[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5979-5980]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         ATROCITIES OF ABORTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Franks) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. FRANKS. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
  Madam Speaker, there was a time when the rules of Congress forbid 
anyone to petition this Congress against slavery. For some inexplicable 
reason, once in a while, it seems mankind becomes completely blind to a 
monstrosity. History is replete with such examples. It seems we are 
never quite so eloquent as we are when we decry the crimes of the past 
generation, and yet we seem as staggeringly blind as some of our most 
sightless predecessors when it comes to facing and rejecting atrocities 
in our own time.
  Whether it was slavery, the Nazi Holocaust, or the many human 
genocides across history, the patterns were the same. Innocent human 
beings, children of God all, were systematically dehumanized and then 
subjected to the most horrifying inhumanity. All the while, human 
society as a whole hardened their hearts and turned away.
  But, Madam Speaker, truth and time travel on the same road. And 
although it was often agonizingly slow, the truth of these tragic 
inhumanities in our past began to dawn on people of reason and good 
will. Their hearts first and then their minds began to change.
  I've often asked myself: What was it that changed their minds? What 
changed the minds of those who had previously embraced an invincible 
ignorance to hide from themselves the horror of what was happening to 
their innocent fellow human beings?
  Madam Speaker, if I only really knew or if I knew how to express it 
because, you see, today such a conundrum looms before humanity once 
again, those most glaring examples of which are things like the trial 
in Philadelphia of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. In the words of the grand jury 
report, Gosnell had a simple solution for unwanted babies. He killed 
them. He didn't call it that, Madam Speaker. He called it ``ensuring 
fetal demise.'' The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking 
scissors in the back of the baby's neck and cutting the spinal cord. He 
called it ``snipping.'' Over the years there were hundreds of 
``snippings.''
  When authorities entered the clinic of Dr. Gosnell, they found a 
torture chamber for little babies that I do not have the words or the 
stomach to adequately describe. Suffice it to say that Dr. Gosnell ran 
a systematic practice in his late-term abortion clinic to cut the 
spines of those babies who had survived his attempt to abort them.
  Every American with the slightest shred of compassion for the 
innocent should learn the truth of this case for themselves, Madam 
Speaker, because perhaps the greatest tragedy of all surrounding this 
case is that it is not as rare as those in the media would try to 
convince us.
  Six months after the Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand in 
the United States, Dr. Peter A.J. Adam, an associate professor of 
pediatrics at Case Western University, reported to the American 
Pediatric Research Society concerning research he and associates had 
conducted on 12 babies up to

[[Page 5980]]

20 weeks old who had been born alive from hysterotomy abortion. These 
men decapitated these little babies and cannulated the internal carotid 
arteries. They then kept these little heads alive with heart-lung 
machines in order to study them. Like the victims of Dr. Gosnell, their 
spines had been completely sliced through and the painful agony that 
they were feeling is beyond our imagination, Madam Speaker.
  Americans were outraged when they learned that the Russians had kept 
the heads of dogs alive in the 1950s. Yet, when asked, Peter Adams 
responded to the criticism of keeping these little human heads alive. 
He responded by saying:

       Our society has declared the fetus dead and abrogated its 
     rights. I don't see any ethical problem. Whose rights are we 
     going to protect once we've decided the fetus won't live?

  In another case, Madam Speaker, Dr. Abu Hayat, the Manhattan 
abortionist who severed the arm of a baby girl later born alive, is 
reportedly the first physician in the United States to be jailed for an 
illegal third-trimester abortion since the infamous 1973 Roe v. Wade 
decision.
  Sixty-three-year-old Abu Hayat was convicted of having knowingly 
performed an abortion on Rosa Rodriguez in October of 1991. The 7- to 
8-month-old baby girl she carried, baby Ana Rosa Rodriguez, was born 
the next day, but one of her arms was missing at the shoulder because 
of Dr. Hayat's botched abortion. Hayat was also convicted of assault on 
the woman because, in the middle of the abortion, he stopped to demand 
an additional $500. When the woman's husband couldn't come up with the 
additional money, she was sent home semiconscious and still bleeding.
  Madam Speaker, my heart goes out to those like Rosa Rodriguez, and 
especially to her, who sooner or later had to face the question from 
her baby daughter, Mommy, where is my arm? Oh, Madam Speaker, it 
beggars human imagination to try to take in the crushing emotional 
burden that the abortion industry in this country has heaped upon so 
many American mothers.
  Madam Speaker, I will not expound upon the cases of abortionist Dr. 
Scott Ricke or abortionist Gordon Goei or Malvin Roy Weisberg in the 
infamous Weisberg incident in Woodland Hills, California. However, I 
will tell you, Madam Speaker, that they involved thousands of unborn 
children, many of them in their third trimester, in what can be 
described as a torturous and mass desecration of innocent unborn 
babies.
  Would it be too much to hope for, Madam Speaker, that Members of this 
body and Americans in general might research these tragedies for 
themselves, given the cataclysmic implications for any society who 
turns a blind eye to such atrocities against the most innocent and 
helpless of its members?

