Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations held a hearing that examined a deadly phenomenon involving both natural and man-made elements--diseases that are resistant to most or all available methods of treatment. While this is a growing problem of increasing concern throughout the world, the subcommittee focused yesterday on the impact of such diseases--known as ``superbugs''--in developing countries and the challenges to preventing and treating these diseases in this part of the world.

There is a family of germs that occur normally in everyone's digestive system. They can cause infections when they get into the bladder, blood or other areas where they don't belong. That is the natural part of this growing problem. Gut flora are absolutely essential for health and an effectively functioning immune response. There are about 100 trillion microorganisms in our digestive systems-- ten times the number of cells in our bodies. Most of them help break down the foods we eat. Those that are not helpful are usually can be treated with existing medicines, such as antibiotics.

The man-made part is that antibiotics have been used increasingly to treat naturally occurring germs, but many of them have become resistant to such treatment. These so-

called ``superbugs'' pose a threat because of overuse or misuse of antibiotics, but they also pose a threat because of what some call a ``drug discovery void,'' in which there has been insufficient research and development of new medicines to treat emerging mutating infections.

This situation recently has become much more serious. In the last 10 years, these drug-resistant diseases have been identified in patients in more than 200 hospitals in 42 states in this country. Over that period, their prevalence rate has increased from 1 percent of patients to 4 percent for those in short-term care, but for patients in long- term care facilities, the rate is as high as 18 percent. Half of all patients who contract these diseases do not survive.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, one of the better known of these superbugs, now kills as many as 19,000 Americans each year and a similar number in Europe. That is higher than the annual rate of deaths from HIV and AIDS.

Last year, the World Health Organization identified strains of gonorrhea and tuberculosis that are currently completely untreatable, as well as a new wave of what might be called ``super superbugs'' with the mutation known as NDM1. These frightening new strains were first seen in India, but they have now spread worldwide. The spread of the H7N9 bird flu in China is causing considerable concern--with more than 100 confirmed cases and 22 deaths reported thus far. According to Agence France Presse, WHO said yesterday that there is still no evidence that H7N9 was spreading in a ``sustained'' way between people in China.

According to WHO, artemesinin, when used in combination with other drugs, is now considered the world's best treatment against malaria, but malarial parasites resistant to artemesinin have emerged in western Cambodia, along the border with Thailand.

In the developed world, we pride ourselves on having top-flight medical care widely available to patients. If we lose half of all patients who contract these drug-resistant diseases, what about patients in the developing world, where statistics are often scarce and effective medical care can be even scarcer? Using accepted protocols for treating these diseases, their rate of infection can be curbed.

In Israel, infection rates in all 27 of its hospitals fell by more than 70 percent in one year with a coordinated prevention program. By following accepted protocols for handling these diseases, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the Florida Department of Health both have stopped outbreaks of these drug resistant diseases in recent years. But what about hospitals in developing countries?

For example, the brain drain has sent trained medical personnel in Africa in search of better working conditions and pay in the developed world. The lack of equipment and supplies that partly led to this brain drain would facilitate the rapid spread of drug resistant diseases in these countries. What would be simple interventions, including removing temporary medical devices such as catheters or ventilators from patients as soon as possible, is less likely under current conditions in developing world hospitals. Adding to this problem is the presence of expired and counterfeit drugs. Patients whose lives could be saved may not be because of inadequate medical care. Unfortunately, because so many countries do not maintain and report statistics on medical issues, we have little idea how serious the situation is today in developing countries in Africa and elsewhere around the world.

In our interconnected world, that means that infected people in the developing and developed countries pose a mutual threat.

Last month, a Nepalese man was detained at the Texas border while trying to make an illegal crossing from Mexico. Officials found he was infected with an extensively drug resistant strain of tuberculosis and had carried this potentially deadly airborne disease through 13 countries over three months--from his home country of Nepal through South Asia, Brazil, Mexico and finally the United States. Who can say how many people he infected during this long journey?

Conversely, six years ago an American infected with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis traveled from this country to France, Greece and Italy before returning through the Czech Republic and Canada. Upon his return to the U.S., he became the first person subjected to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention isolation order since 1963.

Clearly, both developed and developing nations must work together to prevent and treat for these diseases and find a way to implement the new strategies in an era of constrained budgets and loosening control of authority in far too many countries. However, the Administration's proposed FY 2014 budget calls for a 19 percent cut in funding for tuberculosis programming at a time we need such capacity the most.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commemorate the genocide of Armenians committed by the Ottoman Empire. We have a grave obligation, in truth and justice, to acknowledge this genocide against Armenians. This House is obligated, as is the government of the United States, and all peoples and governments around the world. That obligation is all the more grave because the Turkish government--our friend and ally--aggressively denies this genocide.

The facts surrounding the genocide are well known and established beyond any doubt whatsoever. Beginning in April 1915, following years of pogroms and other repressive measures, Ottoman authorities undertook the systematic annihilation of as many as one and a half million Armenians through shootings, mass burnings, gassing, poisoning, drowning, forced labor, or death marches into the Syrian desert. The scale and ferocity of these atrocities were unprecedented in the modern era. The Honorable United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire 1913- 1916 Henry Morgenthau characterized the policy of the Ottoman government as a ``campaign of race extermination'' and was instructed by Secretary of State Robert Lansing to continue his protests along with the officials of many other countries, including allies of the Ottomans. Most tellingly, the post-World War I Turkish government indicted the top leaders involved in the ``organization and execution'' of the policy and in the ``massacre and destruction of the Armenians.'' The chief organizers were all condemned to death for their crimes, though the verdicts of the courts were not enforced.

As is well known, Raphael Lemkin did not coin the term ``genocide'' until 1944, almost 30 years after the Ottoman massacre of Armenians. But in his groundbreaking work on the subject, Lemkin cited the case of the Armenians as the classic example of genocide. His idea of genocide as an offense against international law was widely accepted by the international community and was one of the legal bases of the trial of Nazi leaders at Nuremburg.

Despite the overwhelming preponderance of evidence of the Ottoman government's policy of annihilation of Armenians and the virtually universal acceptance of the Armenian case as a classic example of genocide, the government of the modern state of Turkey refuses to acknowledge the crimes of the previous regime as the responsibility of the Ottoman government or as a case of genocide. Indeed, the Turkish government even has undertaken the persecution of those Turks who recognize the genocide.

One day the Turkish government will acknowledge the genocide. That will be a great day for Turkey--for the moral air of the country--and a truly patriotic gesture, a sign of spiritual strength. The sooner the better! The United States does a disservice to Turkey and its people by facilitating genocide denial by not pressing Turkey harder to acknowledge the truth.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations held a hearing that examined U.S. actions to support the March 2013 elections in Kenya, a critically important African ally. The United States has devoted more than $35 million since 2010 alone to prepare for and manage this year's election process.

After the massive violence following the closely contested December 2007 election, many precautions were taken to prevent a similar occurrence in 2013, and election-day and post-election violence have been greatly reduced. However, an effort to use new technology did not work as well as hoped. There were questions about the effectiveness of this election, which had promised to be a technological advancement. Given future important African elections, this hearing will look at what a responsible U.S. policy toward African elections should look like in an era of constrained development aid budgets.

The tragic election day deaths of 19 people, although attributed mostly to Islamic separatist elements and not to specifically election- related causes, cannot be overlooked and the perpetrators must be held to account. It is unacceptable that in the violence that followed the 2007 elections, an estimated 1,200 Kenyans were killed, and approximately 600,000 were displaced, according to media reports. Yet no one has thus far been held accountable.

Kenya this year conducted its first election under the 2010 constitution. In addition to voting for a president and members of the National Assembly, Kenyans selected members of the new Senate, as well as governors and local Assembly representatives in the 47 newly-created counties, each with a designated women's representative. More technology was brought into polling places to better ensure accuracy of voting and vote tabulation. Unfortunately, reported malfunctions of the equipment in some polling stations and at the national level, where a server broke down, for awhile stoked fears of vote rigging. If the court process had not been handled well as it was, we might now be looking at another wave of post-election violence.

Uhuru Kenyatta was elected President with 6,173,433 votes to 5,340,546 votes for Raila Odinga, and this was certified by the Kenyan Supreme Court. Nevertheless, violence was still a possibility until Odinga gave a magnanimous concession speech following the court ruling.

The amount of U.S support for the Kenya election was extraordinary. American and Kenyan civil society organizations were enabled to conduct civic education, including radio and television messages and programs aimed at youth to encourage participation in the election process and discourage violence. Youth organizations were created nationwide to give young people an enduring voice in their country's political system. Several innovative approaches were created, including a comic book called Shujazz with young characters involved in commenting on the Kenyan political scene.

The three organizations presenting testimony today all played major roles in creative preparations for the 2013 Kenyan election. The International Republican Institute printed nearly 1.2 million sample ballots and 400,000 election posters for the IEBC and also distributed 800,000 Shujazz posters. The National Democratic Institute conducted an important poll on voter attitudes heading into the election, covering such issues as whether the country was headed in the right direction, whether their lives would improve during the next five years, whether the election posed a security threat to them and their community and whether they felt others were being encouraged to do harm to their ethnic group because of the elections.

The International Foundation for Electoral Systems advised Kenya's electoral commission on the process to conduct an election where there were 1,882 different configurations of the ballot, depending on the local races being run. The cell phones necessary for reporting of vote totals from polling stations were so late in being procured that IFES went ahead and purchased 1,200 to send into the field in time for election day.

Despite the extraordinary efforts by NGOs in preparing for the Kenyan election, we must be selective in what lessons we take from this experience. We will not be able to devote such resources to what will be several important elections yet to be held in 2013.

The U.S. Government has pressed both the governments of Mali and Madagascar to hold elections at the earliest possible date in order to normalize relations after coups replaced elected leaders. Zimbabwe, which recently held a constitutional referendum, is scheduled to hold presidential and legislative elections that many in that country hope will break the long cycle of repression of the political opposition. Ethiopia's next election will replace the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and also will determine whether the political opposition will have more space to operate than in previous elections. Guinea's election also is being conducted in an atmosphere of uncertainty for the political opposition.

These elections are important to U.S. foreign policy as was the election in Kenya. So how do we ensure that they are successful and represent the will of the voters if we can't devote the resources we did in Kenya? That was the question we put to the witnesses, whose organizations have broad experience with African elections and have a unique viewpoint that we hope will allow Congress and the administration to agree on funding for a policy that is fiscally sound while being politically effective.

Mr. Speaker, I recently held a hearing in which we listened

and learned from brave men and women from China who have been and are at the forefront of advocating for freedom and human rights and against the tyranny and oppression of the state.

We sought advice and counsel as to what can--and must--be done by Congress, the President, and the American people, and all people of goodwill worldwide, to mitigate the hate and gross mistreatment meted out by the government of China against its own citizens.

We appealed to Beijing--ease up, respect fundamental human rights and the sanctity of human life and honor your commitments and the rule of law.

Chen Guangcheng and his equally courageous wife Yuan Weijing have paid, and continue to pay an extraordinary high price for their benign defiance of a dictatorship that violates human rights with impunity and crushes human dignity.

Not only have the Chens endured numbing isolation and unspeakable torture over the course of several years, but now as we all know, in a pathetic display of PRC governmental revenge Chen's nephew Chen Kegui languishes in a Chinese prison while other family members remain at risk. Shockingly, young Chen Kegui has been brutally tortured and threatened, as Guangcheng noted, with life imprisonment if he appeals his conviction.

Undeterred, Mr. Chen Guangcheng continues to gently raise his clear and consistent voice on behalf of all victims while pushing systemic reform of egregiously flawed political institutions and people who persecute and repress.

Blind since childhood, Mr. Chen bore all the burdens and disadvantages that a disabled person faces in rural China. Confronted with the denial of his rights, he developed an intense interest in law and challenged the local government, winning his case. Hearing of Mr. Chen's success, other individuals in Shandong Province were inspired to seek his legal assistance in securing redress and vindication.

Almost everywhere, corrupt officials made, and continue to make, life miserable for those struggling to survive. Mr. Chen informed many of their rights and helped them seek durable remedies. He helped many to see that the rule of just and compassionate law wasn't just for the privileged few, but for everyone.

Victimized yet unbroken by beatings and torture, 51 months of nightmarish incarceration, preceded by house arrest and followed by 18 months more cut short only by his escape, Chen Guangcheng tenaciously defended Chinese women and babies oppressed by China's draconian one child policy.

Mr. Chen's brilliant mind, indomitable spirit and unimaginable courage exposed pervasive forced abortion, deemed a crime against humanity at the Nuremberg Nazi War Crimes Tribunal, and was relentless in using his self-taught legal skills to protect the innocent.

Unfazed by both the difficulty of the task or the inherent risks, Mr. Chen employed legal strategies to combat this insidious government cruelty towards women and children and argued that his clients in Linyi--and all women in China for that matter--have rights that prohibit such violence. They deserve better.

Chen became, and remains their hero.

It took a blind man to really see the injustice of a population control program that makes most brothers and sisters illegal and to hear the desperate cries of Chinese women.

It took a blind man, the great Chen Guangcheng, to open the eyes of a blind world to these human rights violations systematically inflicted on Chinese women.

