Pro Life

Floor Speech

Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Jean, just very briefly to say to my colleagues tonight, Barack Obama has said he is seeking common ground, and he wants to reduce the number of abortions. Sadly, virtually everything he has done, months to date, as President of the United States has expanded abortions internationally as well as domestically by executive order as well as by his embedding into his administration a virtual who's who of abortion leaders, people from the organizations who are now running agencies of the government of the United States. These are the people who ran the organizations for abortion rights. Now they're there.

The District of Columbia for years has not provided--and our hope is that it will continue not to provide--any funding for abortion, except for rape and incest and life of the mother. That language, as you have pointed out, was crafted by Congressman Bob Dornan; and it was a little game that was played for years. I have been here 29 years, and I will never forget the game that was played. The language would say, no Federal funds can be used to pay for abortion; but they would allow it because we congressionally authorize local funds, so the bottom line was, the net consequence was, abortion on demand unfettered was paid for by public funds, by taxpayers.

Barack Obama keeps saying he wants to reduce abortions. The common ground on reducing abortions is proscribing, prohibiting funding for abortions. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, and Planned Parenthood itself continually say that about a third of the abortions don't occur when public financing is not available. So as a result of the Hyde amendment, as a result of an amendment that I offered back in 1983 that proscribed funding under the auspices of the Federal Employees Health Benefits plan, the Dornan amendment on D.C. approps, and all the other amendments have actually permitted, facilitated those children who otherwise would have been aborted because public financing of abortion wasn't there. That's true common ground. Taxpayers don't want to subsidize chemical poisoning and dismemberment of unborn children.

People can talk all they want. The cheap sophistry of choice is that it does not bring into the visibility that it deserves the very active abortion, which is the maiming, ultimately the killing, of an unborn child. This is the year 2009. We know more about the magnificent life of an unborn child than ever before. Microsurgeries are being done. These unborn children are the littlest patients. They can get blood transfusions. Unfortunately in some hospital rooms and especially in clinics, they are being dismembered; they are being chemically poisoned; and they are being starved to death in the act of abortion, which then is suggested to be a benign act. It is anything but. It is not compassion. It shows no sense of justice; and the public should not be forced, compelled to finance abortion in the District of Columbia or anywhere else.

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