further more............
Doctor C. Everett Koop, the last credible Surgeon General that we had, was interviewed by the American Medical Association on August 19th, and he was asked, "President Clinton just vetoed a bill on partial-birth abortions. In so doing, he cited several cases in which women were told these procedures were necessary to preserve their health and their ability to have future pregnancies. How would you characterize the claims being made in favor of the medical need for this procedure?" Quoting Dr. Koop, "I believe that Mr. Clinton was misled by his medical advisors on what is fact and what is fiction in reference to late-term abortions."
Question: "In your practice as a pediatric surgeon, have you ever treated children with any of the disabilities cited in this debate? Have you operated on children born with organs outside of their bodies?"
Answer: "Oh, yes, indeed; I've done that many times. The prognosis is good. There are two common ways that children are born with organs outside of their body. One is omphalocele, where the organs are out but still contained in the sac composed of the tissues of the umbilical cord. I have been repairing these since 1946. The other is when the sac is ruptured. That makes it a little more difficult. I don't know what the national mortality would be, but certainly more than half of those babies survive after surgery. Every once in awhile, you have other peculiar things, such as the chest being wide open and the heart being outside the body, and I have even replaced hearts back in the body, and had children grow to adulthood."
Question: "And live normal lives?"
Answer: "Living normal lives. In fact, the first child I ever did with a huge omphalocele much bigger than her head, went on to develop well, and become the head nurse in my intensive care unit many years later."
The abortionist who is a principle perpetrator of these atrocities, Dr. Martin Haskell, has conceded that at least 80 percent of the partial-birth abortions he performs are entirely elective. Eighty percent are elective, and he admits to over 1,000 of these abortions, and that's some years ago.
We're told about some extreme cases of malformed babies as though life is only for the privileged, the planned and the perfect. Dr. James McMann, the late Dr. James McMann, listed nine such abortions he performed because the baby had a cleft lip.
Oh, 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 ten minutes studying the federal law understands. Health exceptions are so broadly construed by the Court--not what we write--by the Court, as to make any ban utterly meaningless.
In his memoirs, Dwight Eisenhower wrote about the loss of 1.2 million lives in World War II. And he said, "The loss of lives that might have otherwise been creatively lived, scars the mind of the civilized world." Mr. Speaker, our souls have been scarred by one-and-a-half million abortions every year in this country. Our souls have so much scar tissue, there isn't room for any more.
It isn't just the babies that are dying for the lethal sin of being unwanted or being 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 conscience and allows us to think of this unspeakable act as an act of compassion.
If you vote to uphold this veto, if you vote to maintain the legality of a procedure that is revolting, even to the most hardened heart, then please don't ever use the word "compassion" again.
A word about anesthesia. Advocates of partial-birth abortions tried to tell us the baby doesn't feel pain. The mother's anesthesia is transmitted to the baby. We took testimony from five of the country's top anesthesiologists, and they said this is impossible. That result would take so much anesthesia, it would kill the mother.
By upholding this tragic veto, you join the network of complicity in supporting what is essentially a crime against humanity.
For that little, almost-born infant, struggling to live, is a member of the human family, and partial-birth abortion is a lethal assault against the very idea of human rights and destroys, along with a defenseless little baby, the moral foundation of our democracy, because democracy isn't, after all, a mere process. It assigns fundamental rights and values to each human being, the first of which is the inalienable right to life.