Mr. Chen's daring escape to the U.S. Embassy, his miraculous evasion of China's ubiquitous secret police en route is the stuff of legend and superheroes. His dramatic testimony by telephone from a hospital to two emergency hearings I chaired was heard around the world.

Ms. Geng He appeared in order to remind us, and the world, of another brave extraordinary hero, her husband Gao Zhisheng. With great love and a broken heart, this remarkable woman has worked unceasingly to secure the freedom of her husband.

Gao Zhisheng is an attorney who played a leading role among Chinese human rights lawyers that defend those the Chinese government persecutes most harshly, conducting their defense by demanding that the prosecution conform to the law.

Mr. Gao is the quintessential example of a human rights defender.

In 2005, after he took on politically sensitive cases, Mr. Gao wrote open letters to both the National People's Congress and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, calling for an end to the torture of members of persecuted religious groups. Mr. Gao's license to practice law was subsequently revoked, his law firm shut down, and his family placed under police surveillance. In August, 2006, Mr. Gao was apprehended and then charged with ``inciting subversion.'' He was convicted and given a suspended three-year sentence with five years' probation, effectively placing him under house arrest.

In September 2007, Mr. Gao wrote an open letter to the United States Congress in which he described widespread human rights abuses in China, called ``China's birth control policy the largest genocide in the history of mankind'' and related the government's harsh treatment of him and his family. He was consequently detained and tortured for 50 days. His captors called him a ``traitor,'' and they warned him he would be killed if he told anyone about being abducted and tortured.

In February 2009, Gao was forcibly taken away from his home in Shaanxi province by public security personnel. He briefly resurfaced only in late March of 2010, more than a year later. During his brief reappearance, however, Mr. Gao gave several interviews to foreign media, disclosing the details of his torture. The next month, Mr. Gao disappeared again.

In testimony at a China Commission hearing that I chaired on February 14th of last year, Geng He said of her daughter Grace: ``Zhisheng's absence has caused my daughter severe emotional anguish. She often dreams that her father is dead.''

Geng He added: ``My son has tears in his eyes on Father's day . . . we were forced to endure rumors that the guards had tortured Zhisheng to death.''

In late 2011, Gao was secretly transferred to a distant Shaya County Prison in the Aksu district of Xinjiang. He has seen his family only twice in the last 16 months and for only 30 minutes each visit. Police have prohibited family members from asking him any information about himself.

In an account of Mr. Gao's torture, made public by the Associated Press in January 2011, Mr. Gao disclosed to a reporter the excruciating details of his detention: ``The police stripped Gao Zhisheng bare and pummeled him with handguns in holsters. For two days and nights, they took turns beating him and did things he refused to describe.'' He recalled, ``for 48 hours my life hung by a thread.'' Authorities reportedly threatened to kill Mr. Gao and to dump his body in a river. And, authorities taunted him by saying ``you must forget you're human.''

To President Xi, we will not forget Gao Zhisheng. Not now, not ever. We appeal to you to release him.

Below are several excerpts from the hearing I recently chaired.

Q: Rep. Weber (to Mr. Chen and Pastor Fu)--``Would you all agree that part of your reason for being here is to stop those atrocities and that we would include those as a basic human right as well?''

A: Mr. Chen ``Forced abortion is certainly a basic human rights issue; no mother would willingly kill their own children. This is a doing of the Chinese Communist Party, acting above the law. They want to be as the Emperors and exercise absolute power.''

Q: Mr. Smith Referencing Mr. Chen's interview with the press about the brutality of the one-child policy, specifically quoting Mr. Chen's statement about how forced abortion does not occur only for those who are having a second child, but also for those who are having their first child but without a birth permit; Mr. Smith asked Mr. Chen for any further comments on that.

A: Mr. Chen ``China's population planning agency has become a powerful for-profit institution. On the papers, this institution comprises of 500,000 personnel, but in reality, as much as 2,000,000 personnel are involved in enforcing China's population planning policies.''

``In China, there is a zero-tolerance policy where if a party secretary does not implement one particular policy well, he is ruled to be incompetent and would be removed from his post, even if he performs well in implementing other policies. As a result, party secretaries enforce the one-child policy ruthlessly and aggressively.''

``So now, in addition to forcibly aborting 'extraneous' pregnancies (i.e. any pregnancy beyond the first child), couples also must acquire a birth permit from the population planning office even for first pregnancies. Once pregnancy occurs without this permit, local authorities will also force an abortion--unless you're able to pay a large amount of money to the local authorities for them to look the other way and provide you with an ex post facto permit. But in most cases where they are being stringent, they will force you to go through with the abortion no matter what.''

Amnesty International's T. Kumar, International Advocacy Director said forced abortion is a major human rights violation in China.

``As a consequence of the government's one-child policy, women are still compelled to undergo forced abortion and sterilization, notwithstanding official assurances that such practices violate Beijing's wishes,'' Kumar said.

Fu said bloody cases in China's forcibly enforced ``one-child'' family planning policy and in forced demolition of residential homes and relocation of residents continue to take place; the Chinese people's basic right to life cannot be guaranteed at all.

Fu, of ChinaAid, decried the violence of forced ``family planning.''

``Last month, the Ministry of Public Health publicly announced the `achievements' of the family planning policy in the past 40 years: 330 million abortions performed on Chinese women,'' Fu said. ``What is really distressing is that these bloody numbers continue to climb and that the majority of these abortions were forced on the women by the government.'' Fu said that on March 13, a woman in Henan province (Daxuzhai town, Taikang county) who was forced to have an abortion against her will, was found hanged at the local family planning office with suspicious injuries all over her body. On March 22, he testified, a woman in her seventh month of pregnancy in Anhui province (Chuzhou, Fengyang county) was kidnapped by family planning cadres and taken to a hospital where she was forced to receive a lethal injection that killed her seven-month-old unborn baby and caused her to deliver a dead fetus.

Mr. Speaker, I recently chaired a hearing to examine the human rights situation in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese government continues to be an egregious violator of a broad array of human rights. Our distinguished witnesses provided a detailed account; I would like to highlight just a few areas of grave concern.

Despite the State Department's decision in 2006 to remove Vietnam from the list of Countries of Particular Concern as designated pursuant to the International Religious Freedom Act, Vietnam, in fact, continues to be among the worst violators of religious freedom in the world. According to the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom's 2012 Annual Report, ``[t]he government of Vietnam continues to control all religious communities, restrict and penalize independent religious practice severely, and repress individuals and groups viewed as challenging its authority.'' I agree with USCIRF's conclusion that Vietnam should be designated a CPC country.

I met courageous religious leaders during my last trip to Vietnam who were struggling for fundamental human rights in their country. Unfortunately, many of them, including Father Ly and the Most Venerable Thich Quang Do, remain wrongly detained today. There are disturbing reports that Father Ly is suffering poor health. Leaders of religious organizations are not the only ones victimized by the Vietnamese government; individuals and small communities are also targeted by the regime. One of our witnesses, Mr. Tien Tran, spoke of the brutality that he experienced as a member of the Con Dau parish that was violently repressed in 2010 when they tried to have a funeral procession.

The State Department's upgrade of Vietnam from Tier 2 Watch List to Tier 2 with respect to the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking also needs to be critically examined. The Department's 2012 Trafficking in Persons Report states not only that Vietnamese women and children are being sexually exploited, but that there are severe labor abuses occurring as well-with the government's complicity. The Report acknowledges that state-licensed labor export companies engage in fraud and charge illegal commissions for overseas employment, and that there are documented cases of recruitment companies ignoring pleas for help from workers in exploitative situations.

As the sponsor of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, I am deeply disturbed that the Tier Rankings are not being better utilized by our State Department to pressure Vietnam to correct the trafficking abuses occurring within its government, not to mention those in the private sector.

We heard from Ms. Hui Danh who testified about the ordeal that her sister has endured as a victim of human trafficking. I am deeply disturbed by her story because her sister's situation actually got worse when she asked for help from the Vietnamese embassy. I greatly admire her courage and the Subcommittee is most appreciative of her willingness to speak out and bring attention to this issue.

Despite the dismal status for human rights in Vietnam, we can exert pressure on the Vietnamese government to cease these abuses. I will be reintroducing the Vietnam Human Rights Act soon; swift Congressional action on this bill will send a strong message that Congress will not tolerate continuing human rights abuses in Vietnam.

It is imperative that the United States Government send an unequivocal message to the Vietnamese regime that it must end its human rights abuses against its own citizens. This message however, should not be confined to the Human Rights Dialogue; it must be raised at each opportunity that we have talks with the Vietnamese government.

I thank all of our witnesses for appearing before the Subcommittee, and we look forward to hearing your testimony.

Mr. Speaker, I recently chaired a hearing on anti-Semitism where we heard from representatives from Americans and Europeans about the evil of anti-Semitism can be more successfully addressed.

At a Congressional hearing I chaired in 2002, Dr. Shimon Samuels of the Wiesenthal Center in Paris testified and said, ``The Holocaust for 30 years after the war acted as a protective Teflon against blatant anti-Semitic expression (especially in Europe). That Teflon has eroded, and what was considered distasteful and politically incorrect is becoming simply an opinion. But,'' he warned ominously, ``cocktail chatter at fine English dinners can end as Molotov cocktails against synagogues.''

In response to what appeared to be a sudden, frightening spike in anti-Semitism in several countries, including here in the United States, we first proposed the idea for a conference on combating anti- Semitism under the auspices of the organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Convinced we had an escalating crisis on our hands, we teamed with several OSCE partners to push for action and reform. Many of the people and NGOs present in this room played leading roles.

Those efforts directly led to important OSCE conferences on combating anti-Semitism in Vienna, Berlin, Cordoba, and Bucharest. In each

of those, participating states have made solemn, tangible commitments to put our words into action. In some countries, progress has indeed been made, yet the scope and outcome of anti-Semitic acts have not abated in others, and in some nations it has actually gotten worse.

That is why we are here today, to review, re-commit, and re-energize efforts to vanquish the highly disturbing resurgence of anti-Semitism everywhere, including in Europe.

Unparalleled since the dark ages of the Second World War, Jewish communities on a global scale are facing verbal harassment, and sometimes violent attacks against synagogues, Jewish cultural sites, cemeteries and individuals. It is an ugly reality that won't go away by ignoring or wishing it away. It must be defeated.

Thus, we gather to enlighten, motivate, and share ideas on how not just to mitigate this centuries-old obsession, but to crush this pernicious form of hate.

From our first panel of witnesses we heard how anti-Semitism directly threatens not only Jews but also Christians and Muslims, and democracy and civil society. When we fight anti-Semitism it is not only a matter of justice for Jewish fellow-citizens, but also of standing up for Christianity, and for Islam, and for the possibility of decent living itself. We all have a direct stake in the fight against anti- Semitism.

This is tragically clear in the Middle-Eastern countries where the government propagates anti-Semitism as an official or quasi-official ideology. These governments incite anti-Semitic hatred of Israel in order to distract the people from their own tyrannical rule, from their own abuse of human rights, denial of democracy, economic corruption. Sadly, it works. We see this in governments as varied as those of Iran and Egypt, Pakistan and Syria and Saudi Arabia, and the list doesn't end there.

Tens of millions of people who live in these countries are in this sense suffering from anti-Semitism. Few of them are Jewish--most are Muslim, millions are Christian. It's true that, to some degree or other, many of the people in these countries have bought into the evil of anti-Semitism, but many have not.

From our second panel, we heard reports from a number of European Jewish leaders who will be able to tell us about anti-Semitism in their countries, how the governments are responding, and whether these responses are effective. Sadly, in much of Europe, the harassment of Jews, including verbal and physical violence, continues to increase, and a recent Anti-Defamation League study shows that anti-Semitic attitudes are widespread in Europe and getting worse in many countries.

One thing the witnesses will address is whether elected officials are fulfilling their responsibility to speak out publicly against any expressions of anti-Semitic hate. When national leaders fail to denounce anti-Semitic violence and slurs, the void is not only demoralizing to the victims but silence actually enables the wrongdoing. Silence by elected officials in particular conveys approval--or at least acquiescence--and can contribute to a climate of fear and a sense of vulnerability.

In this respect, I want to recognize the leadership Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has shown in the fight against anti-Semitism. Prime Minister Orban has taken his government into the vanguard of those fighting anti-Semitism in Europe. He has declared a `zero tolerance policy' against anti-Semitism and seen that anti-Semitic incidents are promptly followed by high-level official condemnations, sometimes by him, sometimes by other officials. There is still far too much anti-Semitism in Hungary, and it is cultivated by the viciously racist Jobbik political party. But I am glad that the Hungarian government has responded vigorously, protecting its Jewish citizens by strengthening legislation and law enforcement, education and Holocaust remembrance.

Another point we considered is whether the countries are collecting reliable hate crime information. We can't fight anti-Semitic crimes effectively unless we have reliable information on them. The most recent figures from the U.S., for example, which are collected by the FBI, showed that Jews, less than 2% of the U.S. population, are the victims of 63% of religiously-targeted hate crimes.

An additional concern is the importance of Holocaust education. If we are to protect our children from the dark evil of anti-Semitism, we must reeducate ourselves and systematically educate our children. While that starts in our homes, the classroom must be the incubator of tolerance. It seems to me that only the most hardened racist can remain unmoved by Holocaust education and remembrance. Only the most crass, evil, and prejudiced among us can study the horrors of the Holocaust and not cry out: Never again!

