Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relative to equal rights for men and women.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend Trent Franks for his extraordinary leadership and courage. He is a pro-life champion.

Mr. Speaker last year, an undercover videotaped sting operation by Live Action exposed several Planned Parenthood affiliates who are eager, ready,

and willing to facilitate secret abortions for underage sex trafficking victims--some as young or younger than 14.

As the prime sponsor of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, I found the on-the-record willingness of Planned Parenthood personnel to exploit young girls and partner with sex traffickers to be absolutely appalling.

Now Live Action has released another sting operation video--part of a new series, ``Gendercide: Sex Selection in America''--showing Planned Parenthood advising an undercover female investigator how to procure a sex-selection abortion.

Caught on tape, Planned Parenthood tells the investigator to wait until the baby is 5 months along to get an ultrasound that reveals the sex of the child. Then, if it's a girl, kill it.

Yesterday, The Huffington Post reported: ``No Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in States that explicitly prohibit sex-selection abortions.''

In other words, Planned Parenthood is okay with exterminating a child in its huge network of clinics simply because she's a girl. What a dangerous place for little girls. Let's not forget that Planned Parenthood aborts approximately 330,000 children every year. This, Mr. Speaker, is the real war on women.

For most of us, Mr. Speaker, ``it's a girl'' is cause for enormous joy, happiness, and celebration. But in many countries, including our own, it can be a death sentence. Today, the three most dangerous words in China and India are ``it's a girl.'' We can't let that happen here.

In her book ``Unnatural Selection,'' Mara Hvistendahl traces the sordid history of sex-selection abortion as a means of population control. She writes that by August of 1969, ``sex selection had become a pet scheme''--fewer girls, fewer future mothers, fewer future children.

At a 1969 conference, Christopher Tietze co-presented sex-selection abortion as one of the 12 new strategies representing the future of population control. He, by the way, got the Margaret Sanger Award 4 years later.

Sex-selection abortion is cruel, it's discriminatory, and it's legal. It is violence against women. Most people in government are unaware that it is part of a deliberate plan of population control. Support the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, sponsored by Mr. Franks.

Last year, an undercover video-taped sting operation by Live Action (liveaction.org) exposed several Planned Parenthood affiliates who were eager, ready and willing to facilitate secret abortions for underage sex trafficking victims--some as young or younger than 14--to get them on the streets again.

As the prime sponsor of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, I found the on-the-record willingness of Planned Parenthood personnel to exploit young girls and partner with sex traffickers to be absolutely appalling.

Now Live Action has released another sting operation video--part of a new series, Gendercide: Sex Selection in America--showing Planned Parenthood staff advising an undercover female investigator how to procure a sex-selection abortion.

Caught on tape, Planned Parenthood tells the investigator to wait until the baby is 5 months along to get an ultrasound that will reveal the sex of the child.

Then, if it's a girl, kill it.

Yesterday, the Huffington Post reported that ``no Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in states that explicitly prohibit sex selection abortions.''

In other words, Planned Parenthood is OK with exterminating a child in its huge network of clinics simply because she's a girl. What a dangerous place for little girls. Let's not forget that Planned Parenthood aborts approximately 330,000 children each year. This, Mr. Speaker, is the real war on women.

For most of us, Mr. Speaker, ``it's a girl'' is cause for enormous joy, happiness and celebration. But in many countries--including our own--it can be a death sentence. Today, the three most dangerous words in China and India are: it's a girl. We can't let that happen here.

By now most people know that the killing of baby girls by abortion or at birth is pervasive in China due to the One Child policy and a preference for sons. China and India are ``missing'' tens of millions of daughters.

In her book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, Mara Hvistendahl, traces the sordid history of sex-selection abortion as a means of population control. ``By August 1969, when the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Population Council convened another workshop on population control, sex selection had become a pet scheme . . . Sex selection, moreover, had the added advantage of reducing the number of potential mothers . . . if a reliable sex determination technology could be made available to a mass market,'' there was ``rough consensus'' that sex selection abortion ``would be an effective, uncontroversial and ethical way of reducing the global population.''

Fewer women, fewer mothers, fewer future children.

At the conference, one abortion zealot, Christopher Tietze co- presented sex selection abortion as one of twelve new strategies representing the future of global birth control. Planned Parenthood honored Tietze four years later with the Margaret Sanger Award.

