19th century would some day go away, we 
would no longer treat unborn children as property if we could achieve 
the day when women were not viewed as property.
  Alice Paul is credited as one of the leading figures responsible for 
the passage of the 19th amendment, which is the women's suffragette 
amendment extending to women the right to vote in the Constitution of 
the United States of America. Alice Paul was raised as a Quaker, 
attended Swarthmore College and worked at the New York College 
Settlement while attending the New York School of Social Work. She left 
for England in 1906 to work in a settlement house movement there for 3 
years. She was Chair of a major committee of the National American 
Woman Suffrage Association within a year, in her mid-twenties.
  In England she had taken part in the women's suffragette movement, 
even participating in hunger strikes to make her point. She brought 
back this sense, some would say, of militancy, I would say more 
generously of urgency, to the women's movement in America. It was that 
urgency that characterized the life of Alice Paul.
  Her emphasis on a Federal constitutional amendment for suffrage was 
at times at odds even with some within the women's movement; and after 
the 1920 victory for the Federal amendment, Alice Paul became involved 
in the struggle to pass an Equal Rights Amendment, which actually 
passed this Congress in the year 1970, was sent to the States, and it 
failed. Paul died in 1977 in New Jersey with the heated battle of the 
Equal Rights Amendment having brought her international acclaim.
  Like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton before her, Alice 
Paul was pro-life. Alice Paul said famously, and remember now, this is 
Alice Paul, born January 1885, died 1977, essentially the author of the 
Equal Rights Amendment, seen even as a young woman as one of the 
principal driving forces behind the constitutional amendment which won 
women the right to vote; Alice Paul was pro-life. It is an astonishing 
thing to think about, that the author of the Equal Rights Amendment, 
which I scarcely doubt I would have supported for a variety of cultural 
arguments, but someone who undoubtedly would be a hero of feminists to 
this day, and Alice Paul said, ``Abortion is the ultimate exploitation 
of women.''
  Let me say again, hoping that somewhere in America those words land 
with a thud in the conscience of a feminist, that these women who are 
rightly remembered as heroes of the women's movement in America, a 
woman in Alice Paul who even in her twenties was seen as a driving 
force behind the constitutional amendment that won women the right to 
vote, seen as instrumental in the passage of the 19th amendment, and 
then would go on, however I might disagree with her, to be the author 
of the Equal Rights Amendment which passed this Congress in 1970, some 
33 years ago.
  Alice Paul would say, ``Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of 
women.''
  Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul knew and 
spoke the truth. And so it ever was of women who achieved great 
distinction in the cause of women's rights in America from the 19th 
century through the 20th century, until 1973 when women's issues became 
simply another way of speaking about the right to have an abortion.
  It is an extraordinary irony of history, Mr. Speaker, to think that a 
women's movement that was born on names like Susan B. Anthony, 
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, that was born on the moral 
consciousness of women, who said I am not property to be owned by a 
man, and who understood that that unborn child within them likewise 
should never be seen as property, that that same women's movement in 
1973 would be hijacked by those whose moral view of the sanctity of 
human life is diametrically opposed to those that founded the women's 
movement in America.
  Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women, so said Alice Paul, 
author of the Equal Rights Amendment, and I agree. It is an 
exploitation of women for physical and emotional reasons. Let me speak 
to those tonight as I conclude this portion of the case for life, 
abortion, and American women.
  There are many who believe that abortion is safe in America. But 
truthfully, despite the use of local anesthesia, a full 97 percent of 
women that have abortions report experiencing pain during the 
procedure, which more than a third describe as intense, according to 
medical studies, severe, or very severe. Compared to other pains, 
researchers have rated the pain from abortion as more painful than a 
bone fracture, about the same as a cancer pain, although not as painful 
as amputation, according to medical experts.
  There are some, including former President Bill Clinton, who used to 
repeat the mantra that it was his goal that abortion would be safe, 
legal and rare; but abortion is not safe for women, Mr. Speaker. 
Complications are common. According to medical experts, bleeding, 
hemorrhaging, laceration of the cervix, menstrual disturbance, 
inflammation of reproductive organs, bowel and bladder perforation, and 
serious infection are commonplace in the aftermath of the most routine 
abortions in America. Even more harmful than the short-term pain, which 
women describe as severe, are the potential long-term physical 
complications that we never talk about in America.