Yet another concern is the rise of a ``new'' anti-Semitism, which tries to pass itself off as legitimate criticism of Israel, but which demonizes, delegitimizes, and applies double standards against Israel-- former Soviet ``refusenik'' Natan Sharansky's ``3 Ds.'' In any case, this form of anti-Semitism appears to be spreading among European social-democratic and leftist parties, as well as among Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, and I'd like to hear your views about the most effective ways to expose it for what it is.

We need to work together with you to light a fire under our government, under European governments, and intergovernmental organizations like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

I am preparing to re-introduce the Combating Anti-Semitism Act; another possible initiative is for a day on which heads of state or government can each visit a major synagogue in their national capitals and make a statement on threat that anti-Semitism poses to all of us.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks on the subject of my Special Order.

Mr. Speaker, will the decades-long national news media cover-up of the brutality and the violence of abortion methods ever end?

Will Americans ever be told of the horrifying details as to how and how often abortionists dismember, decapitate, and chemically poison innocent babies?

Will Americans ever be informed by a conscientious, unbiased national news media that in the past 40 years over 55 million child victims have been brutally killed by abortion, a staggering loss of children's lives that equates to the entire population of England, and that many women have been hurt physically, emotionally, and psychologically? And according to the Center for Disease Control--and this is a very conservative estimate from CDC--over 400 women have actually died from legal abortions.

Will Americans ever be told that of the 55 million children, Planned Parenthood alone claims responsibility for destroying 6 million babies and that just 2 weeks ago a Planned Parenthood leader in Florida testified at a legislative hearing at a State initiative to protect born-alive infants that even when a child survives an abortion, the decision to assist or kill the born-alive infant should be ``up to the woman, her family and her physician''? In other words, if a child intended to be aborted survives the assault, the choice to kill remains--so-called ``after-birth abortion.''

Isn't that extreme child abuse?

Murdering newborns in the abortion clinic, it seems to me, is indistinguishable from any other child predator wielding a knife or a gun. Why isn't the child also seen as a patient in need of medical care, warmth, nutrition, and--dare I say--love?

Now another national media coverup--in this case, even when a Jeffrey Dahmer-like murder trial of an abortionist named Kermit Gosnell, who ran the benign-sounding Women's Medical Society unfolds in a Philadelphia courtroom, replete with shocking testimony of beheadings, unfathomable abuse, death, and body parts in jars. To this day, the national news media remains uninterested, woefully indifferent--AWOL.

Why the censorship? Why does Gosnell's house of horrors--his trial-- fail to this day to attract any serious and meaningful national news reporting?

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is on trial for eight counts of murder. One count is for the death of a woman, a victim who

died during an abortion in his clinic. Seven counts are for babies who survived their abortions and were born alive but then killed by severing their spinal cords with a pair of scissors.

In the words of the grand jury report: ``Gosnell had a simple solution for unwanted babies--he killed them.'' He didn't call it that. He called it ``ensuring fetal demise''--a nice euphemism. The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors in the back of the baby's neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that ``snipping.'' Over the years, according to the grand jury report, there were hundreds of snippings.

Indeed, the national news media has not only taken a pass and looked the other way, but their stunning indifference has done a grave disservice to Gosnell's victims: the woman killed, other women injured, and children slaughtered by Gosnell. Because of the national news media's indefensible silence and because of their failure to report, other women and children at other abortion mills might also be at risk.

The grand jury report, again in January of 2011, pointedly pointed out and noted that an absence of press coverage and gross negligence by the health department in Pennsylvania enabled Gosnell to show a ``contemptuous disregard for the health, safety, and dignity of his patients that continued for 40 years.''

Right from the beginning of Roe v. Wade, he was overlooked by a media that was disinterested. Some media commentators, however, are beginning to take note of the national news media blackout and the bias that undergirds and is inherent in that blackout.

The title of an editorial yesterday in the Investors Business Daily was ``Newtown in the Clinic: The Media Ignore the Gosnell Trial.'' It begins in part:

Media bias: A basketball coach who shoves and curses at his

players merits constant coverage by a media also transfixed

by Newtown; but a Philadelphia doctor on trial for murdering

a woman and seven babies? It's ignored.

Those who get their news from the three major networks have

probably not heard of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, now on trial in

Philadelphia, charged with seven counts of first-degree

murder and one count of third-degree murder for killing seven

babies who survived abortions and a woman who died after a

botched painkiller injection.

The editorial points out that, according to the Media Research Center, in 1 week, Rice--who is the coach from Rutgers--received 41 minutes, 26 seconds on ABC, CBS, and NBC in 36 separate news stories. Gosnell received zero coverage.

The editorial points out:

If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery and shot seven

infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the

subject of Presidential hand-wringing.

In today's edition of USA Today, columnist Kirsten Powers writes:

Infant beheadings, severed baby feet in jars, a child

screaming after it was delivered during an abortion

procedure. Haven't heard about those sickening accusations?

It's not your fault. Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania

abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been

precious little coverage of the case that should be on every

news show and front page.

She goes on to write in her column:

A LexisNexis search shows none of the news shows on the

three major national television networks has mentioned the

Gosnell trial in the last 3 months. The exception is when

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment

on ``Meet the Press.''

Again, I ask my colleagues, and I ask the news media: Why the blackout?

Will America ever be told the brutality of abortion and the violence that is commonplace inside the abortion industry; or will the media, the national media especially, continue to censor and censor and, in this case, censor a trial--a trial of the century--that exposes all of the all too inconvenient truth: that not only are unborn children destroyed in these killing centers by being decapitated and dismembered but that even babies who survive the abortions can't escape the deadly hand of these child predators?

I would like to yield to my good friend and colleague, Vicky Hartzler.

I thank my good friend and colleague Mrs. Hartzler for her very eloquent statement, for her championing the rights of the unborn and their mothers, and for joining us in this Special Order today.

I'd like to now yield to a medical doctor who has been the leader on conscience rights in the House of Representatives, in the Congress, Dr. Fleming.

I thank you, Dr. Fleming, so much for your leadership and for that very concise statement. And now I would like to yield to my good friend and colleague, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

I want to thank Mr. Garrett for his eloquence, but also for his faithfulness in defending the powerless and the people who need voices, unborn children and their mothers, all those who are similarly situated, the vulnerable and the weak. He is always there, and I want to thank you so much, Scott.

I'd like to now yield to the chairman of the Health Subcommittee for the Energy and Commerce Committee for the House of Representatives, Joe Pitts, and note that Congressman Pitts, Chairman Pitts, is the author of the Abortion Control Act of 1980, the legislation that established, within the framework of Roe v. Wade, a very aggressive attempt to protect, to the maximum extent possible, pursuant to that onerous decision by the Supreme Court, and it was upheld by the Supreme Court, to do investigations of clinics and to just hold to a higher standard so that, to the greatest extent possible, life would be protected.

Congressman Pitts has been leading the charge on life for his entire career, both in the State legislature and in the U.S. House of Representatives, so it is a distinct honor to yield to my good friend.

I want to thank Chairman Pitts for his very eloquent statement. Even the grand jury report noted that if Mr. Pitts' law had been followed faithfully, the whole Gosnell destruction of not only women's lives but the death and murder of one woman and the killing of these children might not have occurred.

I'd like to yield to Dr. Andy Harris, a Johns Hopkins physician and also a Member of the U.S. House from Maryland.

Dr. Harris.

Dr. Harris, thank you for that very insightful--and I would say brilliant--defense of not just the unborn, but the newly born, and your very logical argument as to how this is already being extended in what is euphemistically called after-birth abortion to those, like Dr. Gosnell's victims, who have been born and then are killed.

I would point to my colleagues, before going to Mr. Stutzman, that one of the clinic individuals who was actually killing these children-- this came out in testimony at the trial--said that when he heard the child crying, it was like an alien.

Children cry when they're being killed--and in this case, a very painful--as you pointed out, pain-capable children are at least 20 weeks gestational age. Many of these kids were 23, 24, 25, even higher. As we've learned from the grand jury, as well as from these proceedings, some of these children were as old as 30 weeks gestational age--very, very large children, very mature children, but no different than the child who just a few weeks and even months before, same child, just a little more mature and, as you said, worthy of protection always.

I'd like to yield to Mr. Stutzman.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Indiana for that very extraordinary and eloquent speech, bringing to the American people an inconvenient truth that needs to be exposed, and for, again, reminding us all that the major news media--NBC, CBS, ABC-- have all had a blackout, there's been a coverup. If this was any other trial of a horrific bloodletting, a house of horrors, it would be front page, it would be the lead story, maybe second or third on some nights on the major networks.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, to its credit, a newspaper that is not pro-life editorially, and I know that because I've talked to them over the many years, they, nevertheless, have deployed reporters who have done a very, very good job in covering this trial. But that's pretty much where it ends. And, again, the major networks ought to be there.

I would point out that the reason why this clinic in this house of horrors was allowed to do much of what it has done is because of the chilling effect that the proabortion side has had on inspections of clinics where children are routinely slaughtered.

The grand jury itself said: ``The politics in question were not antiabortion, but proabortion. With the change of administrations from Governor Casey,'' a Democrat pro-lifer, ``to Governor Tom Ridge,'' a proabortion Republican, ``officials concluded that inspections would be putting a barrier up to women seeking abortions. Better to leave the clinics to do as they please,'' went on the grand jury report, ``even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.'' That is found on page 9.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield to my good friend and colleague from Pennsylvania (Mr. Rothfus) for as much time as he may consume.

I thank my friend for coming from his markup to be with us here today.

There was a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer--again, just tell the truth, just tell the story about what's happening in the trial--and they report that this week an ex-employee of Gosnell talked about how she perceived the brutal snipping of the spines of newborns still alive after abortion.

``Did you know it was murder?'' Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore asked ex-clinic worker Lynda Williams, referring to the clinic's practice of snipping the spines of babies born alive during abortion procedures.

``No, I didn't,'' said Williams, 44.

She goes on to say that one of her duties was to retrieve fetuses from women who would sometimes spontaneously abort in the waiting room after getting large doses of drugs. ``One day,'' she testified, ``a women expelled a second trimester fetus and it was moving.'' Williams said she took a pair of scissors and snipped the spine as Gosnell showed her. ``I did it once,'' she said, ``and I didn't do it again because it gave me the creeps.''

Mr. Speaker, let me conclude. Dr. Andy Harris a few moments ago talked about the bioethicists who had made statements that after-birth abortion is justified because the newborn, or children who have been out of the womb for even weeks, have the same moral stature--and that is none--as an unborn child. Those two bioethicists say: ``The devaluation of newborn babies is inextricably linked to the devaluation of the unborn.'' They said: ``We propose that this practice of after- birth abortion be called that, rather than infanticide, in order to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed''--that is to say the baby--``is comparable to that of the fetus.''

Whether she will exist is exactly what our choice is all about. So the choice to kill extended to the point of snipping the spines of children who were born and struggling and gasping for breath and for some kind of outreach of hands that would save that child, but it wasn't there. That is now being prosecuted, as it ought to be, as murder.

Our hope is that the blackout of this trial of Kermit Gosnell will end. It is ongoing. It's occurring today. It's occurring every day. I don't know how long it will take. But to NBC, CBS, and ABC and to the major news media, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and others, just tell the story. Keep your editorials on the editorial page--you are absolutely entitled to that--but don't let that creep onto and bleed onto the other pages. Just tell the story. And the indifference, again, and the lack of coverage suggests a coverup.

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

Mr. Speaker, less than a month ago I chaired a hearing on ``Anti-Semitism: A Growing Threat to All Faiths.'' One of the witnesses was Tamas Fellegi, a former minister in the Orban government, who is himself Jewish. His testimony was impressive, as was the long list of significant actions the Orban government has taken to combat anti-Semitism in Hungarian society.

Mr. Fellegi admitted frankly that anti-Semitism is a serious social problem in Hungary. Fortunately, the Orban government is on a clear upward trajectory here, and gives every sign that it will continue to be part of the solution rather than the problem. I'm confident it will particularly take on the persistent attempts to rehabilitate Holocaust perpetrators and vicious anti-Semites, both from the 1930s and 1940s and today. I will certainly continue to urge it to do so.

We all know that many NGOs and a few governments, including our own, have been vocal in criticizing the Hungarian government on various grounds touching on democracy and human rights--and that the Hungarian government and its supporters have rejected these criticisms vigorously.

Having reviewed material on both sides, I must say that I believe the Orban government is right when it says that many of the criticisms are unfair, involving double standards, misrepresentations, and inaccurate information. The Hungarian government has carefully documented this, for example in its ``Open Letter to Freedom House.''

For another example, the administration, in criticizing the Orban government's adoption of a new constitution, claimed in its written testimony to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe this week that in ``fundamental'' matters, ``the process must lead to a consensus built from a cross-section of society, rather than reflect only the opinions of the ruling coalition . . . the lack of serious consultation with different sectors of society, did not honor the democratic spirit . . .'' Anyone familiar with the passage of the Obamacare legislation might well question whether this is a message our government is ideally situated to deliver. Certainly it should have avoided the rude insinuation about democracy.