(I would note parenthetically, in March of 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also received the Margaret Sanger Award and said in her acceptance speech that she was ``in awe'' of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. To our distinguished Secretary of State, I respectfully ask: Are you kidding? In ``awe'' of Margaret Sanger, who said in 1921, ``Eugenics . . . is the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems.'' And who also said in 1922, ``The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.''

Secretary Clinton in her speech said that Margaret Sanger's ``life and leadership'' was ``one of the most transformational in the entire history of the human race.'' Mr. Speaker, transformational, yes, but not for the better if one happens to be a woman, poor, disenfranchised, weak, a person of color, vulnerable, or among the many so-called undesirables who Sanger would exclude and exterminate from the human race.)

Mr. Speaker, these cruel, anti-woman policies have had horrific consequences.

Hvistendahl writes that today ``there are over 160 million females ``missing'' from Asia's population. That's more than the entire female population of the United States. And gender imbalance--which is mainly the result of sex selective abortion--is no longer strictly an Asian problem. In Azerbaijan and Armenia, in Eastern Europe, and even among some groups in the United States, couples are making sure at least one of their children is a son. So many parents now select for boys that they have skewed the sex ratio at birth of the entire world.''

In the Global War Against Baby Girls renowned AEI demographer Nicholas Eberstadt wrote in The New Atlantis last Fall; ``over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female--in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe--and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new ``missing baby girls'' each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.''

As far back as 1990, Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen wrote in The New York Review of Books that ``More than 100 Million Women are Missing.'' In 2003 Sen wrote that sex-selection abortion was the primary cause.

A 2008 study by Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund of Columbia University documented ``male-biased sex ratios among U.S. born children of Chinese, Korean and Asian Indian parents in the 2000 U.S. census. The male bias is particularly evident for third children: If there was no previous son, sons outnumbered daughters by 50 percent . . . We interpret the found deviation in favor of sons to be evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.''

A study published in 2011 by Sunita Pun and three other researchers undertook ``in-depth interviews with 65 immigrant Indian women in the United States who had pursued fetal sex selection on the East and West Coasts of the United States between September 2004 and December 2009 . . .'' and found ``that 40% of the women interviewed had terminated prior pregnancies with female fetuses and that 89% of women carrying female fetuses in their current pregnancy pursued an abortion.''

Many European nations including the UK as well as several Asian countries ban sex selection abortion. Only four US states--Arizona, Illinois, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania--proscribe it.

The United States is a destination country for sex selection abortion. According to the House Judiciary Committee Report, ``women cross the border from Canada (where it is illegal) to obtain sex selection abortions in the United States.''

The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, authored by pro-life champion Congressman Trent Franks, seeks an end to this pernicious form of violence against women by prescribing criminal and civil penalties on abortionists who knowingly perform an abortion based on sex or gender of the child.

If enacted, the Act will also penalize anyone who uses force or the threat of force to intentionally injure or intimidate any person for the purpose of coercing a sex selection abortion. This anti-coercion provision is an extremely important protection for women.

According to the House Judiciary Committee Report; ``sex-selection abortions are oftentimes coerced.'' The Report notes ``women who refuse sex-selection abortions are sometimes physically abused. A woman may be denied food, water, and rest to induce abortion where it is determined that the woman is carrying a female unborn child. Some women described being hit, pushed, choked and kicked in the abdomen in a husband's attempt to terminate a female unborn child. Pregnancy is already a vulnerable time for women; the most common cause of death for pregnant women in the United States is homicide, often at the hands of the unborn child's father.''

And the Act will hold accountable anyone who knowingly solicits or accepts funds for the performance of a sex selection abortion or transports a woman into the U.S. or across a state line for a sex selection abortion.

Sex-selection abortion is cruel and discriminatory and legal. It is violence against women. Most people in and out of government remain woefully unaware of the fact that sex-selection abortion was--a violent, nefarious and deliberate policy imposed on the world by the pro-abortion population control movement--it's not an accident. The Congress can--and must--defend women from this vicious assault today.

I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the so-called ``Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.''

Today, the Republican majority continues its war on women in a new and creative way, by attempting to couch legislation that would destroy women's fundamental constitutional rights as a women's rights law. It is cynical, but creative.

Trying to destroy women's constitutional rights, and pretending that it is somehow being pro-woman, plays well to the far-right wing base, but does nothing to help American families get

on their feet and put people back to work.

