Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act

CHILD INTERSTATE ABORTION NOTIFICATION ACT -- (House of Representatives - September 26, 2006)

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Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his great leadership on this bill.

Mr. Speaker, young girls desperately need the modest protections against exploitation contained in the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, and they need these protections now, without any further delay.

It is inhumane and unjust that abortion mills in New Jersey and some other States aggressively advertise and market secret abortions for pregnant minors living in States that have enacted and enforce parental involvement statutes. The Yellow Pages in Pennsylvania, for example, are filled with ads for children to procure secret abortions in my home State. That is unconscionable.

The fact that older men, including statutory rapists, can secretly transport and perhaps pressure or coerce teenagers to go to abortion mills for an abortion even as late as 6 months is wrong.

Who protects the teenagers from abuse? The abortionist? The male who wants the baby dead to evade responsibility?

Policies that enable abortion clinics to circumvent State parental involvement laws recklessly and irreversibly endanger the health, safety, and well-being of young girls.

Mr. Speaker, not only are babies being slaughtered at abortion clinics, and let's not kid ourselves, the soothing rhetoric of the abortion industry has anesthetized many people to the inherent violence against children of every abortion. Chemical poison and dismemberment is violence against children. But minor girls as well have become physically wounded and emotionally wounded by the abortion. They become the walking wounded.

Ask yourselves, when health or emotional complications occur, do we really think a young girl and her shocked and broken parents return to the abortion mill? I think not.

Finally, I want to commend Chairman Sensenbrenner and his staff for the exemplary work they have done on this bill, especially the highly persuasive, heavily footnoted majority commentary in the report accompanying the bill. I wish more Members had the time or made the time to read it. It makes a cogent case for this bill, and I urge support for this important bill.

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Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. NADLER. And. Finally, and after this statement I will yield, this law also says that if someone is asked to perform, if a doctor is asked to perform an abortion on a young woman, on a minor from another State, he must notify the parents in that State whether or not that State requires parental notification. So we are expanding, we are now putting the Federal Government and saying to a State when only two States are involved, neither which have a parental notification law, you must because we say so. There is no justification for that.

I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith).

Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Let me make it very clear. What I just said was that if you go to the Yellow Pages and look at some of the ads and in newspapers and in other media, the abortionists actively try to solicit young girls 13, 14, 15, 16, to go across State lines. And you know as well as I do adult males, including predatory males, read those ads and act. All they have to do is go to New Jersey or some State other than Pennsylvania, where there is no parental involvement law, and thereby circumvent the parental notification, parental consent in that particular State.

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