Yet we need to continue delivering these and similar messages to a number of foreign governments--we must not give in to the cynicism induced by our own or any other government's failings.

But we should be a lot more humble--especially when we are dealing with a country like Hungary, where the system of constitutional checks and balances is alive and well, where a democratic party with an unprecedented supermajority and a mandate for dramatic change, gained in a free and fair election, passed a democratic constitution and shows itself open to working with others to amend and improve the flaws in its new laws. This is a conversation between equals, and there is a lot we can learn from Hungary. I'm thinking particularly here of the constitutional cap on public debt and the statement that life will be protected in the womb.

I'd like to congratulate the Hungarian government for the many laudable things in the new constitution--many things that advance human rights, including the prohibition of human trafficking, reproductive cloning, and its promotion of the culture of life. And for the rest, I look forward to a continuing conversation with the Hungarian government about their and our constitutional traditions and how they can both be improved.

I thank my good friend for yielding.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of the Violence Against Women Act offered by Congresswoman McMorris Rodgers. It authorizes $2.2 billion for VAWA to help victimized women & children seeking assistance to break the cycle of violence & live free from intimidation, fear, abuse, & exploitation. I just want to point out something that little attention has been paid to.

A little over a decade ago, I authored the Trafficking Victims' Protection Act of 2000, the landmark law that created America's comprehensive policy to combat modern-day slavery. The TVPA created the State Department's Trafficking in Persons Office, now led by an ambassador-at-large with a robust complement of over 50 dedicated and highly trained people.

The Leahy trafficking amendment to S. 47, title XII, guts the TIP Office and represents a significant retreat in the struggle to end human trafficking. The only way to fix it is to pass the McMorris Rodgers amendment, go to negotiations, and get this legislation fixed.

The TIP Office is an extraordinary advocacy mechanism and has had a huge impact worldwide. In addition to best-practices advocacy, the office monitors labor and sex trafficking and makes recommendations for whether or not countries be ranked tier one, tier two, or tier three.

For over a decade, the Trafficking in Persons Office has been the flagship in our struggle to combat human trafficking. The Leahy amendment cuts the authorization for the TIP Office from about $7 million down to $2 million. It eviscerates the TIP Office; there is no doubt about that.

It also shifts responsibilities to the regional bureaus. We have had problems over the last decade, as my colleagues, I'm sure, know. The regional bureaus have a whole large portfolio of issues that they deal with. When they deal with those issues, trafficking is on page 4 or page 5 of their talking points. The TIP Office walks point; it has now been demoted significantly.

I would point out that when I first did the trafficking bill, there was huge pushback from the State Department. They didn't want human rights in general, and absolutely they did not want the trafficking-in- persons issue to be dominant and center stage. That's what the office does. It is a step backwards for combating human trafficking.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of the Violence Against Women Act, VAWA, authored by Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

It authorizes $2.2 billion for VAWA to help victimized women and children seeking assistance to break the cycle of violence and live a life free from intimidation, fear, abuse and exploitation.

VAWA is landmark legislation with a proven track record of assisting abused and battered women and must be reauthorized. VAWA includes: $222 million in STOP grants, providing critical funding to improve the criminal justice system's response to crimes against women; $73 million in Grants to Encourage Arrest Policies and Enforce Protection Orders, providing resources to bring abusers to justice and providing victims with the legal protections to live free of fear from their abusers; $57 million for Legal Assistance for Victims, providing necessary funding to strengthen state legal systems and ensure that agencies charged with handling domestic abuse and sexual assault cases are able to assist victims through the legal process; and millions more in housing assistance to shelter victims away from their abusers; grants to protect young women on college campuses; training and services for abuse against women in rural areas and those with disabilities; funding to reduce rape kit backlogs so we can identify past abusers and provide justice to their victims; and many more critical programs that strengthen communities to combat abuse against vulnerable populations.

I just want to point out something that far too little attention has been paid to: the Leahy Amendment cuts to the State Department Trafficking in Persons, TIP, Office contained in the Senate version.

A little over a decade ago, I authored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, TVPA, of 2000--the landmark law that created America's comprehensive policy to combat modern day slavery.

The TVPA created the State Department's Trafficking in Persons Office, now led by an ambassador-at-large with a robust complement of over 50 dedicated and highly trained people.

Madam Speaker, Superstorm Sandy inflicted unprecedented damage on communities in the Northeast including my district in New Jersey. Congress and the President have responded by providing $60 billion in emergency and recovery aid.

Today's debate and vote however isn't at all about whether or how much funding Congress appropriates to mitigate the impact of Sandy. We've had that vote.

Rather, it is about those who are being unfairly left out and left behind. It's about those who helped feed, comfort, clothe and shelter tens of thousands of victims now being told they are ineligible for a FEMA grant.

It is unconscionable that foundational pillars of our communities damaged by Sandy--synagogues, churches, mosques, temples and other houses of worship--have been categorically denied access to these otherwise generally-available relief funds. Current FEMA policy is patently unfair, unjustified and discriminatory and may even suggest hostility to religion.

FEMA has a policy in place to aid nonprofit facilities damaged in the storm, but the agency has excluded houses of worship from this support. That is wrong. And it's time Congress ensures fundamental fairness for these essential private nonprofits.

The bipartisan Federal Disaster Assistance Nonprofit Fairness Act of 2013--H.R. 592--will ensure that churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and other houses of worship are eligible for federal funds to effectuate repairs, restoration and replacement of damaged facilities.

Madam Speaker, it's worth noting here that FEMA's discriminatory policy of exclusion isn't prescribed by any law. Nothing in the Stafford Act or any other law including the Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief Appropriations Act precludes funds to repair, restore or replace houses of worship. Indeed, congressional precedent favors enacting H.R. 592 as there are several pertinent examples of public funds bein allocated to houses of worship.

For example:

FEMA grants were explicitly authorized by Congress and provided to churches damaged in the Oklahoma City terrorist attack;

Homeland Security Department and UASI provides funding to houses of worship for security upgrades;

Interior Department provides funding for grants for historically significant properties including churches and synagogues;

It is important to note that a controlling Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel Memorandum explains in detail the legal principles which make H.R. 592 constitutional. In a September 25, 2002, written opinion, the Office of Legal Counsel concluded it was constitutional for Congress to provide disaster relief and reconstruction funds to a religious Jewish school, along with all sorts of other organizations, following a devastating earthquake.

The same principles apply to protect religious organizations following a devastating hurricane. As the Office of Legal Counsel memo concluded ``provision of disaster assistance to [religious organizations] cannot be materially distinguished from aid programs that are constitutional under longstanding Supreme Court precedent establishing that religious institutions are fully entitled to receive generally available government benefits and services, such as fire and police protection.''

The Supreme Court handed down its first modern Establishment Clause decision in Everson v. Board of Education, which involved a program in my own state of New Jersey. In that case the Court held that religious institutions are entitled to receive ``general government services'' made available on the basis of neutral criteria.

The Court held that the Establishment Clause does not bar students attending religious schools from receiving generally available school busing services provided by the government. In reaching its decision, the Court

explained that even if the evenhanded provision of busing services increased the likelihood that some parents would send their children to religious schools, the same could be said of other ``general state law benefits'' that were even more clearly constitutional because they were equally available to all citizens.

As examples, the Court cited ``such general government services as ordinary police and fire protection, connections for sewage disposal, public highways and sidewalks,'' concluding that ``cutting off church schools from these services . . . would make it far more difficult for the schools to operate. But such is obviously not the purpose of the First Amendment. That Amendment requires the state to be a neutral in its relations with groups of religious believers and non-believers; it does not require the state to be their adversary. State power is no more to be used so as to handicap religions, than it is to favor them.''

As Nathan J. Diament, Executive Director of Public Policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America notes in his excellent legal analysis which I will include in the Record ``federal disaster relief is analogous to aid that qualifies as 'general government services' approved by the Court in Everson.

That same Supreme Court also held that ``[Government] cannot exclude individual Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Baptists, Jews, Methodists, Non-believers, Presbyterians, or the members of any other faith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits of public welfare legislation . . . [W]e must be careful, in protecting the citizens of New Jersey against state-established churches, to be sure that we do not inadvertently prohibit New Jersey from extending its general state law benefits to all its citizens without regard to their religious belief.''

In Walz v. Tax Commission, the Court rejected an Establishment Clause challenge to a property tax exemption made available not only to churches, but to several other classes of nonprofit institutions, such as ``hospitals, libraries, playgrounds, scientific, professional, historical, and patriotic groups.'' As the Court stated in reference to Everson, if ``buses can be provided to carry and policemen to protect church school pupils, we fail to see how a broader range of police and fire protection given equally to all churches, along with nonprofit hospitals, art galleries, and libraries receiving the same tax exemption, is different for purposes of the Religion Clauses.''

The bill before us today simply makes clear and clarifies that federal disaster relief includes religious entities along with every other sort of entity. As the Court later stated in Widmar v. Vincent, ``[t]he provision of benefits to so broad a spectrum of groups is an important index of secular [that is, constitutional] effect.'' And as it stated more recently in Texas Monthly, Inc. v. Bullock, ``[i]nsofar as [a] subsidy is conferred upon a wide array of nonsectarian groups as well as religious organizations in pursuit of some legitimate secular end, the fact that religious groups benefit incidentally does not deprive the subsidy of the secular purpose and primary effect mandated by the Establishment Clause.''

Significantly, Madam Speaker, when three churches in Detroit received taxpayer funded grants to repair and spruce up their buildings prior to the 2006 Superbowl, American Atheists sued the City of Detroit and lost. In a sweeping decision authored by Judge Sutton, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit unanimously held that the direct assistance to the churches did not violate the Establishment Clause.

Judge Sutton said: ``Detroit sought to fix up its downtown, not to establish a religion. And as will generally be the case when a governmental program allocates generally available benefits on a neutral basis and without a hidden agenda, this program does not have the impermissible effect of advancing religion in general or any one faith in particular. By endorsing all qualifying applicants, the program has endorsed none of them, and accordingly it has not run afoul of the federal or state religion clauses . . . In the Establishment Clause context, that means evenhanded, neutral laws generally (though not invariably) will be upheld. So long as the government benefit is neutral and generally applicable on its face, it presumptively will satisfy the Establishment Clause.''

In sum, H.R. 592 exhibits no government preference for or against religion, or any particular religion, since it merely permits houses of worship to receive the same type of generally-available assistance in picking up the pieces after stunning devastation that many other similarly situated nonprofits receive. Thus, the bill not only passes the test of constitutionality, it passes the test of basic human decency.

Indeed, to do otherwise would be to single out churches for adverse treatment, which is itself constitutionally suspect. The Supreme Court held in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, that ``[a]t a minimum, the protections of the Free Exercise Clause pertain if the law at issue discriminates against some or all religious beliefs.'' And in Employment Division v. Smith, the Court held that under the Free Exercise Clause, the state may not ``impose special disabilities on the basis of religious views or religious status.'' Similarly, in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, the Court held that ``the government offends the First Amendment when it imposes financial burdens on certain speakers based on the content of their expression,'' including religious expression. To continue to single houses of worship out for discrimination does not express government neutrality, it expresses government hostility. And there is no place for government hostility toward religion under our constitution.

The constitution clearly allows, and arguably requires, that religious organizations be treated equally when it comes to Congress' providing for the well-being of Americans following the onslaught of Superstorm Sandy and other natural disasters.

The damage unleashed by Sandy has taken a huge toll on houses of worship. According to the N.J. Catholic Conference more than 145 churches suffered significant damage in my state alone. Another 125 churches in New York have been damaged and are seeking FEMA help with more to be counted as repairs and ongoing work are addressed and contracted out for completion.

Similarly, dozens of synagogues and temples in both states are now looking to see how they repair after spending months of providing goods and services--with no regard to religion--to those who needed it.

In testimony just last week before the New York City Council, Joseph Rosenberg of the Catholic Community Relations Council poignantly noted that when Sandy hit, the leaders of the churches, synagogues and other houses of worship did not first ask if their facilities would be eligible for federal assistance before providing food and shelter and relief to thousands of displaced persons.

Nor did these providers of assistance ask the religious affiliation of the victims. No, they went to work providing tangible, life-saving aid to all comers.

In his letter of support for H.R. 592, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz concludes that ``religious institutions may receive government aid if it is in the context of a broadly available program with criteria that are neutral toward religion and pose no risks of religious favoritism.''

Professor Dershowitz notes further:

Once FEMA has the policy in place to aid various nonprofit

organizations with their building repairs, houses of worship

should not be excluded from receiving this aid on the same

terms. This is all the more appropriate given the neutral

role we have witnessed houses of worship play, without regard

to religion of those affected, in the wake of Sandy and

countless previous disasters. Federal disaster relief aid is

a form of social insurance and means of helping battered

communities get back on their feet. Churches, synagogues,

mosques and other houses of worship are an essential part of

the recovery process.

Religious liberty scholar Professor Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia School of Law wrote a letter endorsing H.R. 592 and said in part: ``Charitable contributions to places of worship are tax deductible, without significant controversy, even though the tax benefits to the donor are like a matching grant from the government. These deductions have been uncontroversial because they are included without discrimination in the much broader category of all not-for- profit organizations devoted to charitable, educational, religious, or scientific purposes. The neutral category here is equally broad. To include places of worship in disaster relief is neutral; to exclude them would be affirmatively hostile. There is no constitutional obstacle to including them.''