This bill criminalizes abortion prior to viability. It makes pre- viability abortions a crime under certain circumstances, a flagrantly unconstitutional provision under Roe v. Wade.

Under this bill, a relative who disagreed with a woman's choice would be able to sue a doctor simply by alleging that the woman had an impermissible motive. The doctor would face years of litigation at great expense. A relative could even obtain an injunction blocking an abortion from going forward merely by alleging that the abortion is being done for the purposes of sex selection. While the matter is being litigated, the pregnancy would go forward so that, regardless of the merits, a woman would be compelled by a court injunction to proceed with her pregnancy against her will, perhaps to have an abortion at a much later stage with a much more mature fetus.

Any clinic employee who suspected--merely suspected--that a woman's motives ran afoul of this law would have a legal obligation, under penalty of prison, to report that suspicion to law enforcement.

How would this affect the basic practice of medicine?

H.R. 3541 would force health care providers to inquire into women's reasons for seeking abortion services. Physicians would have to consider whether women seeking routine non-abortion services, such as determining the sex of the fetus, might then use that information in deciding whether to continue a pregnancy.

Given the severe civil and criminal penalties in this bill, doctors would be forced to police their patients, read their minds, and conceal information from them. The failure to do so would put medical professionals at risk of prosecution and lawsuits.

This bill is facially unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has held, beginning with Roe v. Wade and in Casey and subsequent cases, that the decision of whether to have a child or whether to end a pregnancy is a private one. Up until the point of viability, the government may not make that decision for a woman. Following viability, the government may regulate or bar an abortion, except when the abortion is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.

The preference for male children is a real, if limited, phenomenon in the United States. Some women face familial and community preference to have male children, and that pressure can increase with each subsequent birth. But this bill does nothing to help those women.

This bill cites the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women as urging governments to prevent sex-selective abortions, but it ignores the concerns of those who work on this problem, such as the U.N. Population Fund, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, the U.N. Children's Fund, the U.N. Women, and the World Health Organization, that abortion restrictions are not the solution because they put women's health and lives in jeopardy and violate women's human and reproductive rights.

Where is the legislation providing women with the means to achieve independence so that they are not subject to community and family pressures? My Republican colleagues opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that would have done just that. We all had to watch the charade recently where Republicans pretended they weren't going after the Violence Against Women Act with a meat-ax. Where is the support for family planning services so we have fewer unplanned pregnancies and, therefore, fewer abortions? Where is the commitment to maternal and child health programs?

But all this costs money, it won't do anything to undermine Roe v. Wade, and it doesn't play well in the world of abortion politics.

I urge the Members of this House to reject this cynical, dishonest, and hypocritical legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the so-called ``Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.''

Today, the Republican majority continues the war on women in a new and creative way, by attempting to couch legislation that would destroy women's fundamental constitutional rights as a women's rights law. It is cynical, but creative.

Our nation's economy is struggling to recover. Families are struggling to keep their homes, and provide a better future for their children.

And what is the majority doing about it? Nothing. Today we have yet another radical foray into divisive social issues. Trying to destroy women's constitutional rights, and pretending that it is somehow being ``pro-woman,'' plays well to the far right-wing base, but does nothing to help American families get on their feet, and put people back to work.

This is election-year politics at its absolute worst.

Despite the fact that this bill is couched in the language of civil rights, indeed it amends the civil rights crimes chapter of the federal Criminal Code, it is nothing more than yet another attack on the fundamental constitutional rights of women. It does not improve their ability to choose to have a healthy and successful pregnancy. It does not improve the prospects for their children once those children come into the world. It does nothing to help women who are subject to community pressure to have sons. It does nothing to improve the lot of women who may really need our help.

This bill criminalizes abortion, prior to viability; it makes previability abortions a crime under certain circumstances, a flagrantly unconstitutional provision under Roe.

Under this bill, a relative who disagreed with a woman's choice would be able to sue a doctor simply by alleging that the woman had an impermissible reason. The doctor would face years of litigation at great expense.

A relative could even obtain an injunction blocking an abortion from going forward merely by alleging that the abortion is being done for the purposes of sex selection. While the matter is being litigated, the pregnancy would go forward so that, regardless of the merits, a woman would be compelled by a court injunction to proceed with her pregnancy against her will.

Any clinic employee who suspected--merely suspected--that a woman's motives ran afoul of this law would have a legal obligation, under penalty of prison, to report that suspicion to law enforcement.