                              {time}  1740

  If our society is to survive with our humanity intact, our moral 
impulse toward our fellow human beings must first survive. Madam 
Speaker, that is why it is so important for people to see for 
themselves the inhumanity of what is being done to these little 
victims. Maybe it would not change everyone's mind, but it has changed 
many minds. One such example gained a lot of media coverage.
  Abby Johnson spent 9 years working at a Texas Planned Parenthood 
clinic--first as a volunteer and then as clinic director. At one point, 
she was asked to assist during a routine abortion procedure. Amazingly, 
this was the first time in those 9 years that Abby had actually watched 
on an ultrasound an abortion being performed. She recounts holding the 
transducer over the mother's midsection and observing the display of 
the baby's movements on the screen. She then watched as the abortion 
proceeded and as the unborn baby attempted unsuccessfully to escape the 
probe.
  She said:

       I could see the whole profile of the baby. I could see the 
     probe. I could see the baby try to move away from the probe, 
     and I just thought: What am I doing? Then I thought: never 
     again.

  Two weeks later, looking out the clinic window and seeing two members 
of Coalition for Life standing outside, praying, Johnson walked out of 
the clinic and joined them, and she has never looked back.
  Then there was the case of Brenda Shafer, a nurse who was so 
radically pro-abortion that she told her teenage daughters that they 
would be forced to have an abortion if they ever got pregnant; but only 
3 days of working in an abortion clinic was more than she could handle.
  She speaks of going in on her third and final day and watching as the 
doctor performed three partial-birth abortions, including one procedure 
on a 6-month-old baby boy with Down syndrome. She watched as the little 
boy's arms and legs were delivered, his little fingers clasping and 
unclasping, his feet kicking before the vacuum tube was inserted into 
the baby's head. He went completely limp--only to be discarded as if he 
were nothing more than a rag.
  Brenda said:

       I have been a nurse for a long time, and I have seen a lot 
     of death--people maimed in auto accidents, gunshot wounds, 
     you name it--and I have seen surgical procedures of every 
     sort; but in all of my professional years, I had never 
     witnessed anything like this. For a long time, sometimes 
     still, I had nightmares about what I saw in the clinic that 
     day.

  Former abortion provider Nita Whitten tells a similarly gut-wrenching 
story of a young teenage girl who was pressured by her mother to have 
an abortion. The doctors had inserted what is called a ``laminaria'' to 
allow the abortion to be performed. Nita describes the young girl going 
into the bathroom and screaming at the top of her lungs for her mother, 
screaming over and over ``It's a baby. It's a baby'' after she saw the 
baby that was aborted in the toilet.
  For this little girl, who will forever be scarred by what she saw, 
there was no debate about whether her baby was just a blob of tissue. 
Unlike the ostensibly educated abortionists, this girl realized 
intuitively what science has long argued: conception creates a 
genetically unique human life--a baby.
  All of these people shared a common thread when they were confronted 
with the brutality and the reality of abortion. They could no longer 
deny the truth that abortion is the murder of a defenseless child. It's 
easy for those of us who are far removed from the actual abortion 
clinics--those who do not have to confront the unspeakable pain caused 
within the doors of those clinics every day--to idealize and justify 
abortion on demand.
  They tell themselves that they are really fighting for women. They 
convince themselves that that little flicker they see on the ultrasound 
screen, as the baby is savagely torn apart in his own mother's womb, is 
not the tiny beating heart of another living being. They lie to 
themselves year after year, ignoring the truth that every 5-year-old 
child knows instinctively. They desensitize themselves to the horrors 
and the reality until the violent destruction of a defenseless baby is 
viewed as if it were nothing more than having one's tonsils removed.
  Indeed, this is the hope and the goal of monsters like Kermit Gosnell 
or Abu Hayat or Scott Ricke or Gordon Goei or Malvin Weisberg, just to 
name a few.
  When Abby Johnson, Brenda Shafer, Nita Whitten, and so many others 
like them saw what abortion really was, they changed their minds. I 
would never suggest that I clearly know what sparked the change in 
their hearts, but I am convinced that it is the same spark in the human 
soul that has turned the tide of blood and tragedy and hatred and 
inhumanity throughout history. And, Madam Speaker, I am also convinced 
that it is mankind's only hope.
  With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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