America's houses of worship are an integral, irreplaceable part of the contour and fabric of our communities. Like any other private non- profit organization, their recovery is essential to the recovery of neighborhoods, towns and states. They should not be excluded from federal programs that ensure community recovery, especially since they selflessly provide assistance to all in need.

H.R. 592 has been endorsed by several organizations including the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Council of Churches of the City of New York and the American Jewish Committee.

I would like to take this moment to submit one more additional letter of support for H.R. 592 from Carl H. Esbeck, Professor of Law, University of Missouri, and my full statement for the Record.

University of Missouri

School of Law,

February 11, 2013.

Re Federal Disaster Assistance Nonprofit Fairness Act of

2013.

Hon. Chris Smith,

Rayburn HOB, Washington, DC.

Hon. Grace Meng,

1317 Longworth HOB, Washington, DC.

Dear Representatives Smith and Meng: I have been asked to

give an opinion concerning the constitutionality of the

Federal

Disaster Assistance Nonprofit Fairness Act of 2013. The bill

was introduced in the House of Representatives on Friday,

February 8, 2013. It would amend Sections 102(10)(B) and

406(a)(3) of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and

Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5122(10)(B) and

5172(a)(3)), to clarify that houses of worship are eligible

for disaster relief and emergency assistance on the same

terms as other nonprofit facilities providing certain defined

essential services to the public. Stated differently, houses

of worship that are otherwise eligible for relief and

assistance are not to be discriminated against because of

their religious character.

FEMA's current policy is set forth in its memorandum

captioned ``Houses of Worship--FEMA Public Assistance

Eligibility.'' Concerning multiple-use facilities, FEMA

denies relief and assistance to otherwise eligible houses of

worship unless the primary use of the space in a facility is

for essential services of a governmental nature. FEMA

converts ``primary use'' into a simple fifty-percent (50%)

rule, but it does not state the legal authority for the rule.

The matter of interest is compliance with the Establishment

Clause in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The

United States Supreme Court has formulated a neutrality

principle to assess general programs of aid to the

nongovernmental sector. The principle requires: (i) that the

program have a secular purpose, and (ii) that the recipients

of the aid be eligible without regard to religion. Under the

above-referenced bill, Section 102(10)(B) defines an eligible

private nonprofit (PNP) as a facility that provides: (a)

essential services; (b) while not by government, of that

``nature;'' and (c) available to the public. The three-part

definition is secular in purpose. True, the bill expressly

mentions houses of worship as eligible. But that makes sense

and is secular in purpose, because in the past they were

sometimes excluded by FEMA. So Congress, in passing this

amendment, is just bringing matters back from a

discriminatory situation to one of religious neutrality.

A parenthetical in 102(10)(B) gives several examples of

such eligible PNP facilities providing essential services. If

a private ``museum'' is an essential service in the

``nature'' of ``governmental,'' the eligible recipients are

not as narrowly limited as might at first appear. ``Community

centers'' are expressly named as eligible, and this bill has

``houses of worship'' as a type of community center. The

findings in Section 2(5) of the bill further help to define

how houses of worship serve as a type of community center.

The findings also help to explain how a community center

provides ``essential services,'' namely activities central to

community rebuilding and reconstruction after a natural

disaster.

Several U.S. Supreme Court cases prepared the way for the

neutrality principle as we presently recognize it. In Bowen

v. Kendrick, 487 U.S. 589 (1988), the Court upheld a

congressional program funding counseling centers targeting

adolescent sexuality that was available to religious as well

as secular providers. In Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills Sch.

Dist., 509 U.S. 1 (1993), the Court held that a public school

district had to provide the same special education services

to a student when he switched enrollment from a public to a

religious high school. In Witters v. Washington Dep't of

Servs. for the Blind, 474 U.S. 481 (1986), the Court upheld a

state vocational rehabilitation program, available without

regard to religion, even when it resulted in aid to a student

to attend a seminary.

The neutrality principle became fully grounded with the

Court's decision in Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203 (1997).

Agostini involved the implementation of federal funding for

K-12 special educational services in schools in the State of

New York. The special educational services were rendered by

special education teachers employed by the local public

school district. For those special education students in

religious schools, it was more effective and less costly to

have the teachers travel to the religious school campus to

deliver the services. But this had been barred by prior case

law. In Agostini, the Court overruled its prior precedent and

approved the delivery of services to all special needs

students on a basis neutral as to religion. The services were

secular, and there was no reason because of the Establishment

Clause to discriminate against children enrolled in the

religious schools.

The Agostini secular-purpose/religion-neutral analysis was

carried forward by the Supreme Court in Mitchell v. Helms,

530 U.S. 793 (2000). The case involved a challenge to a part

of the Primary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which

provide educational materials and services to all K-12

schools without regard to religion. The challengers wanted

the aid denied to religious schools. The nature of the

educational materials was secular. Accordingly, the Court

upheld the practice of treating all schools neutrally. These

religious schools were intensely religious, but that was no

reason to discriminate against them. Care should be exercised

so that no governmental aid is diverted from its intended

secular purpose, in particular that the aid not be diverted

to an explicitly religious purpose.

It is my opinion that the above-referenced proposed

amendment to the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and

Emergency Assistance Act is consistent with the Establishment

Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Thank you for your kind consideration of this letter

opinion.

Sincerely,

Carl H. Esbeck,

R.B. Price Professor of Law and Isabelle Wade & Paul C.

Lyda Professor of Law, University of Missouri.

Mr. Speaker, the House passage of H.R. 592 by the large margin of 354-72 is a substantial statement of support for the houses of worship that have done so much for those suffering in the wake of natural disasters like Superstorm Sandy. It is also a strong affirmation of the constitutionality of the bill.

I thank my good friend, the chair, for yielding. I thank him for his support and for Mr. Rahall. And I want to thank Gracie Meng for her cosponsorship and leadership on this important bill, and all the cosponsors, and to Eric Cantor and the leadership for scheduling it for a vote today. This is extremely important and very timely.

Madam Speaker, Superstorm Sandy inflicted unprecedented damage on communities in the Northeast, including my district in New Jersey. Congress and the President have responded by providing $60 billion in emergency and recovery aid.

Today's debate and vote, however, isn't at all about whether or how much funding Congress appropriates to mitigate the impact of Sandy. We've had that vote.

Rather, it's about those who are being unfairly left out and left behind. It's about those who help feed, comfort, clothe, and shelter tens of thousands of victims now being told they are ineligible for a FEMA grant.

It's unconscionable that foundational pillars of our communities damaged by Sandy--synagogues, churches, mosques, temples and other houses of worship--have been categorically denied access to these otherwise generally available relief funds.

Current FEMA policy is patently unfair, unjustified, and discriminatory and may even suggest hostility to religion. FEMA has a policy in place to aid nonprofit facilities damaged in the storm, but the agency has excluded houses of worship from their support. That is wrong, and it's time Congress ensures fundamental fairness for these essential private nonprofits.

The bipartisan Federal Disaster Assistance Nonprofit Fairness Act will ensure that houses of worship are eligible for Federal funds administered by FEMA.

Madam Speaker, it's worth noting here that FEMA's discriminatory policy of exclusion is not prescribed by any law. Nothing in the Stafford Act or any other law, including the Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief Appropriations Act, precludes funds to repair and to replace and to restore houses of worship.

Indeed, the congressional precedent favors enacting H.R. 592, as there are several pertinent examples of public funding being allocated to houses of worship. For example, FEMA grants were explicitly authorized by Congress back in 1995 and provided to the churches damaged by the Oklahoma City terrorist attack, as my friend from West Virginia pointed out.

The Homeland Security Department and UASI provides funding to houses of worship for security upgrades. The Interior Department provides funding to grants for historically significant properties, including active churches and active synagogues. And the SBA provides low interest loans--no hint at all by anyone that there's an Establishment Clause issue.

It's important to note that a controlling Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memorandum explains in detail the legal principles that make H.R. 592 constitutional. In a 2002 written opinion, the Office of Legal Counsel concluded it was constitutional for Congress to provide disaster relief and reconstruction funds to a religious Jewish school, along with all sorts of other organizations, following a devastating earthquake. The same principles apply to protect religious organizations following a devastating hurricane.

As the Office of Legal Counsel memo concluded:

Provisions of disaster assistance to religious

organizations cannot be materially distinguished from aid

programs that are constitutional under longstanding Supreme

Court precedent, establishing that religious institutions are

fully entitled to receive generally available government

benefits and services, such as fire and police protection.

The Supreme Court handed down its first modern Establishment Clause decision in the Everson v. Board of Education decision, which involved a program in my own home State of New Jersey. In that case, the Court held that religious institutions are entitled to receive ``general government services'' made available on the basis of neutral criteria. The Court held that the Establishment Clause does not bar, in that case, students attending religious schools from receiving generally available school busing services provided by the government.

As Nathan Diament, Executive Director of Public Policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Organizations of America, notes in his excellent legal analysis, which I will include in the Record:

Disaster relief is analogous to aid that qualifies as

general government services approved by the Court in Everson.

Madam Speaker, the bill before us today simply makes clear and clarifies that Federal disaster relief includes religious entities, along with every other sort of entity.

As the Court later stated in Widmar v. Vincent:

The provision of benefits to so broad a spectrum of groups

is an important index of secular, that is, constitutional

effect.

As it stated more recently in Texas Monthly v. Bullock:

Insofar as that subsidy is conferred upon a wide array of

nonsectarian groups as well as religious group organizations

in pursuit of some legitimate secular end, the fact that

religious groups benefit incidentally does not deprive the

subsidy of the secular purpose and primary effect mandated by

the Establishment Clause.

Significantly, Madam Speaker, when three churches in Detroit received taxpayer-funded grants to repair and spruce up their buildings prior to the 2006 Super Bowl, American Atheists sued the City of Detroit and lost.

In a sweeping decision offered by Judge Sutton, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, unanimously held that the direct assistance to the churches did not violate the Establishment Clause. Judge Sutton said, and I quote, in pertinent part:

Detroit sought to fix up its downtown, not to establish a

religion. And as will generally be the case when a

governmental program allocates generally available benefits

on a neutral basis and without a hidden agenda, this program

does not have the impermissible effect of advancing religion

in general or any one faith in particular. By endorsing all

qualifying applicants, the program has endorsed none of them,

the Court went on to say, and accordingly it has not run

afoul of the Federal and State religious clauses . . . In the

Establishment Clause context, that means evenhanded neutral

laws generally, though not invariably, will be upheld. So

long as the government benefit is neutral and generally

applicable on its face, it presumptively will satisfy the

Establishment Clause.

H.R. 592 exhibits no government preference for or against religion, or any particular religion, since it merely permits houses of worship to receive the same type of generally available assistance.

Again, this legislation permits houses of worship to receive the same type of generally available assistance in picking up the pieces after stunning devastation that many other similarly situated nonprofits receive. Thus, the bill not only passes the test of constitutionality, it passes the test of basic decency.

Indeed, to do otherwise would be to single out churches for adverse treatment, which is in itself constitutionally suspect.

The Supreme Court held, Madam Speaker, in Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, that ``at a minimum, the protections of the Free Exercise Clause pertain if the law at issue discriminates against some or all religious beliefs.''

And in Employment Division v. Smith, the Court held that under the Free Exercise Clause, the State may not ``impose special disabilities on the basis of religious views or religious status.''

To continue to single houses of worship out for discrimination does not express government neutrality; it expresses government hostility. And there's no place for government hostility toward religion under our Constitution.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I thank my good friend for yielding, and I thank the gentlelady from Texas for her very strong and passionate remarks.

I especially again want to thank Congresswoman Meng for her excellent statement and her support and cosponsorship of this important bill.

Let me just say a couple of points to my colleagues. First of all, I will be submitting for the Record a very fine analysis by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, an outstanding public interest law firm that has done yeoman's work throughout the country on religious liberty.

It's a statement to us as Members of Congress by its leaders. It points out first not only does the Establishment Clause provide no support for FEMA's practice of discriminating against houses of worship, that practice itself runs afoul of the First Amendment by discriminating against religious institutions.

Second, the bill you have proposed will not lead to Establishment Clause violations because no act of Congress can purport to repeal the First Amendment. Arguments to the contrary are constitutional scaremongering.

Eric Rassbach and Daniel Blomberg have authored again a very important contribution to this debate.

Madam Speaker--and Ms. Meng mentioned this earlier and it bears repeating--in letters of support for H.R. 592, Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz concludes:

Religious institutions may receive government aid if it is

in the context of a broadly available program with criteria

that are neutral toward religion and pose no risk of

religious favoritism.

He states further:

Once FEMA has a policy in place to aid various nonprofit

organizations with their building repairs, houses of worship

should not be excluded from receiving this aid on the same

terms.

This is all the more appropriate given the neutral role that we have witnessed houses of worship play without regard to religion to those afflicted in the wake of Sandy and countless previous disasters.

Federal disaster relief aid in the form of social insurance and other means of helping battered communities get them back on their feet. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship are an essential part of the recovery process.