                              {time}  1815

  And when I say ``we,'' I mean those who support the right to an 
abortion and even those of us in the pro-life movement. I will never 
forget President Clinton's Surgeon General saying, so thoughtfully, 
that one particular denomination of Christianity needed to get over 
their ``love affair with the fetus.'' So said Surgeon General Joycelyn 
Elders. Despite the horrific aspects of her comment, the truth is that 
even we, in the pro-life movement, have not thought enough about the 
other victim of abortion as well, for there are, as I said at the 
opening of this Case for Life, two victims. We grieve the loss of 
unborn life, but we need to speak more boldly about the impact on 
American women, physical and emotional, that abortion extracts.
  Among those long-term physical complications, Mr. Speaker, for 
example, overzealous curettage, a medical procedure, can damage the 
lining of the

[[Page 25372]]

uterus and lead to permanent infertility. Overall, women who have 
abortions face an increased risk of tubal pregnancy and more than 
double the risk of future sterility. Perhaps the most important are 
that all the risks of these sorts of complications, along with the risk 
of future miscarriage, increases with each subsequent abortion. I am 
not altogether sure that women that make their way into clinics know 
that, that with each abortion they risk infertility, sterility or when 
the time comes that they decide to say yes to life, that they may be 
greeted with the heartbreak of miscarriage in increasing measure. More 
controversially, according to the Journal of the National Cancer 
Institute, there is strong evidence that abortion increases the risk of 
breast cancer. A study by the Institute of more than 1,800 women in 
1994, which was published in the Journal of the National Cancer 
Institute, found that overall women having abortions increased their 
risk of getting breast cancer before the age of 45 by 50 percent. For 
women under 18 with no previous pregnancies, having an abortion after 
the eighth week increased the risk of breast cancer, according to this 
medical study, by 800 percent. Women with a family history of breast 
cancer fared even worse. All 12 women participating in the study who 
had abortions before 18 and had a family history of breast cancer 
themselves contracted breast cancer before the age of 45. I say this as 
someone who has consistently supported research with the National 
Institutes of Health to confront breast cancer. I have had dear friends 
beset by this scourge and disease and I do not mean to speak in any way 
insensitively about it or in any way to associate breast cancer with 
abortion, that one fits the other, but rather simply to cite the 
research, that we can hear the truth echoing perhaps from this place 
tonight that according to the medical community and the Journal of the 
National Cancer Institute, there is strong evidence that abortion 
increases the risk of breast cancer and women should know that.
  There are also psychological consequences to American women for 
abortion. It seems to me that this may have been in the mind of Alice 
Paul, the author of the Equal Rights Amendment, when she said, 
``Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.'' Because it seems to 
me it is altogether convenient for men for a woman to have an abortion. 
Men have a rather unlimited capacity to compartmentalize and move on, 
but what the medical community is finding out is what most men have 
known throughout the eons, that women by and large have better hearts 
than we do, have a greater moral sensitivity than we do, and it is 
reflected in the research of what has come to be known as postabortion 
syndrome, which is rising to epidemic levels in America. Clinical 
research provides a growing body of scientific evidence that having an 
abortion can cause psychological harm to some women. Psychologist Wanda 
Franz, Ph.D., in the March 1989 congressional hearings on the impact of 
abortion said, quote, women who report negative aftereffects from 
abortion know exactly what their problem is. They report horrible 
nightmares of children calling to them. When they are reminded of the 
abortion, Franz testified the women reexperience it with terrible 
psychological pain. They feel worthless and victimized because they 
failed at the most natural of human activities, the role of being a 
mother.
  I think in my own heart of conversations with women of my generation 
who have become active in the pro-life movement but who have found in 
their faith the grace and the healing to move beyond that choice. And I 
think of a woman who said in my presence once, some 20 years after 
having an abortion, that not a day went by that she did not think how 
old that child would be. They do not tell you that in the lobby at the 
abortion clinic, Mr. Speaker, but they should. The exploding incidence 
of postabortion syndrome has even caused major medical associations in 
this country to recognize it. Women suffering postabortion stress may 
experience drug and alcohol abuse, personal relationship disorders, 