How would this affect the basic practice of medicine?

H.R. 3541 would force health care providers to inquire into a woman's reasons for seeking abortion services. Physicians would have to consider whether women seeking routine non-abortion services, such as determining the sex of the fetus, would then use that information in deciding whether to continue a pregnancy.

The more information the doctor has, and the more he shares with his patient, the greater the risk that someone could argue that the abortion was for a prohibited purpose, and that he knew it.

Given the severe civil and criminal penalties in this bill, doctors would be forced to police their patients, read their patients' minds, and conceal information from them. The failure to do so would put medical professionals at risk of prosecution and lawsuits.

Do you want to see defensive medicine? Try making this law.

This bill is facially unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has held, beginning with Roe v. Wade, and in Casey and subsequent cases, that the decision whether to have a child, or whether to end a pregnancy, is a private one. Up until the point of viability, the government may not make that decision for a woman. Following viability, the government may regulate or bar an abortion, except when the abortion is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.

This bill would bar a woman from having an abortion at any time on the basis of her motives.

While this bill may be an unconstitutional intrusion into women's private choices, it does nothing to help women or their children. That sort of legislation is not on the agenda here, or in this Republican controlled Congress.

The bill contains flat out lies. For example, it contains a ``finding'' that a fetus can feel pain after 20 weeks, even though this is a fringe position rejected by the mainstream of medical science. A survey of available research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005 concluded that ``[e]vidence regarding the capacity for fetal pain is limited but indicates that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester.'' Similarly, a detailed survey by the Royal Academy of Obstetricians and Gynecologists concluded:

In reviewing the neuroanatomical and physiological evidence

in the fetus, it was apparent that connections from the

periphery to the cortex are not intact before 24 weeks of

gestation and, as most neuroscientists believe that the

cortex is necessary for pain perception, it can be concluded

that the fetus cannot experience pain in any sense prior to

this gestation.

But why let the facts get in the way of some nice rhetoric?

The preference for male children is a real if limited phenomenon in the United States. Some women face familial and community preference to have male children and that pressure can increase with each subsequent birth.

But this bill does nothing to help those women.

While H.R. 3541 cites the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women as urging governments to prevent sex selective abortions, it ignores the concerns expressed by those who work on this problem--such as the United Nations Population Fund, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations Children's Fund, United Nations Women, and the World Health Organization--that abortion restrictions are not the solution because they put women's health and lives in jeopardy and violate women's human and reproductive rights.

The Judiciary Committee heard from Miriam Yeung, of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, who discussed how Congress could address the male child preference issue in a manner that is effective and that supports women rather than stigmatizing them. She explained:

Son preference is a symptom of deeply rooted social biases

and stereotypes about gender. Gender inequity cannot be

solved by banning abortion. The real solution is to change

the values that create the preference for sons. . . . We are

working with members of our own community to empower women

and girls, thereby challenging norms and transforming values.

Where is the legislation providing women with the means to achieve independence so that they are not subject to community and familial pressures? My Republican colleagues opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that would have done just that. We all had to watch the charade recently where Republicans pretended they weren't going after the Violence Against Women Act with a meat-ax. Where is the support for family planning services so we have fewer unplanned pregnancies and, therefore, fewer abortions? Where is the commitment to maternal and child health programs?

There are many things Congress could do to assist women, including women who are under pressure from their families or communities to terminate a pregnancy--strategies that have worked and that assist women rather than turn them into suspects or pariahs. We can work with their doctors and provide necessary resources to women and their families.

But that costs money, it won't do anything to undermine Roe v. Wade, and it doesn't play well in the world of abortion politics.

I urge the members of this House to reject this cynical and destructive legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3541) to prohibit discrimination against the unborn on the basis of sex or race, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous materials on H.R. 3541, as amended, currently under consideration.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act we are debating at this moment simply says that an unborn child cannot be discriminated against by subjecting him to an abortion based on the sex of the child. Because between 40 and 50 percent of African American babies--nearly one in two--are killed by abortion, which is five times, Mr. Speaker, the rate of white children, I believe with all of my heart that this bill should also prohibit race-targeted abortion as it did when the bill was first introduced.

It is my hope that by protecting unborn children from being aborted based on their sex that one day very soon we will also recognize the humanity and justice of protecting unborn children regardless of their race or color as well, and simply because we recognize them as fellow human beings.