Madam Speaker, religious liberty scholar Professor Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia School of Law wrote a letter endorsing H.R. 592 and said in part:

Charitable contributions to places of worship are tax

deductible without significant controversy, though the tax

benefits to the donor are like a matching grant from the

government. These deductions have been uncontroversial

because they're included without discrimination in a much

broader category of all not-for-profit organizations devoted

to charitable, educational, religious, or scientific

purposes. The neutral category here is equally broad; to

include places of worship in disaster relief is neutral. To

exclude them would be affirmatively hostile. There is no

constitutional obstacle to including them.

That is according to Professor Laycock of the University of Virginia School of Law, a preeminent expert on these matters.

Madam Speaker, houses of worship are an integral, irreplaceable part of the contour and fabric of our communities. Like any other private nonprofit organization, their recovery is essential to the recovery of neighborhoods, towns, and States. They should not be excluded from Federal programs that ensure community recovery, especially since they so selflessly provide assistance to all in need.

In conclusion, Madam Speaker, this legislation has been backed by a number of important organizations, including the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals.

Just to underscore for my colleagues the broad support that this has, the American Jewish Committee has also supported it, the Family Research Council. As I said earlier, the Becket Fund and so many others have written very extensive remarks in favor of it.

I do hope there will be very strong support for this important legislation. It's a matter of inclusion to stop current-day, present- day exclusion.

Memorandum

To: Interested Parties

From: Nathan J. Diament, Exec. Director of Public Policy

Date: February 6, 2013

Re Legal Analysis Supporting Including Houses of Worship,

Among Private Nonprofit Facilities, Eligible for Federal

Disaster Relief Funds Administered by FEMA Under the

Stafford Act.

Conclusion: The Establishment Clause does not bar the award of federal grants to houses of worship for the repair of facilities damaged in a

natural disaster, in the context of the Stafford Act's ``private

nonprofit facility'' aid program.

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 the subject of my Special Order.

Mr. Speaker, 40 years ago today marks the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous, reckless, and inhumane abandonment of women and babies to abortionists. Forty years of victims, dead babies, wounded women, shattered families. Forty years of government-sanctioned violence against women and children. Since 1973, more than 55 million children have been killed by abortion, a staggering loss of children's precious lives, a death toll that equates to the entire population of England.

The passage of time hasn't changed the fact that abortion is a serious, lethal violation of fundamental human rights; and that women and children deserve better, much better; and that the demands of justice, generosity, and compassion require that the right to life be guaranteed to everyone, regardless of age, sex, race, condition of dependency, disability, or stage of development.

Rather than obscure or dull our consciousness to the unmitigated violence of abortion, the passage of time has only enabled us to see and better understand the innate cruelty of abortion and its horrific legacy--victims--while making us more determined than ever to protect the weakest and most vulnerable and end the mass deception by the abortion industry.

Earlier today, Linda Shrewsbury, an academic and an African American with a degree from Harvard, who had an abortion, told a 40 Years Of Victims press conference:

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.

She goes on to say:

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.

She said she ``dreamed of the volcano of abortion truth that could erupt one day from the grass-roots--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.''

Clearly, Mr. Speaker, there are seemingly ominous present-day signs that hinder ending abortion denial and a reconnection with reality and life. Certainly the re-election of the abortion President Barack Obama, public funding for abortion in the ObamaCare health exchanges that come online in 2014, a massive increase of public funding for abortion, the use of coercion to compel religious believers and entrepreneurs to violate their consciences, slick advertising, and the export of abortion worldwide.

And it is deeply troubling that despite the fact that Planned Parenthood claims direct responsibility for killing over 6 million unborn babies in their clinics, including a record 333,964 abortions in 2011 alone, Planned Parenthood remains President Obama's favorite organization.

Despite these and many obstacles, however, we will never quit. In adversity, our faith and trust in God is tested, but it also deepens and overcomes and forges an indomitable, yet humble, spirit.

The pro-life movement--and I've been in it for 41 years--is comprised of some of the noblest, caring, smart, and selfless people I have ever met. They make up an extraordinarily powerful, nonviolent, faith-filled human rights struggle that is growing in public support, intensity, commitment, and hope.

The compassionate women and men who staff thousands of pregnancy care centers, many of the women being post-abortive themselves who try to save women from that irreversible decision, help women who are experiencing unexpected pregnancies, and they provide tangible assistance and an enormous amount of love and emotional support both before and after the birth of a child.

The pro-life movement is not only on the side of compassion, justice, and inclusion. We are on the right side of responsible science and of history.

Someday future generations will look back on America and wonder how and why such a seemingly enlightened society, so blessed and endowed with education, advanced science, information, wealth, and opportunity, could have failed to protect the innocent and the inconvenient. They will wonder how and why a Nobel Peace Prize-winning President could also simultaneously have been the abortion President.

Dr. Alveda King, niece of the late Dr. Martin King, who had two abortions but is now solidly pro-life, said in one of her speeches:

My Uncle Martin had a dream. He dreamt that we would live

out that which is self-evident, that all men are created

equal. He called on America to admit our wrongs and turn from

them. Today, I call on all of us, regardless of nationality,

race, or religion, to admit our wrongs and turn from them. I

believe that the denial of the right to life is the greatest

injustice we face in the world today. There is no compassion

in killing. There is no justice in writing people out of

the human race.

History, Mr. Speaker, will not look favorably on today's abortion culture. We must, indeed and instead, work tirelessly to replace it with a culture of life.

Mr. Speaker, forty years ago today marks the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous, reckless and inhumane abandonment of women and babies to abortionists.

Forty years of victims--dead babies, wounded women, shattered families.

Forty years of government sanctioned violence against women and children.

Since 1973, more than 55 million children have been killed by abortion--a staggering loss of children's precious lives--a death toll that equates to the entire population of England.

The passage of time hasn't changed the fact that abortion is a serious, lethal violation of fundamental human rights. And that women and children deserve better--much better. And that the demands of justice, generosity and

compassion require that the right to life be guaranteed to everyone, regardless of age, sex, race, condition of dependency, disability, or stage of development.

Rather than obscure or dull our consciences to the unmitigated violence of abortion, the passage of time has only enabled us to see and better understand the innate cruelty of abortion--and its horrific legacy victims--while making us more determined than ever to protect the weakest and most vulnerable, and end mass deception by the abortion industry.

Earlier today, Linda Shrewsbury, an academic and African American with a degree from Harvard who had an abortion told a ``40 Years of Victims'' press conference that: ``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.''

Clearly there are seemingly ominous present-day signs that hinder ending abortion denial and a reconnection with reality and life--the reelection of the abortion President Barack Obama, public funding for abortion in the Obamacare health exchanges that come on-line in 2014, the use of coercion to compel religious believers and entrepreneurs to violate their conscience, and the export of abortion worldwide.

And, it is deeply troubling that despite the fact that Planned Parenthood claims direct responsibility for killing over 6 million unborn babies, including a record 333,964 abortions in 2011 alone, Planned Parenthood remains President Obama's favorite organization.

Despite these and any obstacles, we will never quit. In adversity our faith and trust in God is tested, but it also deepens and overcomes and forges an indomitable yet humble spirit.

The pro-life movement is comprised of some of the noblest, caring, smart and selfless people I have ever met. They make up an extraordinarily powerful, non-violent, faith-filled human rights struggle that is growing in public support, intensity, commitment and hope.

The compassionate women and men who staff thousands of pregnancy care centers throughout America provide women who are experiencing unexpected pregnancies tangible assistance, love and emotional support both before and after the birth of her child.

With malice towards none, even President Obama for whom we must pray, we believe that the nightmare that is abortion on demand will end.

The pro-life movement is not only on the side of compassion, justice, and inclusion; we are on the right side of responsible science and of history.

Someday future generations will look back on America and wonder how and why such a seemingly enlightened society, so blessed and endowed with education, advanced science, information, wealth and opportunity could have failed to protect the innocent and inconvenient. They will wonder how and why a Nobel Peace Prize winning President could also simultaneously have been the Abortion President.

Dr. Alveda King, niece of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, had two abortions but is now pro-life. She said in one speech: ``My Uncle Martin had a dream. He dreamt that we would live out that which is self-evident--that all men are created equal. He called on America to admit our wrongs and turn from them. Today, I call on all of us, regardless of nationality, race or religion, to admit our wrongs and turn from them. I believe that the denial of the right to life is the greatest injustice we face in the world today. There is no compassion in killing. There is no justice in writing people out of the human race.''

History will not look favorably on today's abortion culture. We must instead work tirelessly to replace it with a culture of life.

Pro-lifers celebrate the sanctity of life. Unborn babies are not disposable commodities. We recognize that unborn children, like their older brothers and sisters, have inherent worth, value, and dignity. They are children too. If left alone to grow and mature, they too will become older brothers and sisters--and perhaps parents themselves someday.

Modern medicine and scientific breakthrough--especially the widespread use of ultrasound--have shattered the pernicious myth that unborn children are mere blobs of tissue. It's time to recognize birth merely as a celebratory event in the life of a person--not the beginning of life. And we've got to step up our efforts to educate and persuade. Far too many politicians, judges, journalists and others choose denial and deceptive speech over truth.

Today doctors diagnose illness and disability before birth. New and exciting breakthrough health care interventions for the unborn-- including microsurgeries--are leading to an ever expanding array of successful treatments and cures of sick or disabled unborn babies in need of help. Unborn children are society's littlest patients who like any one of us might need health care.

In stark contrast, abortion methods rip, tear and dismember or chemically poison the fragile bodies of babies and abortion pills cause premature expulsion from the womb and death. There is nothing benign, compassionate, or just about an act that utterly destroys the life of a child and often physically, psychologically, and emotionally harms women. And despite the near total absence of any meaningful reporting by the media, women get hurt and some even die from legal abortions.

According to the most recent Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report, from 1973 to 2008 at least 403 women tragically died in the United States from legal abortion. And that sad fact is almost certainly a significant undercount because the methodology employed by CDC is passive and voluntary and likely to miss instances of both mortality and morbidity.

In the years since CDC's ``most recent report,'' many more women have surely died. Like Tonya Reaves, a 24-year-old woman who died last July from a botched second trimester dismemberment abortion--a D&E--at a Chicago area Planned Parenthood abortion mill.

The abortion industry excels at surface appeal argument and propaganda. Indeed the misleading term ``safe abortion'' purposely misses the point that no abortion--legal or illegal--is ever safe for the baby and that all are fraught with negative health consequences for the mother.

Today, at least 104 credible studies show significant psychological harm, major depression and/or elevated suicide risk in women who abort.

The Times of London reported that, ``[S]enior . . . psychiatrists say that new evidence has uncovered a clear link between abortion and mental illness in women with no previous history of psychological problems.'' They found ``that women who have had abortions have twice the level of psychological problems and three times the level of depression as women who have given birth or who have never been pregnant.''

In 2006, a comprehensive New Zealand study found that 78.6% of the 15-18-year-olds who had abortions displayed symptoms of major depression as compared to 31% of their peers. The study also found that 27% of the 21-25-year-old women who had abortions had suicidal ideations compared to 8% of those who did not have an abortion.

At this morning's ``40 Years of Victims'' press conference courageous post-abortive women, as well as the mother of a minor girl who was transported across state lines to New Jersey to evade Pennsylvania's parental involvement laws spoke eloquently of the anguish of abortion.

Irene Beltran said: ``My entire being was overcome by terror, and I felt deep anguish in the core of my soul when I ended the life of my own child for the sake of convenience. At the clinic I was treated like livestock being herded from one step to the next . . . When the abortionist administered the poison in my stomach I was mortified and shocked because I felt my child kick and turn very hastily. Years later I found out she was being burned and could feel the pain. Since I was 6 months pregnant this would be a two-day process. The second day consisted of the abortionist tearing my daughter out of me--limb from limb, piece by piece. But I did not go back. After feeling my daughter fight for her life I went straight to my mother's home crying for help. She drove me to the Labor and Delivery Department at a local hospital. I arrived at the hospital grasping on the slim chance they could save my daughter, but there was nothing the doctors could do. The effects of the toxin were irreversible.''

Marcia Carroll said even though ``my daughter chose to have the baby, raise it . . .. The father's family arranged a taxi, a train, and subway rides to sneak her across state lines

to New Jersey where his family met them in front of the abortion clinic. . .. They planned, financed, harassed, and ultimately threatened my daughter into having the abortion . . .. As a result of the legal abortion that was completed unbeknownst to me, my daughter suffered years of depression, intense grief, post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, and thoughts and even attempts of suicide.''

Kellie Stauffer spoke of her abortion at the age of 14: ``We all thought abortion would erase the situation I had gotten myself in and we would go on living life the way it was. That was not the case. . . . life sadly was never the same. I hated myself. I tried to numb my pain in any way I could find, drugs, alcohol, food, meaningless relationships, but nothing took away the deep darkness that overwhelmed my soul. . . . She persuaded me to go to a Rachel's vineyard retreat and that weekend saved my life. I allowed myself to feel the forgiveness God had been showing me all along. . . . I will never forget what I did to my first child. I am still brought to my knees in tears at times when I remember the pain I caused her. In response to God's grace and for my daughter's spirit I will be silent no more.''