sexual dysfunction, communication difficulties and even in some cases 
attempt suicide. Postabortion syndrome appears to be a type of pattern 
of denial which may last for 5 to 10 years before emotional 
difficulties surface.
  Now that clinicians have established that there is an identifiable 
pattern to PAS, postabortion syndrome, they face a new challenge. What 
is still unknown is how widespread psychological problems are among 
women who have had abortions. The LA Times did a survey in 1989 and 
found that 56 percent of women who had abortions felt guilty about it. 
And 26 percent, quote, mostly regretted the abortion, in a poll done by 
the LA Times. Clinicians' current goal now is to conduct extensive 
national research studies to obtain data on the size and scope of 
postabortion syndrome.
  When one thinks, Mr. Speaker, of 1.5 million women undergoing 
abortions every year since 1973, it is almost overwhelming to think of 
the heartache that must grip the quiet moments of millions of women in 
our land. And because I am not standing in my home church, Mr. Speaker, 
I will not tonight explain to them that there is a way out under it, 
that there is grace and there is forgiveness and there is healing, and 
in a church near to them they can find it. It will always be my prayer 
as the Case for Life series goes forward in this Chamber that any woman 
who has experienced this under the sound of my voice would never in any 
way feel judged by this sinner, but that they would know that there is 
healing and there is grace in a God of mercy, and they would know there 
is a Nation that urgently needs them to take a stand and to tell the 
truth to the next generation of women about the cost of an abortion, 
not just the ending of an innocent human life and every potential that 
it would ever have but, Mr. Speaker, about the breaking of a heart.
  Oftentimes, as I stand before groups of young women in the prime of 
their life, I am asked about my position on abortion. My pro-life views 
are fairly widely known in Indiana. I always make the point to offer 
young women in the room a promise, and it is a good place for me to 
close this installment of the Case for Life tonight as I think about 
Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony who believed that abortion was the 
ultimate exploitation of women. I will look at these young women, 
oftentimes in a high school classroom, sometimes in a small church 
group, and I will look around the room knowing just statistically 
speaking that there may be some young women in that room who are faced 
with an unwanted pregnancy and are faced with a choice between bringing 
that unborn baby to term or ending its life in the womb. I always look 
at those young women and I say, I want to make you a promise that the 
other side can never make. I said, if you are faced with an unwanted 
pregnancy and you make the decision, however difficult, with your 
family's assistance or a crisis pregnancy center near you to take that 
baby to term and even if you turn that baby over to another family for 
adoption, versus if you choose to end that life in the womb, if you 
choose life, I will promise you from the moment they hand you that 
wiggling little baby in the operating room, whether you raise it or you 
give it up, there will never be a day in your life but that you know 
that you did the right thing. And the other side cannot make that 
promise.
  And if the statistics that we heard tonight, the physical cost and 
the emotional cost of abortion, are not jarring, perhaps that challenge 
would be, Mr. Speaker. My prayer is that as we think about the great 
women of American history, the great women of the suffragette movement 
that won women the right to vote, that wrestled equal status for women 
in our society, people like Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul and others, 
when I think about the tender and wonderful women of my family and of 
America, I have hope for the cause of life, because I cannot help but 
believe that women who could take American society from a medievalist 
view of women as property and have the moral courage to win the right 
to vote and to win equal standing in the public square because of their 
courage and their conscience, that those same

[[Page 25373]]

American women and their daughters and their granddaughters will not 
someday lead us back to the truth that life is sacred, to the truth 
that echoes through history in those ancient words, ``See, I set before 
you today life and death, blessings and destruction. Now choose life, 
so that you and your children may live.''
  It is my belief that it will be when that day comes, that abortion 
comes to an end in America, it will be the women of America who lead us 
home, just as it was the women of America who led us to a more just 
society and to an equal station in our culture for women.
  With that, I would conclude my part of this Case for Life series, Mr. 
Speaker, and yield for whatever approach he would choose to make to 
this issue to a man who while he has served in Congress for over 20 
years, his vibrancy and vitality is intimidating to most of us who 
serve with him.