Mr. Speaker, worldwide sex-selection abortion has now left the human family on Earth with approximately 200 million missing baby girls. Various United Nations organizations have battled sex-selection abortion for years. These agencies routinely refer to sex-selection abortion as ``an extreme form of violence against women.''

In the New Atlantis magazine, political economist Nicholas Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, said:

In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective

abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war

against baby girls.

In 2007, the United States spearheaded a U.N. resolution to condemn sex-selection abortion worldwide; yet here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we are the only advanced country left in the world that still doesn't restrict sex-selection abortion in any way.

Mr. Speaker, a number of academic papers have now published evidence that the practice of sex-selection abortion is demonstrably increasing here in the United States, especially, but not exclusively, in the Asian immigrant community.

A study by researchers at the University of Connecticut, which was published in Prenatal Diagnosis, found that the male-to-female live birth sex ratio in the United States for Chinese, Asian Indians, and Koreans clearly exceeded biological variation for third births and beyond. Mr. Speaker, deliberate prenatal sex selection is the only plausible explanation.

Dr. Sunita Puri and three other researchers at the University of California interviewed 65 immigrant Indian women in the United States who had sought or were seeking sex-selection abortion. They found that 40 percent of the women interviewed had deliberately aborted unborn baby girls previously and that nearly 90 percent of the women who were currently carrying unborn baby girls were also currently seeking to abort them.

This was an incredibly powerful study, Mr. Speaker. It discussed in detail the multiple forms of pressure and outright coercion to which these women are often subjected. Sixty-two percent of the women described verbal abuse from their husbands or female in-laws, and fully one-third of women described past physical abuse and neglect, all related specifically to their failing to produce a male child. As a result, these women reported aborting multiple unborn baby girls in a row because of the pressure that was put on them to have a male child.

Mr. Speaker, sex-selection abortion is extreme violence against both unborn baby girls and their mothers. It has been a primary enforcement mechanism for China's forced abortion and ``one child'' policy for many years. It has dramatically increased sex trafficking and violence against women due to the imbalanced sex ratios left in its wake across the world, and we now know that it is a tragic circumstance into which many women are also being coerced. This evil practice has now allowed thousands of little girls in America and millions of little girls across the world to be brutally dismembered, most of them in their second or third trimester and when they are capable of feeling extreme pain, simply because they were little girls instead of little boys, Mr. Speaker.

Sex selection is violence against women, and it is the truest kind of war against women, and it has now brought humanity to a place where the three deadliest words on this Earth are ``it's a girl.'' What in God's name have we come to, Mr. Speaker? I've often asked myself what finally enlightened and changed the hearts of those across history who have either perpetrated or supported or ignored the atrocities and human genocides of their day.

While I probably will never fully understand, I believe I caught a glimpse of the answer from my 3-year-old little girl, Gracie. As I was holding her and we were watching her favorite laughing baby videos on YouTube, I inadvertently clicked on a video that showed a young man from China who was playing poignant and beautiful music on the piano with his feet because both of his arms had been amputated when he was a child.

In trying to seize on a teaching moment, Mr. Speaker, I said, ``Look at that, Gracie. He's playing the piano with his feet. Isn't that amazing?''

But with a stricken little look on her face, Gracie said, ``But, Daddy, he doesn't have any arms.''

I said, ``I know, Baby, and that's very sad, isn't it?''

And she said, ``Oh, Daddy, it is very sad. We've got to help him. We've just got to. We've got to get some arms and give it to him.''

I said, ``But, Baby, there aren't any extra arms. They're all hooked onto other people.''

And she thought for a moment and looked at me with wet little eyes and pulled up her sleeve and held up her little arm and said, ``But, Daddy, can I give him one of my arms if it will fit on him?''

Across human history, the greatest and most loving voices among us have always emphasized the critical responsibility each of us has to recognize and cherish the light of divine, eternal humanity shining in the soul of every last one of our fellow human beings. I believe there is an answer to some of these seemingly unanswerable questions, Mr. Speaker, that face the human families and how we see each other. On that YouTube video, I saw an amazing young man who played heart- stirring music with his feet, but my little girl saw a child of God who had no arms and wanted to give him one of hers.

And how very thankful I am that my little Gracie was not one of the hundreds of millions of little girls whose lives and hearts were torn from this world before they ever saw the light of sunrise simply because they were little girls instead of little boys.