Olivia Gans Turner said: ``I was not told vital information about the child I was carrying. Including the medical fact that by the time I had an abortion at 12 weeks, my baby already had a beating heart and brain waves! . . . I have not forgotten one moment of that day, and never will. That single day changed my life forever.''

Abortion not only has deleterious effects on women but on children born subsequently to women who have had a previous abortion.

At least 115 studies show a significant association between abortion and subsequent premature births. Researchers Shah and Zao showed a 36% increased risk for preterm birth after one abortion and a staggering 93% increased risk after two.

Similarly, the risk of subsequent children being born with low birth weight increases by 35% after one and 72% after two or more abortions. Another study shows the risk increases 9 times after a woman has had three abortions.

What does this mean for her children? Preterm birth is the leading cause of infant mortality in the industrialized world after congenital anomalies. Preterm infants have a greater risk of suffering from chronic lung disease, sensory deficits, cerebral palsy, cognitive impairments and behavior problems. Low birth weight is similarly associated with neonatal mortality and morbidity.

The extremism of the pro-abortion industry is shocking.

Last spring, the House of Representatives took up a bill to ban sex- selection abortion. The bill garnered a solid majority--246 to 168--in the House. President Obama, however, made it absolutely clear that he would veto the sex-selection abortion prohibition should it be sent to the White House.

While sex-selection abortion almost exclusively targets girls for extermination--simply because they are little girls--the egregious practice remains legal in most states. In fact, only four states-- Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Arizona--and several countries including the United Kingdom proscribe it.

And if that's not shocking enough, many remain unaware of the fact that sex-selection abortion is part of a deliberate plan of population control--a war on women. In other words, abort the girls so they can't grow up someday and have children of their own.

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,'' Hvistendahl writes. ``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.''

Many of you might recall the undercover sting operation by Live Action that 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. As the prime sponsor of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act--the landmark law to combat human trafficking--I found the willingness of Planned Parenthood personnel to exploit young girls and partner with sex traffickers to be absolutely appalling.

Now, Live Action has released sting-operation videos--part of a series, ``Gendercide in America''--that show Planned Parenthood personnel advising undercover female investigators how to procure a sex-selection abortion. Caught on tape, one staffer tells an investigator to wait until her baby is 5 months along to get an ultrasound that reveals the sex of the child. Then, if it's a girl, kill it.

For most of us, ``it's a girl'' is cause for enormous joy, happiness and celebration. But far too often, this phrase can be a death sentence.

These cruel, anti-woman policies have had horrible consequences everywhere, especially in China (and India as well).

China's one child per couple policy in effect since 1979 constitutes massive crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg Nazi war crimes tribunal properly construed forced abortion as a crime against humanity--nothing in human history compares to the magnitude of China's 34-year assault on women and children.

In China, brothers and sisters are illegal in most instances.

The price for failing to conform to the one child per couple policy is unbearably high. A Chinese woman who becomes pregnant without a permit will be put under mind-bending pressure to abort. She knows that ``out-of-plan'' illegal children are denied education, health care, and marriage, and that fines for bearing a child without a birth permit can be 10 times the average annual income of two parents, and those families that can't or won't pay are jailed and their homes smashed in.

If the brave woman still refuses to submit, she may be held in a punishment cell, or, if she flees, her relatives may be held and, very often, beaten. Group punishments will be used to socially ostracize her. And her colleagues and neighbors will be denied birth permits. If the woman is by some miracle still able to resist this pressure, she may be physically dragged to the operating table and forced to undergo an abortion.

Over the years, I have chaired 43 congressional human rights hearings focused in whole or in part on China's one child policy. At one, the principal witness, Wuijan, a Chinese student attending a U.S. university, testified about how her child was forcibly murdered by the government. She said, ``[T]he room was full of moms who had just gone through a forced abortion. Some moms were crying. Some moms were mourning. Some moms were screaming. And one mom was rolling on the floor with unbearable pain.'' Then Wuijan said it was her turn, and through her tears she described what she called her journey in hell.''

Not only has the Obama Administration turned a blind eye to the atrocities being committed under the one child policy, but continues to provide financial support--contrary to U.S. law--to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), an organization that supports, plans, implements, defends and whitewashes the Chinese government's brutal program.

Twenty nine years ago--on May 9, 1984--I authored the first amendment ever to a foreign aid bill to deny funding to organizations such as the UNFPA that are complicit with China's forced abortion and involuntary sterilization policy. It passed. After all these years, it is astonishing that policy makers--including and especially the Obama Administration--remain indifferent or worse, supportive, of these massive crimes against women and children. The Obama Administration has long enabled this cruel policy by its silence and financial support to the tune of $50 million a year to the UNFPA.

The result of this policy is a nightmarish ``brave new world'' with no precedent in human history, where women are psychologically wounded, girls fall victim to sex-selective abortion (in some provinces 140 boys are born for every 100 girls), and most children grow up without brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles or cousins.

Women bear the major brunt of the one child policy not only as victimized mothers. Due to the male preference in China's society and the limitation of the family size to one child, the policy has directly contributed to what is accurately described as gendercide--the deliberate extermination of a girl--born or unborn--simply because she happens to be a girl.

As a result of the Chinese government's barbaric attack on mothers and their children, there are some 100 million missing daughters in China today.

Because of the missing girls--China today has become the human sex trafficking magnate of the world. Women and young girls from outside the country are being sold as commodities throughout China--a direct consequence of the one child policy. Several prominent people including Ted Turner have suggested that the United States--indeed the world-- needs to follow China's example and promulgate a one child per couple policy.

Mr Speaker, despite the best and slickest market branding money can buy, the stubborn fact remains that Planned Parenthood clinics are among the most dangerous places on Earth for a child. Planned Parenthood's own personnel are now taking a second look and, thanks to ultrasound, are clearly seeing what is being done to millions of children in the womb.

One of those abortion providers who took a second look and walked away is Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood abortion

clinic director. In her book ''Unplanned,'' Abby Johnson exposes the duplicity and cruelty of what really goes on behind closed doors at a Planned Parenthood clinic. In it she writes how she witnessed and assisted in an abortion of a 13-week-old baby by holding the ultrasound probe, and as she pointed out in the book, it was the first ultrasound- guided abortion at that facility.

She writes in the book: ``The details startled me. At 13 weeks you could clearly see the profile of the head, both arms, legs, and even tiny fingers and toes. With my eyes glued to the image of this perfectly formed baby, I watched as a new image emerged on the video screen. The cannula, a straw-shaped instrument attached to the end of the suction tube, had been inserted into the uterus and was nearing the baby's side. It looked like an invader on the screen: out of place, wrong. It just looked wrong.''

She goes on to write: ``My heart sped up; time slowed. I didn't want to look, but I didn't want to stop looking either. At first, the baby didn't seem aware of the cannula. It gently probed the baby's side, and for a quick second I felt relief But I couldn't shake an inner disquiet that was quickly mounting to horror as I watched the screen.'' Remember, this is an abortion clinic director saying this.

``The next movement was a sudden jerk of a tiny foot of the baby as he started kicking, as if trying to move away from the probing invader.''

``As the cannula pressed in, the baby began struggling to turn and twist away. It seemed clear to me that the fetus could feel the cannula, and it did not like the feeling. And then the doctor's voice broke through, startling me: `Beam me up, Scotty,' the abortionist said lightheartedly to the nurse. He was telling her to turn on the suction, in an abortion the suction isn't turned on until the doctor feels he has the cannula in exactly the right place.

Abbey Johnson, abortion clinic director, went on to write: ``I had a sudden urge to yell, Stop; to shake the woman and say, Look at what's happening to your baby. Wake up; hurry. Stop them. But even as I was thinking those words, I thought of my own hand and saw my own hand holding the probe. I was one of them performing this act'' of abortion.

``My eyes shot back to the screen. The cannula was already being rotated by the doctor and now I could see the tiny body violently twisting with it. For the briefest moment it looked as if the baby was being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then the little body crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tiny perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube. And then everything was gone. The image of that tiny dead baby mangled and sucked away kept replaying in my mind. What was in this woman's womb just a moment ago was alive. It wasn't tissue. It wasn't cells. This was a human baby, fighting for life. A battle was lost in the blink of an eye.

``What I have told people for years''--8 years as a clinic director at a Planned Parenthood clinic-- ``what I have told people for years,'' Abby Johnson continues, ``what I believed and taught and defended is a lie.'' Abby Johnson is now an amazing pro-life leader.

Mr. Speaker, as we stand here on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives this afternoon marking 40 years since seven members of the U.S. Supreme Court imposed abortion on demand for all nine months on the United States of America, the legacy of Roe v Wade--dead babies and injured women, shattered families--begs reappraisal. And courageous women like Abby Johnson are showing the way.

Mr. Speaker, we have a duty to protect. The struggle to re-establish durable protections for the most discriminated minority in America today--unborn babies-- is worth any personal sacrifice, inconvenience or pain.

We cannot allow the violence against women and their children to continue.

I would like now to yield to my good friend and colleague, Marsha Blackburn.

I want to thank my good friend and colleague, Marsha Blackburn, for her exemplary leadership and for her very eloquent statement today.

I'd like to yield to Congresswoman Ann Wagner, the gentlelady from Missouri.

Thank you very much for that very powerful statement.

I yield to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Nunnelee).

Thank you so much, Mr. Nunnelee.

I yield to Mr. Pompeo of the Fourth District of Kansas.

I yield to Vicky Hartzler.

I thank the gentlelady for her very eloquent statement.

I yield to my good friend and colleague, Mr. Huelskamp.

It is a high honor and privilege to yield to the distinguished majority leader, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Cantor).

I want to thank the distinguished majority leader for his exemplary leadership for many years, but especially as majority leader, and for reminding all of us that the unborn child, especially over the last 2 decades, has become the littlest patient, where microsurgeries and interventions can save children and enhance their life. I appreciate his extraordinary leadership.

I now yield to our distinguished colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Walberg).

I now yield to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce).

Thank you very much, Mr. Pearce, for that very moving statement.

I now yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Harris).

I now yield to the distinguished obstetrician, Dr. Roe, Phil Roe, from Tennessee.

Dr. Roe, thank you very much. Thank you for your great leadership here.

I would like to now yield to my good friend and colleague, Dr. Fleming, a medical doctor as well, from the great State of Louisiana.

I would like to yield to my good friend, Mr. Schweikert, the gentleman from Arizona.

I thank you so very much for sharing not only with the Congress, but with the country, that very moving story.

I would like to now yield to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King).

Will the gentleman yield just briefly to my good friend, Ms. Foxx, because she does have to leave, and then we'll go right back.

I yield to the gentleman from Iowa.

I thank my good friend for yielding, and I applaud his tremendous leadership over the years in defense of the culture of life, for being consistent on all human rights issues--from child soldiers and combating that abuse of children to the abuse of unborn children by way of abortion. So I thank him for that. I would just make a few points, because we are coming to a close, Mr. Speaker.

Today, doctors diagnose illness and disability before birth. New and exciting breakthrough health care interventions for the unborn, including microsurgeries, are leading to an ever-expanding array of successful treatments and cures of sick or disabled unborn babies. A few other Members have made this point very clearly, as do I, which is that unborn children are society's littlest patients, and they might need health care just like any one of us.

In stark contrast, abortion methods rip, tear, dismember or chemically poison the fragile bodies of unborn babies to death, and abortion pills cause premature expulsion from the womb and death. There is nothing benign, compassionate, or just about an act that utterly destroys the life of a child and often physically, psychologically, and emotionally harms women. And despite the near total absence of any meaningful reporting by the news media, women get hurt and even die from legal abortions.

According to the most recent Centers for Disease Control report, from 1973 to 2008, at least 403 women tragically died in the United States from legal abortion. And that sad fact is almost certainly a significant undercount because the methodology employed by CDC is passive and voluntary and likely to miss instances of both mortality and morbidity.

In the years since CDC's ``most recent report,'' many more women have surely died, like Tonya Reaves, a 24-year-old woman who died last July from a botched second trimester dismemberment abortion, a D&E, at a Chicago area Planned Parenthood abortion mill.

The abortion industry, Mr. Speaker, excels at surface appeal argument and at propaganda. Indeed, the misleading term ``safe abortion'' purposefully misses the point that no abortion, legal or illegal, is ever safe for the baby, and all are fraught with negative health consequences for the mother.

Today, at least 104 credible studies show significant psychological harm, major depression, and/or elevated suicide risk to women who abort. The Times of London reported that:

Senior psychiatrists say that new evidence has uncovered a

clear link between abortion and mental illness in women who

have had no previous history of psychological problems.

They've found that women who've had abortions have twice the

level of psychological problems, three times the level of

depression as women who have given birth or who have never

been pregnant.

One comprehensive study out of New Zealand in 2006 found that 78.6 percent of the 15- to 18-year-olds who had had abortions displayed symptoms of major depression as compared to 31 percent of their peers.

Mr. Speaker, there are at least 115 studies that show significant association between abortion and subsequent premature births. You never read about this in the news media.

Researchers Shah and Zao show a 36 percent increase for pre-term birth after one abortion and a staggering 93 percent increased risk after two.

