By Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Co-Chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus.
Editor’s note. These remarks were delivered at a Capitol Hill press conference marking this week’s first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs’ decision.
For decades—right up to this very moment—abortion purveyors have gone to extraordinary lengths to ignore, trivialize, and cover up the battered baby victim.
They’ve aggressively fostered a culture of denial, disrespect, and bias against babies.
The United States Supreme Court’s 7-2 majority in 1973 infamously wrote in Roe v. Wade—that: ‘‘We need not resolve the difficult question of when human life begins.’’ (Page 159)
Sidestepping that fundamental question and giving absolutely no benefit of the doubt to the innate value, dignity and humanity of an unborn child, the Court went on to legalize and facilitate abortion on demand throughout pregnancy.
In 1973, Justice Byron White, joined by Justice Rehnquist, dissented on both extremist pro-abortion decisions and called what the Court did in Doe v. Bolton, the companion decision to Roe— “an exercise of raw judicial power… an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review…”
In 2022, the Alito majority agreed.
One year ago, Justice Alito, writing for the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, reversed Roe (and Casey) and returned the power to lawmakers at all levels—local, state, and federal—to regulate or prohibit abortion.
Justice Alito wrote: “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives…”
As explained in the opinion, “Our nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated…”
The hope and moral imperative to protect innocent children’s lives from extermination couldn’t come a moment too soon.
Since 1973, according to the National Right to Life Committee, approximately 64.5 million babies had been brutally killed by abortion in the United States—a loss of children’s lives that equates with the entire population of Italy.
Now in the post-Dobbs era, fourteen states ban abortion while others have enacted laws that are in effect to prohibit abortions at 6 weeks (1), 12 weeks (1), 15 weeks (2), 18 weeks (1), and 20 weeks (1).
Another 8 states have new protections that have been blocked by the lower courts.
Tragically, some states like my state of New Jersey have enacted extremist laws that permit aborting a baby—killing a baby—right up to the moment of birth for any reason.
The Democrat-led House of Representative twice passed H.R. 3755 to legalize abortion until birth.
These pro-abortion policies pose an existential threat to the well-being and lives of innocent children.
There is nothing humane, compassionate, or benign about abortion. Abortion is not healthcare, 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.
The 1973 Supreme Court anti-child decisions and several that followed like Casey have enabled the violent death of unborn baby girls and boys by dismemberment, decapitation, forced expulsion from the womb, deadly poisons, and other violent methods at any time and for any reason until birth.
But history—and science—are on the side of life.
Today, thanks to ultrasound, unborn babies are more visible than ever before.
When a woman is carrying a child, the first baby pictures she proudly shares and often displays on the refrigerator door, are ultrasound photos, of that precious little girl or boy living and thriving in the womb.
Today, science confirms that birth is an event—albeit a very important one—but only an event in the life of a child. It is not the beginning of life.
Unborn babies are society’s youngest patients and deserve benign, life-affirming medical interventions. Modern medicine treats unborn children with a disability or disease as a patient in need of diagnosis and treatment.
All unborn babies deserve protection not death by abortion. Unborn babies and their mothers need support; we need to love and help them both.
There has been an explosion in interventions that have saved children’s lives and mitigated many, many problems that they may face when the disability, for example, was not caught early.
Now, more than ever, women and men of conscience must act to protect the weakest and most vulnerable.