I know that this Congress deals with many controversial issues where it is sometimes difficult for Republicans and Democrats to find common ground, but I refuse to believe that we cannot find enough humanity in this body to conclude together that it is wrong to knowingly kill unborn children because they are baby girls instead of baby boys.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Adams), a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King), the vice chairman of the Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Buerkle), a member of the Oversight & Government Reform Committee.

Of course, the gentleman knows there's no criminal thing in this bill for the women. That's an unfortunate fallacy.

I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Louisiana, Dr. Fleming, a member of the Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Stearns), a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Mr. Speaker, can I inquire as to the remainder of the time?

I yield 2 minutes to the gentlelady from Tennessee (Mrs. Blackburn), a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I would now yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) who is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, where he is the chairman of the Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights Subcommittee.

Mr. Speaker, I don't have time to correct all of the misinformation that my friends on the other side of the aisle have said here today. They've talked about everything but what this bill does.

If I thought that America really supported aborting little girls because they were little girls as a people, then I guess I would conclude that the light of human compassion had gone out in our society and it was time to board this place up and go home and be done with it. But, fortunately, Mr. Speaker, I know that 86 percent of the American people favor protecting little girls from sex-selection abortion, and that gives me great hope. I wish I had time to mention all of the groups that are in favor of this bill, but I know that this is going to be the first step, and we're going to be on the right side of history and the right side of justice, and I urge a ``yes'' vote on this bill.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 328, I call up the joint resolution (H.J. Res. 68) authorizing the limited use of the United States Armed Forces in support of the NATO mission in Libya, and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.J. Res. 68.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I do not support a complete U.S. withdrawal from NATO's Operation Unified Protector. I believe that it is necessary for U.S. Armed Forces to remain engaged in a limited capacity. However, I cannot support an authorization which constitutes our current level of engagement for an entire year. This is what is proposed in H.J. Res. 69, offered by my friend from Florida (Mr. Hastings), and I therefore must rise in opposition to his resolution.

This resolution not only authorizes U.S. military engagement in Libya far beyond even the 90-day NATO extension, but it justifies U.S. military engagement in Libya as undertaken to enforce a United Nations Security Council resolution and at the request of the Transitional National Council, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Arab League. So we must ask: Where is the United States Congress in this equation?

If an authorization resolution had been put forward in February, I might have been able to support it. I understand the mission. But in the intervening period, conditions have changed significantly on the ground in Libya, within NATO, with our NATO partners, and here in the U.S. Decisive action with congressional authorization at the outset might have solved this problem quickly, but now we have drifted into an apparently open-ended commitment with goals that remain only vaguely defined. And that is at the heart of the problem, Mr. Speaker.

The President asserted, ``These strikes will be limited in their nature, duration, and scope.'' Well, it is now day 97--97--of our involvement of U.S. Armed Forces in hostilities regarding Libya; yet Qadhafi still clings to power and the opposition appears to be no closer to a decisive victory. Command for the military operation has been transferred to NATO; yet the constrained role the President has said is being played by U.S. forces in Libya still includes nearly one- quarter of the total sorties flown in Libya; suppression of the enemy air defense through missile strikes; strikes by unmanned Predators on Qadhafi targets; nearly 70 percent of the mission's intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; and over 75 percent of all aerial refueling. Yet the President has yet to explain just what American interests are at stake and just what outcomes he is hoping to achieve.

The resolution offered by our Speaker, Speaker Boehner, and adopted by this Chamber on June 3 posed specific questions that required straight answers. Instead, we received a letter and accompanying documents from the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs, which stated that U.S. actions in Libya were ``taken in response to direct appeals from the Libyan people and acting with a mandate from the United Nations.''

The administration proceeded to justify its current policy by asserting that U.S. military operations in Libya do not constitute hostilities. This argument is so incredulous that even the attorneys in the Office of the Legal Counsel do not agree. Therefore, I am not optimistic that the reporting provisions in the resolution we are considering today, which calls for ``a full and updated explanation of the President's legal and constitutional rationale for conducting military operations in Libya,'' will be fulfilled in a fulsome manner, respectful of congressional prerogatives.