What does this mean for children? Pre-term birth is the leading cause of infant mortality in the industrialized world after congenital anomalies. Pre-term infants have a greater risk of suffering chronic lung disease, sensory deficits, cerebral palsy, cognitive impairments, and behavioral problems. Low birth weight is similarly associated with neonatal mortality and morbidity.

These are consequences that are visited upon a woman later on. She's never told this at the abortion clinic that subsequent children that she will have later in her life could suffer prematurity and low birth weight.

And, finally, the extremism of the pro-abortion industry is shocking.

Last spring, the House of Representatives took up Trent Frank's bill to ban sex-selection abortion. The bill garnered a solid majority, 246- 168 in the House. President Obama, however, made it absolutely clear that he would veto the sex-selection abortion prohibition should it be sent to the White House.

While sex selection targets almost exclusively girls for extermination, simply because they're girls, the egregious practice remains legal in most of our States. In fact, only four States-- Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Arizona--and several countries, including the United Kingdom, prohibit sex-selection abortion. And yet we have not been able to get that legislation enacted into law, and it's opposed by President Obama.

Mr. Speaker, we need to stand up for life. Again, I want to thank my good friend and colleague from Nebraska for having this second Special Order on defending life. And like Jeff, I do look forward to the March for Life on January 25 where we will all rally in defense of the defenseless.

Thirty-three.

No, I did not.

I thank the gentleman for yielding and for raising that important issue.

The People's Republic of China doesn't have a pro-life movement per se. The government is a dictatorship. Regrettably, going back to 1979, they enacted with great push and encouragement from the United States and from the West, Europe especially, a one-child-per-couple policy where brothers and sisters are illegal, where women are systematically, forcibly aborted, and forced sterilization is commonplace to achieve quotas. Not only does a woman have to get a birth authorization from the Government of China to have a baby; if she has an out-of-plan birth, she is aborted forcibly.

Over the years, as chairman of the China Commission and as chairman of the Human Rights Committee of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I've chaired 43 congressional hearings on human rights in China; and many of those were focused on, as you pointed out, women who had to be behind screens to tell their story about the gross indignity, the exploitation, the crimes against humanity that had been committed against them.

In China today, there are approximately 100 million, maybe more, missing daughters, the direct consequence of sex-selection abortion and what is often referred to as gendercide, the deliberate killing of a little girl simply because she is a girl.

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. And almost no one knows about this. You'll never read about this in the local papers. You don't hear about it on the major news broadcasts. She writes:

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.

Hvistendahl writes:

If a reliable sex-determination technology could be made

available to a mass market, there was a rough consensus that

sex-selection abortion would be an effective,

uncontroversial, and ethical way of reducing the global

population.

What that means is that you kill the girl child in the womb, you end one life, and that girl who will never grow up to be a woman because she has been exterminated because she happened to be a girl, will never be a mother. So it is a means of population control. It is absolutely an egregious violation of human rights, and yet our own President refuses to support a ban on sex-selection abortion. He talked about we the people and inclusion yesterday. Where's the inclusion of all unborn babies, but those who are particularly targeted for elimination, the girl child?

And I would also add, finally, Live Action, an undercover sting operation that they had done--and it's on the Web, you can watch it, you can watch the raw footage, liveaction.org--in their series, ``Gendercide in America,'' they showed Planned Parenthood personnel in this country advising undercover female investigators how to procure sex-selection abortions. I watched that and was sickened by the admonishment, the so-called counseling that was all caught on tape.

One staffer tells the investigator to wait until her baby is 5 months along, get the ultrasound. That's when you can determine the gender of the child, boy or girl, and if it's a girl, that's when you can kill it.

And it was all made very clear. The investigators were laying out a scenario where, if it's a girl, I want the girl child to be destroyed. And there was Planned Parenthood accommodating that to the nth degree.

I thank my friend for yielding and for raising again another very important point. You know, at several of these hearings, which were covered very scarcely by the news media, unfortunately, we had some powerful witnesses from women who are actually the victims of coercive abortion.

Over the many years we've had such hearings, and when they tell their story, and they talk about the helplessness and almost hopelessness of the situation, trying to evade family planning cadres in China as they hunt them down.

You know, most people are unaware of the fact that it begins with economic coercion. If you have a baby out of plan, you are fined if you do not voluntarily walk into the abortion mill for the child to be destroyed. And many women want those children.

One of the women we had testify, her name was Wuijan. She was a Chinese student attending a U.S. university, and part of her testimony--these are her words--she said, when she was rounded up, literally grabbed by the family planning cadres and thrown into a van, totally against her will, she said:

The room was full of moms who had just gone through a

forced abortion. Some moms were crying. Some moms were

mourning. Some moms were screaming. And one mom was rolling

on the floor with unbearable pain.

Then Wuijan said that it was her turn, and through her tears she described her journey into hell. Here is a woman, just like so many others that we heard from, who were literally trussed, picked up, arrested.

I had a woman back in the 1990s, who was pretty much smuggled out of China, who ran one of the family planning centers in Fujian Province, and she self-described herself: ``By day I was a monster, by night a wife and

mother of one.'' And she talked about it, and she got asylum here eventually.

But she talked about how she would use every part of the police state to ensure that women, even if they evaded family planning cadres up to the ninth month--to drag her in and to kill the baby, and if it's very late in the pregnancy, with a poison shot of formaldehyde or some other substance right to the soft part of the brain to kill the baby.

These are crimes against humanity. They are ever-present throughout China. And again, they're missing 100 million girls, maybe more, because of gendercide and the loss of life. There's no precedent. There's no example that even comes close of a government using abortion as a tool of population control and the like. And it came right out of the population control movement and what happened in the early or late sixties and especially into the seventies, right here in the United States.

In 1984, I say to my friend, Mr. Fortenberry, 29 years ago I offered the first amendment on this floor, from this podium, to a foreign aid bill to deny funding to any organization, such as the U.N. Population Fund, that is complicit in China's forced abortion policy and involuntary sterilization. It passed, and it morphed into what became known as the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, offered on the appropriations bill by Congressman Jack Kemp.

After all of these years, it is astonishing to me that we still have so many Members of Congress, we have an administration, in the Obama administration, that is, at best, indifferent, and I would say, at worst supportive of these crimes by giving money to the groups that are on the ground enabling these crimes against women. The Obama administration has enabled this cruel policy by its silence and its financial support to the tune of some $50 million a year to the U.N. Population Fund.

We passed, in this House, a prohibition. They, unfortunately, ignore it, do findings that do not comport with the reality on the ground, and then end up sending this money.

And I met with a woman whose name is Peng Peiyun, who ran the family planning program in China, I say to my friend, Mr. Fortenberry, for several hours in a conversation in Beijing. She kept coming back to the fact that the U.N. Population Fund was there on the ground and found nothing but voluntary abortions. Of course, there are a loss of lives, too, but no coercion. So the whitewashing that the U.N. Population Fund has been able to provide to this egregious violation of women's rights in China, and now we today, under the Obama administration, are funding it, Mr. Fortenberry. So it's something that has to end. We should be on the side of life and respect, not enabling such terrible things.

One of the things that is so noble about the pro-life movement is that it loves and cares for women during the time of their crisis. And if they do procure an abortion, they are there, again, with Project Rachel and all of these outreaches to help women find reconciliation and peace.

And men, too, have lost track of the number of women we have met that found that peace. We had four women today at the 40 Years of Victims who told their story of the terrible crisis of the abortion but also the reconciliation and peace that they found later.

You make a very good point, Mr. Fortenberry, about the young generation. I have never seen more pro-lifers at the March for Life than we are seeing now. And I went to the first one back in 1974 with my wife, Marie, and then made every one thereafter. When I speak in schools, I used to get a great deal of pushback in answer to a question on the right to life. There are still people who push back, but many students say, It's life. Ultrasound has helped enormously. It's a window to the womb. We all remember Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the founder of NARAL, who became a pro-lifer. He said, ``If wombs had windows, abortion would end.'' The ultrasound is a window to the womb. And you can see that magnificent unborn child moving, shaking around, sucking his or her thumb, doing somersaults inside the womb. Blobs of tissue and protoplasm don't do this.

I think this young generation also has another perspective as well. One of my favorite musicals is ``Les Miserables.'' My wife and I have seen it twice--once in New York, once here in Washington. And now the movie. There's a very haunting song in ``Les Miserables,'' a song by Marius, one of the chief people in that musical, Victor Hugo's ``Les Miserables,'' and it's called, ``Empty Chairs and Empty Tables.'' And he says, ``There's a grief that can't be spoken, there's a pain,'' and it goes on and on, ``Empty chairs and empty tables where my friends will live no more.''

We have empty chairs and empty tables. A third of this generation has been killed by abortion. You look to your left, you look to your right in a classroom or at a diner, there are missing children and now young adults even up to the age of 40, since 40 years ago Roe v. Wade was handed down. Empty chairs, empty tables. And I would add to that, empty cribs.

I thank my good friend for yielding, and I strongly support Mr. Frelinghuysen's amendment.

Madam Chair, gaps in homeowners insurance coverage and a growing realization that there will be major tax receipt losses from towns that have had their tax bases eviscerated by Sandy is further compounded in a State that's reeling from a body blow with no precedent. All of this has led to crippling shortfalls. Towns have serious gaps in needed resources. They need our help. The $33 billion Frelinghuysen amendment fills those gaps for people in need of housing assistance, public infrastructure destroyed or damaged by Sandy will get a huge boost, and economic revitalization will accelerate.

I've lost count, Madam Chair, of the number of my constituents who either didn't have flood insurance for their homes or who had an inadequate amount of coverage. To compound their misery, many have upside-down mortgages, and they desperately need our help. The Frelinghuysen amendment raises to $16 billion from $3.9 billion in the Rogers amendment, funds to aid in the relief of homeowners, buyouts, and home elevation. It will also provide very critical moneys for the Army Corps of Engineers. Where the Army Corps had projects in place, there was a mitigation of the amount of damage to infrastructure and to homes. We need this additional funding to protect homes, businesses so millions of people can get on with their lives.

I thank my good friend for yielding.

Madam Chair, I rise in strong support of the amendment offered by my good friend and colleague, Mr. Runyan, to ensure that the funding in this bill is targeted to those fishery disasters resulting from Superstorm Sandy.

Recreational angling contributes more than $125 billion annually to the American economy, Madam Speaker, in addition to creating and sustaining over 1 million jobs.

New Jersey has a long tradition of fishing along our 130-mile shoreline. Recreational and commercial fishing generates over $1.3 billion in New Jersey in economic activity and supports 8,500 Jersey jobs.

This vital industry not only creates and sustains good jobs but boosts fishery conservation efforts, tourism, and contributes significantly to the economy in coastal communities. The disaster declaration on November 16 and the modest funding provided in the pending legislation will help rebuild the damaged and destroyed infrastructure so that this industry can recover and return to pre- storm levels.

I urge all members to support the Runyan amendment.

I thank my good friend for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the rule. When emergencies strike, large or small, Americans can always be counted on to assist and to support the victims. At our core, we are a Nation of Good Samaritans. After Superstorm Sandy came ashore in New Jersey and devastated the region, first responders courageously rescued people trapped in homes and cars. They often had minimal regard for their own personal welfare, safety and well-being. Everyone rallied around the clock.

Governor Chris Christie, Emergency Management personnel, the National Guard, police and fire, elected officials, the Monmouth County OEM director Sheriff Shaun Golden were absolutely tenacious and effective, and our local mayors were like NFL quarterbacks--running the plays, making calls day by day, hour by hour. Faith-based organizations helped feed and clothe and shelter. Private voluntary organizations were on the scene in droves. Our neighbors to the north, west, and south poured in to the State to help restore power and remove fallen trees. Words are inadequate to convey my--our--appreciation.

Within weeks, however, the emergency phase seamlessly matriculated into the recovery phase--the flip side of the same coin. Now the big question is this: will the feds have our backs as we strive to recover? It is an absolutely arduous process. I believe that we will. Any delay in appropriating sufficient funds will likely stall a comprehensive and robust recovery.

Sandy was the most destructive storm ever in our region and, arguably, the second or third most costly in America's history. The Governor's office has estimated the damage in my State alone to be $36.9 billion. Homes like this one--22,000 homes like this one-- completely and totally destroyed. Another 324,000 homes damaged; 41,000 people can't return to those homes--they're still not fixed. Businesses also took it on the chin: 19,000 New Jersey businesses suffered damage of a quarter of a million dollars or more.

Three-quarters of New Jersey businesses were hurt by Sandy. When asked, they put the small business loss at $8.3 billion. No wonder 100,000 storm-related unemployment claims have been filed. The Governor's office points out that public facilities and infrastructure sustained the same losses of some $7 billion. Boardwalks were snapped like toothpicks, beaches have eroded, and some have been radically reconfigured.

Significantly more funds are needed if New Jersey and our good friends in New York and other Sandy impacted areas are to recover. The Frelinghuysen amendment is absolutely crucial. We are not crying wolf here, I say to my colleagues. There are huge gaps. People who have filed for insurance claims find insurance has covered only this much. How do they ever recover? The same goes for the infrastructure in New Jersey. 860,000 people every single day use New Jersey transit. That infrastructure has been demolished--locomotives, cars, tracks as well as stations. Critical Army Corps projects need to be reconstructed and repaired, while new initiatives need to be funded. We need this money. And we need it now.