                              {time}  1830

  The gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) has been an advocate of the 
cause of life since before Roe v. Wade, and he brings an energy and a 
commitment to this cause like no other, and I am deeply humbled that he 
would join me in this series of a case for life, and I yield gratefully 
to the gentleman from New Jersey.
  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman 
from Indiana (Mr. Pence) for his leadership in realizing that we need 
to accelerate our efforts to inform, to enlighten, and hopefully to 
motivate America to stand up on behalf of life, to let women know that 
there are alternatives. We spoke the other day, actually the gentleman 
from Indiana (Mr. Pence) and I and a few others, the gentleman from 
Arizona (Mr. Franks), and we cosponsored a forum on women who had had 
abortions. As a matter of fact it was called Women Deserve Better, and 
we were able to hear from four very brave women, including Jennifer 
O'Neil and Melba Moore and others, who told their stories of having had 
abortions and the horrific consequences to their emotions, to their 
bodies, to their psychological health as a direct result of that 
abortion.
  And the abortion lobby would like to have us believe that this is 
something that is benign, and it is anything but. It is an ugly, very 
destructive act that is committed upon her unborn child, and women are 
the co-victims of every abortion. We know that the baby is either 
chemically poisoned, or he or she is dismembered as a result of the 
abortion; but we also know that the woman carries with her a terrible 
price that goes on year in and year out, and regrettably the abortion 
lobby enables that and somehow suggests that she ought to be happy with 
that decision.
  And what we are trying to say is that there is reconciliation. The 
Women Deserve Better campaign is trying to reach out to those women who 
are suffering in carrying the burden of that abortion and to say that 
there is hope, there is reconciliation, and there is life after an 
abortion; but they need to come to terms with it. And I would encourage 
all those women who are perhaps listening to be in contact with the 
Women Deserve Better organization or to talk to some others who have 
direct experience, have experienced an abortion themselves and can 
bring, like I said, some reconciliation to them because, again, there 
needs to be that, I think, individually and collectively in America if 
we are to go forward.
  Let me also point out, as my good friend and colleague I am sure 
pointed out, today is truly a historic day having seen the Senate pass 
by a very wide margin a ban on the gruesome act known as partial-birth 
abortion where a baby is partially delivered only to have his or her 
head punctured with scissors in the back of the head and the brains of 
that tiny innocent baby snuffed out, vacuumed out to complete this 
horrific procedure known as partial-birth abortion.
  Partial-birth abortion, I would respectfully submit, is but the tip 
of an ugly and unseemly iceberg. Just below the surface, the surface 
appeal of choice, is a reality almost too horrific and cruel to 
contemplate, let alone face. Yet we persist in our allusions and denial 
as a country ever enabled by clever marketing, bias news reporting, and 
the cheap sophistry of choice. Let us be clear, and I do not think we 
can say this often enough, abortion is child abuse and it exploits 
women. Women deserve better than having their babies stabbed or cut or 
decapitated or poisoned. Women deserve nonviolent, life-affirming 
positive alternatives to abortion.
  Thirty years after Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the companion 
decision, the national debate on partial-birth abortion has finally 
pierced the multiple layers of euphemisms and collective denial to 
reveal child battering in the extreme. The cover-up is over, and the 
dirty secret concerning abortion methods is finally getting the 
scrutiny that will usher in reform and protective statutes. I would say 
to my colleagues that there is nothing compassionate, there is 
absolutely nothing benign about stabbing babies in the head with 
scissors so that their brains can be sucked out. That is child abuse. 
And yet over on the Senate side today and previously here in the House, 
we had Members for whom I have an enormous amount of respect defending 
the indefensible. We reach out to them and say, look at what you are 
saying. If they did this, if they were a young mother and they had a 
little baby girl, a young child who took her doll and took a pair of 
scissors and stuck those scissors into the back of the head of that 
baby, they would get counseling. They would say no, my daughter should 
not be play-acting that kind of activity. And yet there are Members of 
this Chamber who embrace, enable, facilitate, and defend that 
indefensible act on a tiny living baby girl or baby boy.
  As the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) knows and as my colleagues 
know, the loss of human life to abortion in this country has been 
staggering; 44.4 million babies have been killed by abortions since Roe 
v. Wade. And, yes, there were tens of thousands killed even prior to it 
in those States where abortion had been legalized like New York, like 
Hawaii, like Oregon, but 44.4 million kids. That is one out of every 
three of this generation missing. I say to my colleagues, the next time 
they are in a classroom, look around at the desks, count one, two, then 
the missing child; one, two, the missing child. This generation, 
perhaps more than any other in our own history, perhaps any other's 
history, is missing children who by ``choice'' have been destroyed by 
an abortionist.
  Let me just conclude. On the WorldNetDaily site, there was an article 
on October 17, and I will just read part of it: ``Attendees of a 
national conference for abortion providers watched and listened with 
rapt attention as the inventor of the partial-birth abortion procedure 
narrated a video of the grizzly procedure, and then they burst into 
applause when the act was over and the unborn child was destroyed. The 
disturbing and eye-opening event featuring abortion doctor Martin 
Haskell, addressing members of the National Abortion Federation, was 
actually captured on audiotape, calmly and dispassionately describing 
each step of the process up to and including the insertion of the 
scissors into the base of the baby's head, followed by the sound of the 
suction machine sucking out the baby's brain. Dr. Haskell walks his 
audience through the procedure that opponents hope will finally be 
banned,'' that is us, ``during this congressional session. At the end 
of the procedure,'' the article goes on to say, ``after the late-term 
fully developed unborn child's life has been violently and painfully 
terminated, the audience breaks into applause.''
  That is sick, I say to my colleagues. These are the providers of 
abortion. These are the ones that our friends on the other side of this 
issue will defend passionately. They broke into applause as that baby 
met his death. That is what partial-birth abortion is all about. It is 
a horrific, grisly procedure. We are all about life, life affirmation. 
Thank God we have a President who respects the dignity and the value of 
each and every life and will sign this legislation into law, unlike his 
predecessor, Bill Clinton, who on two occasions vetoed this 
legislation.
  And I want to thank the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence), my 
friend,