Again, I must underscore that I do not support a complete withdrawal from our commitments concerning Libya. That would be dangerous. That would be ill-advised. A complete withdrawal of all U.S. military assets from the Libya operations would undermine our intelligence efforts and our foreign policy goals, and would all but assure a victory for Qadhafi. It can lead to greater instability, which could affect NATO operations in Iraq and Afghanistan at a critical stage of transition. There are also proliferation concerns at stake, particularly as an increasing number of weapons have moved into the region and reportedly fallen into the hands of extremist organizations, including al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The Qadhafi regime is an unpredictable regime that has chemical weapons, including mustard and possibly sarin gas.

While a complete withdrawal is unacceptable, the resolution before us is also unacceptable. The resolution effectively ratifies all that the President has done, and it would grant him the blessings of Congress to continue on his present course. The resolution before us would enable mission creep, rather than setting clear parameters for U.S. engagement. I must therefore oppose this resolution.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I am pleased to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas, Dr. Paul, a member of our Committee on Foreign Affairs.

(Mr. PAUL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

I yield the gentleman 30 additional seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas, Judge Poe, vice chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Kinzinger), a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased and honored to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights.

I continue to reserve the balance of my time, Mr. Speaker.

I reserve the right to close, Mr. Speaker; so I will reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, to wrap up on our side, I am proud and pleased to yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Griffin), a member of both the Committees on Foreign Affairs and Armed Services.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Members of the House, I want to thank the leadership on the other side for requiring that the chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, the gentleman from Arizona, drop ``race'' from this Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, so-called. So it's now just sex selection.

This is the latest in a long series of measures intended to chip away at a woman's right to seek safe and legal medical care. It tramples the rights of women under the guise of nondiscrimination while doing absolutely nothing to provide women with the needed resources so that their babies--female and male--can come into the world healthy, and so that both mother and child can thrive.

I am grateful that the proponents of this bill have stopped making the ridiculous charge that I used to hear, that reproductive freedom is worse than slavery, and invoking at the same time the name of the great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass in the service of their cause. It was deeply offensive, and I'm glad that we won't have to listen to that anymore.

Mr. Speaker, at this point, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased now to yield as much time as he may consume to the ranking member of the Constitution Subcommittee, the distinguished gentleman from New York, Jerry Nadler.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased now to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia, Hank Johnson, a distinguished member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished physician, the gentleman from Washington, the Honorable Dr. McDermott.

(Mr. McDERMOTT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, the gentlewoman from Oakland, California, Barbara Lee.

I yield the gentlelady 1 additional minute.

I yield the gentlewoman an additional 15 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would just like to remind my colleagues that from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, we have this warning:

We oppose this bill because it does not in any way adjust

discrimination on the basis of sex or race. Rather, it is a

veiled attempt to restrict health care for women of color

under the guise of civil rights.

This is the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

This bill tramples the rights of women under the guise of nondiscrimination while doing absolutely nothing to provide women with needed resources for their babies, female and male, so they can come into this world healthy and so both the mother and the child can thrive.

This measure before us does absolutely nothing to empower women to make important life choices free from any family or community pressures they now face either to have an abortion, or to carry the pregnancy to term. In fact, it fails to employ the tested solutions that will reduce the pressures brought to bear on women to have sons. Experience around the world has shown that supporting women, providing them with tools to become independent and to be safe from violence, rather than criminal prohibitions, helps them resist the pressures of son preference. International organizations such as the United Nations Population Fund, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations Children's Fund, United Nations Women, and the World Health Organization have all said that abortion restrictions are not the solution because they put women's health and lives at risk and violate their human and reproductive rights.

Please, join us and these organizations who are familiar with the phenomenon of son preference and oppose H.R. 3541.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Ladies and gentlemen of the House, if this measure is passed into law, we would then require that medical and mental health professionals violate doctor-patient confidentiality and report ``known or suspected violations'' of the law to law enforcement authorities. The penalty for failure to report would be a fine or incarceration.

Now, it is not by accident, Members of the House, that this measure is opposed by these outstanding organizations: the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists; American Public Health Association; Association of Reproductive Health Professionals; American Society for Reproductive Medicine; Medical Students for Choice; National Abortion Federation; National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women's Health; National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association; Physicians for Reproductive Health and Choice; and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Now, this is something that would chill communications between doctors and patients because doctors might hear something that would put them at risk for criminal prosecution, and patients because they would fear that their conversations with their doctors would not remain private. And so what we're doing here is taking the most drastic step that would cause these nine organizations to oppose this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.