"Today, Here and Now, We Must Choose Sides."

                                                                                                                        Vol. X, No. 2, February 1997

[Excerpts from comments by Congressman Henry J. Hyde (R-IL), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on September 19. 1996, on the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act]

The law exists to protect the weak from the strong. That is why we are here. In his classic novel Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky has his murderous protagonist Raskolnikov complain that "Man can get used to anything, the beast!” That we are even debating this issue, that we have to argue about the legality of an abortionist plunging a pair of scissors into the back of the tiny neck of a little child whose trunk, arms and legs have already been delivered, and then auctioning out his brains, only confirms Dostoyevsky's harsh truth.

We were told in the Judiciary Committee by an attending nurse that the little arms and legs stop flailing and suddenly stiffen as the scissors is plunged in. People who say "I feel your pain' are not referring to that little infant.

What kind of people have we become that this procedure is even a matter for debate? Can't we draw the line at torture - - and baby torture at that? If we cannot, what has become of us?

We are all incensed about ethnic cleansing. What about infant cleansing? There is no argument here about when human life begins. The child who is destroyed is unmistakably alive, unmistakably human, and unmistakably brutally destroyed.

The justification for abortion has always been the claim that a women can do with her own body what she will. If you still believe that this 4/5-delivered little baby is a part of the woman's body, then I am afraid your ignorance is invincible.

I finally figured out why supporters of abortion on demand fight this infanticide ban tooth and claw, because for the first time since Roe v. Wade, the focus is on the baby -- not the mother, not the woman, but the baby and the harm that abortion inflicts on an unborn child, or in this instance a four-fifths born child.

That child -- whom the advocates of abortion on demand have done everything in their power to make us ignore, to dehumanize -- is as much a bearer of human rights as any member of this House. To deny those rights is more than the betrayal of a powerless individual. It betrays the central promise of America, that there is, in this land, justice for all.

The supporters of abortion on demand have exercised an amazing capacity for self-deception by detaching themselves from any sympathy whatsoever for the unborn child, and in doing so they separate themselves from the instinct for justice that gave birth to this country.

President Clinton, reacting angrily to this challenge to his veto, claims not to understand why the morality of those who support a ban on partial-birth abortions is superior to the morality of “compassion” that he insists informed his decision to reject Congress' ban on what Senator Moynihan has said is "too close to infanticide."

Well, let me explain, Mr. President. There is no moral, nor for that matter medical, justification for this barbaric assault on a partially born infant. Dr. Pamela Smith, director of medical education in the Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Chicago's Mt. Sinai Hospital, testified to that, as have many other doctors, including Dr. C. Everett Koop, the last credible Surgeon General we had, in an interview that appeared in the American Medical Association News on August 19.

Well, the President claims he wants to solve a problem by adding a “health" exception to the partial-birth abortion ban. That is spurious, as anyone who has spent 10 minutes studying the Federal law understands. Health exceptions are so broadly construed by the Court -- not what we write, but by the Court -- as to make any ban utterly meaningless.

And say, what do we mean by "human dignity" if we subject innocent children to brutal execution when they are almost born? We all hope and pray for death with dignity. But tell me what is dignified about a death caused by having a scissors stabbed into your neck so your brains can be sucked out.

It is not just the babies that are dying for the lethal sin of being unwanted, handicapped, or malformed. We are dying, and not from the darkness, but from the cold -- the coldness of self-brutalization that chills our sensibilities, deadens our consciences, and allows us to think of this unspeakable act as an act of compassion.

One of the great errors of modern politics is our foolish attempt to separate our private consciences from our public acts, and it cannot be done. At the end of the 20th century, is the crowning achievement of our democracy to treat the weak, the powerless, the unwanted as things to be disposed of? If so, we have not elevated justice -- we have disgraced it.

This is not a debate about sectarian religious doctrine nor about policy options. This is a debate about our understanding of human dignity: what does it mean to be human? Our moment in history is marked by a mortal conflict between a culture of death and a culture of life. And today, here and now, we must choose sides.

I am not the least embarrassed to say that I believe one day each of us will be called upon to render an account for what we have done, and maybe more importantly, what we failed to do in our lifetime. And while I believe in a merciful God, I believe in a just God, and I would be terrified at the thought of having to explain at the Final Judgment why I stood unmoved while Herod's slaughter of the innocents was being reenacted here in my own country.

This debate has been about an unspeakable horror. While the details are graphic and grisly, it has been helpful for all of us to recognize the full brutality of what goes on in America's abortuaries day in and day out, week after week, year after year. We are not talking about abstractions here. We are talking about life and death at their most elemental. We ought to face the truth of what we oppose or support, stripped of all euphemisms. The queen of all euphemisms is “choice” -- as though one is choosing vanilla or chocolate, instead of a dead baby or a live baby.

Now, we have talked so much about the grotesque; permit me a word about beauty. We all have our own images of the beautiful: the face of a loved one, a dawn, a sunset, the evening star. I believe nothing in this world of wonders is more beautiful than the innocence of a child. Do you know what a child is? She is an opportunity for love. And a handicapped child is an even greater opportunity for love.

Mr. Speaker, we risk our souls, we risk our humanity, when we trifle with that innocence or demean it or brutalize it. We need more caring and less killing.

Let the innocence of the unborn have the last word in this debate. Let their innocence appeal to what President Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Let our votes prove Raskolnikov is wrong, and that there is something we will never get use to. Make it clear once again there is justice for all -- even for the tiniest, most defenseless in this, our land.

[Reprinted from The Lifesaver, Virginia Society for Human Life, January 1997.]