[[Page 25374]]

for having these times on the floor so that we can begin the process of 
educating America. Much work needs to be done, and for those people who 
watch C-SPAN, know this: we care about life, the unborn, the newly 
born, all of those who are weak and disenfranchised. Many of us are the 
leaders on human rights, religious freedom, Trafficking Victims 
Protection Act, and a whole host of other important legislation 
designed to protect the innocent from the strong, the weak, and the 
vulnerable from those who would do them harm. That is what it is all 
about. Government is for the weakest and the most at risk. The unborn 
in our society are the weakest and the most at risk. Again I thank the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence), and I yield back to my good friend 
and colleague.
  Mr. PENCE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for his 
passion, for his generous remarks, and for his dogged determination in 
this issue.
  We come to the close of this case for life much as we began, and it 
is always remarkable to me how sometimes God bookends things in ways 
that we could never have planned. Because we heard the gentleman from 
New Jersey begin his remarks by simply using a phrase I heard him use 
many times on floor, but I know he did not hear me use tonight. He 
said, ``Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women,'' which was 
precisely the words of Alice Paul, who in her 20s was a driving force 
behind winning women the right to vote in America; a woman who was the 
driving force behind even another great signature item of the feminist 
movement in America, the Equal Rights Amendment. She said, ``Abortion 
is the ultimate exploitation of women.''
  And I close with the words of Susan B. Anthony, who now every time I 
walk through the Rotunda and I look at those heroes of the suffrage 
movement carved in stone, I will think of it, if the Speaker will 
forgive me, as much a memorial to their moral courage as to their 
political accomplishment because these women were simultaneously about 
the elevation of women to equal political status, but they were also 
women committed to the sanctity of human life. Susan B. Anthony, and I 
close, said of abortion: ``No matter what the motive, love of ease, or 
a desire to save the suffering of the unborn innocent, the woman is 
awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in 
life. It will burden her soul in death. But, oh, thrice guilty is he 
who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the deed.''
  Susan B. Anthony, without whom American women would have not a 
fraction of the status and the political power they have today, was a 
woman committed to the sanctity of human life. And as we go forward and 
as American women, in particular, listen in on our conversations on 
this Capitol floor, it is my hope that another generation of courageous 
and visionary American women of courage and conscience will lead us 
back to that profound moral truth echoed through the ages to choose 
life.
  With that I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Ferguson), 
another of my colleagues in this series, a man who brings with him an 
enormous pedigree in the right-to-life movement.
  Mr. FERGUSON. Mr. Speaker, I am a little out of breath. I just got 
over here from my office. I was watching the debate and the 
conversation in my office, and I wanted to participate for a couple of 
different reasons. Number one, I wanted to pay tribute to the gentleman 
from Indiana (Mr. Pence), who really is showing tremendous leadership 
and vision in helping to use this forum and use this opportunity to 
refocus our Nation's attention on an issue which is as fundamental to 
us and to our lives and to our society as any that we take up in this 
House and in these halls of Congress. I am proud to call him a friend, 
and I am so pleased and proud of his leadership on this issue.
  I also want to pay tribute to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. 
Smith), who has been fighting these battles for almost 25 years. He has 
brought passion and intelligence and commitment to an issue in trying 
to educate people around the country and around the world about the 
value of human life and this, unfortunately, very slippery slope which 
we have proceeded down in the years since Row v. Wade and even since 
before that.

