By Chris Smith (R-NJ}
Editor’s remarks. These comments preceded passage of the so-called Women Health Protection Act.
The legislation under consideration by the House today is deceptively titled the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021. Abortion is not health care unless one construes the precious life of an unborn child to be analogous to a tumor to be excised or a disease to be vanquished.
This bill constitutes an existential threat to unborn children and to the value of life itself.
For the first time ever by congressional statute, H.R. 3755 would legally authorize and enable the violent death of unborn baby girls and boys by dismemberment, decapitation, forced expulsion from the womb, deadly poisons, or other methods at any time, for any reason, until birth.
A significant majority of Americans are deeply concerned about protecting the lives of unborn children.
A 2021 Marist Poll found that 65% of Americans want Roe v. Wade reinterpreted to either send the issue to the states or stop legalized abortion.
Of that 65% majority of Americans—40% of Democrats would “allow certain restrictions on abortions as determined by each state.”
If enacted, this bill will nullify almost every modest pro-life restriction ever enacted by the states including:
women’s right to know laws in 35 states, parental involvement statues 37 states, pain capable unborn child protection laws in 19 states, waiting period laws in 26 states, and more.
70% of Americans, according to the 2021 Marist poll, oppose abortion if the child will be born with Down syndrome—with over half of those who identify as pro-choice (56%), opposed, or strongly opposed to abortion due to the expectation a child will be born with Down syndrome. Americans seek to “embrace” and not “erase” those babies identified as having an extra chromosome.
H.R. 3755 overturns state laws that protect children with Down Syndrome as well.
Regarding international law, the bill falsely states that “Core human rights treaties ratified by the United States protect access to abortion”.
In fact, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the U.S. has ratified, is concerned about unborn children being killed. It states in Article 6 that “Every human being has the inherent right to life” and that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.”
It goes on to declare that the “sentence of death…shall not be carried out on pregnant women.” The ICCPR creates an exemption from execution for pregnant women, recognizing that their unborn children have an independent claim to legal protection, as do all unborn children.
Many women have been seriously harmed by abortion.
A few years ago, Linda Shrewsbury, an academic and African American with a degree from Harvard who had an abortion said at an event here at the Capitol: “the lies that brought me to that day and its sorrowful aftermath are crystal clear in my mind— falsehoods and deceptions that concealed the truth about abortion. Lies planted in my thinking by clever marketing, media campaigns and endless repetition led to a tragic irreversible decision–the death of my first child.
“I didn’t really understand back then. At age 20, I had no inkling of the mental and emotional darkness I was about to enter. I couldn’t have grasped the immense psychological toll abortion would take for years into the future–unrelenting tears, guilt, shame, and depression. After spending many years in denial, I did eventually find healing. When I understood and rejected distortions about fetal development, doublespeak about choice, rights, planned and wanted children; I understood the reality and victimhood of my aborted child. I understood the absence of moral bases for choosing to ‘dis-entitle’ an innocent human being of life. When I embraced truth, truth set me free and I finally gained inner peace.
“It’s past time to lance the national wound of abortion with truth. The high culture—thought leaders, media, celebrities—that brought us abortion seem vested beyond extraction. I dreamed of the volcano of abortion truth that could erupt one day from the grassroots—women and men and their relatives witnessing to their suppressed emotion, unspoken trauma, and lived pain. With abortion denial ended, we as a society could then reconnect with reality and life.”
The U.S. Supreme Court majority in Roe v Wade wrote: “we need not resolve the difficult question of when human life begins.” Sidestepping that threshold question and giving no benefit of the doubt to the child, they went on to legalize and enable abortion on demand.
For decades, abortion advocates have gone to extraordinary lengths to ignore, trivialize and cover-up the battered baby-victim.
But today, thanks to ultrasound, unborn babies are more visible than ever before.
Today science informs us that birth is an event—albeit an important one—but not the beginning of life.
Modern medicine today also treats unborn children with disability or disease as a patient in need of diagnosis and treatment.
Unborn babies are society’s youngest patients and deserve benign life affirming medical interventions.
All unborn babies deserve our respect and love—not death by abortion.