                              {time}  1845

  Earlier today I was here on the floor and we were debating Medicare 
and talking about health care and talking about innovation and talking 
about trying to provide new health opportunities for our seniors, for 
people around this country. So much of the Medicare debate has been 
about medicines, it has been about medical devices, it has been about 
providing care to people who we care about.
  One of the thoughts that I had as my friend the gentleman from New 
Jersey was talking about the millions and millions and millions of 
people who have been lost over the years to the terrible tragedy of 
abortion, I am thinking about that one out of three desks in the 
classroom. I used to be a teacher, and I was thinking back to those 
classrooms, one out of three desks where a child has been lost to 
abortion.
  But it got me thinking about those who have been lost in another way. 
Think about the cures and the innovations, all the good that could have 
come from these millions and millions of human beings, these people who 
would be with us today, who would be participating. Researchers and 
scientists. They would be teachers, they would be moms, they would be 
dads. Thinking about the enormous good that would come from these 
individuals, these human beings who would be here to grow their hearts 
in love, to show love to other people, and compassion; the incredible 
insights they would be able to share with us. The philosophers, the 
theologians, the priests, the ministers, the rabbis, those who would 
seek to make our society better and stronger, more compassionate and 
loving. All that has been lost. So much of that has been lost. Of 
course, we are blessed with people today who are able to share these 
things with us.
  But think of what has been lost by those who have not been able to be 
with us today and who we have lost over the years to the terrible 
tragedy of abortion. It is sad, but I think it also should instill in 
us a new commitment, a new understanding and perhaps a new perspective 
as to how important this issue is.
  It is not just important in the ways that we know it is, the 
fundamental values that we all stand for as Americans, that we are 
fighting for around the world, but it is important, too, because we 
could be so much better, were it not for those who have been lost.
  With that, I yield back to my friend the gentleman from Indiana.
  Mr. PENCE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. 
Ferguson), who, along with his wife, Maurine, has been a champion for 
life in and out of the Congress for many years.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Aderholt), a 
moral leader in the United States House of Representatives.
  Mr. ADERHOLT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  First of all, let me say it is a great day in the House, it is a 
great day in the United States Senate and it is a great day in the 
United States of America. I say to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. 
Pence), as we have said and talked about on many occasions, a lot of 
times we hear the courts speak on different issues. Well, today we have 
had an opportunity to hear the people speak, that this is an issue that 
we should not put up with in this Nation.
  I believe we will be judged by how we treat those who are the most 
vulnerable in society. For that reason, it is especially exciting to be 
here on the Floor of the United States House of Representatives in the 
United States Capitol when this legislation has passed.
  Certainly, I was pleased to join 161 of my house colleagues in 
cosponsoring this legislation. This is the fifth Congress during which 
this debate has taken place. I am thankful we have done the right thing 
to outlaw this procedure once and for all, and look forward to 
President Bush having a signing ceremony and inviting all the

[[Page 25375]]

Members of Congress that are very interested in this issue to be there, 
because I think this will be a great day for America and I think it 
will be a great day for not only this administration when he signs 
that, but also the United States Congress.
  Mr. PENCE. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues, the gentleman from New 
Jersey (Mr. Ferguson), the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) and 
the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Aderholt), for joining me in this case 
for life.

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