Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to come before the House tonight in a continuous series that this Member of Congress had the privilege of beginning scarcely a month ago, but a series of speeches that I hope will periodically and…
Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to come before the House tonight in a continuous series that this Member of Congress had the privilege of beginning scarcely a month ago, but a series of speeches that I hope will periodically and intermittently be a part of the fabric of my congressional career for howsoever long the Lord permits me to serve here.
I simply call it, Mr. Speaker, the case for life, and it is my ambition from time to time to time to come onto this blue and gold carpet of this Capitol and speak to my colleagues, and anyone else who may be listening, on the moral and intellectual and historical arguments for the sanctity of human life; and to perhaps, Mr. Speaker, in some small way enliven the moral sensibility of a Nation and be a part of an ongoing debate in America on this topic.
Mr. Speaker, this is a debate that continues at this very hour in the other body of this Congress. At this very moment, I am pleased to say, as a pro-life Member of Congress, that the United States Senate is at this very moment passing a conference report on the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. That legislation, as of today, will have three times passed the Congress since 1995 and will be delivered for the first time to the willing desk of President George W. Bush, where, unlike the veto stamp of President Clinton that met the ban of partial-birth abortion not once but twice, President George W. Bush, upon returning from his tour of the Asia-Pacific Rim, will no doubt, in an emotional ceremony, put his pen to this legislation and end a practice that has no place in civilized society.
So it is especially poignant for me, just a few steps down the hallway from that Chamber, to rise tonight and continue my discussion of the case for life. And particularly tonight, Mr. Speaker, I feel prompted to speak about abortion and American women. You see, it has always been my belief, since first having my conscience enlivened on this issue, that there is not one victim of abortion, but there are two. There is undoubtedly the nascent human life that is ended abruptly and in darkness, but there is the other life that goes on that pays a price that psychologists are talking about today, but many Americans simply choose to ignore.
There are also other voices that I want to reflect on tonight as well, chiefly from our own history. As we think about the great American women who led this Nation in increasing measure towards equal status for women in voting rights and in property and in station in our society, women like Susan B. Anthony, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton come to mind.
I just came from a stroll in the rotunda, Mr. Speaker, where I grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled the names of a few of those heroic women that actually appear on a statute at the very center of our Capitol. In the rotunda, there is a statute that bears the likeness of the three great heroes of the suffrage movement. Two of them I would like to speak about tonight as we talk about great American women and abortion, but then also talking about what women of America today face in the struggle over the sanctity of human life.
One of the faces on that statute is Susan B. Anthony, a name that is almost like mom and apple pie for most Americans. Susan B. Anthony was born February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts. She was brought up in a Quaker family that had long activist traditions. Early in life, she developed a deep sense, historians tell us, of justice and what could only be described as moral zeal.
After teaching for 15 years, Susan B. Anthony became active in the temperance movement. Because she was a woman, she was not allowed to speak at rallies, and this experience, as well as her acquaintance with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, led her to help form what became the Women's Movement in 1852. Soon afterwards, she would dedicate her entire life to winning women not only the right to vote, Mr. Speaker, but Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were about winning women a seat at the civic table; the opportunity not to be viewed, as women were in some aspects of common law, as the property of their husbands, but rather to be seen as coequal heirs of everything that freedom offers.
Ignoring opposition and abuse, Susan B. Anthony traveled, lectured, and canvassed across the Nation for the vote. She also campaigned for the abolition of slavery, women's rights to their own property and earnings, and even women's labor organizations. In 1900, she achieved a major victory in convincing the University of Rochester to admit women for the first time in their storied history.
Susan B. Anthony, who had never married, and was remembered as an aggressive and compassionate person with a keen mind and the ability to inspire, she remained active in the movement that she began until her death in March of 1906.
And Susan B. Anthony was pro-life. Let me read, if I may, from her publication, ``The Revolution,'' on this topic, published July 8, 1869. Susan B. Anthony wrote: ``No matter what the motive, love or ease or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed.'' Referring to abortion. She went on to write: ``It will burden her conscience in life; it will burden her soul in death. But, oh,'' she wrote, ``oh thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime.''
So wrote Susan B. Anthony, words that we will reflect on before I take my seat tonight. Brokenhearted words of the suffering of the unborn innocent and also of the suffering of the American woman who would burden her conscience in life and burden her soul in death, but of the guilt of the man who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to perform the abortion.
Susan B. Anthony, memorialized in marble in the rotunda of the United States Capitol, a woman whose name is synonymous with the voting rights and the equal status that women of 21st century America enjoy, was pro- life and understood the moral consequences of the act on an American woman and the deplorable position of a man that would force the outcome.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton also appears on the monument in the rotunda. And she, like Susan B. Anthony, her friend and colleague and colaborer for women's issues in America, was pro-life. Elizabeth Cady, the daughter of Daniel Cady, a lawyer and a politician, was born in Jonestown, New York, 12 November 1815. She studied law under her father, who became a New York Supreme Court judge, and during that period of time she became a very strong advocate for women's rights.
In 1840, Elizabeth married the lawyer, Henry B. Stanton. The couple became active in the American antislavery movement, and later that year Stanton and Lucretia Mott traveled to London as delegates to the World Antislavery Convention. Both women, history records, were furious when they, like the British women at the convention, were refused the permission to speak at the meeting to denounce slavery.
Stanton later recalled, ``we Resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home and form a society to advocate the rights of women.'' And so she did. But it was not until 1848 that Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. Stanton's resolution, that it was ``The duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the sacred right to the elective franchise,'' was passed, and this became the focus of the group's campaign for years to come.
In 1866, Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone established the American Equal Rights Association. The following year, the association became active in Kansas where Negro suffrage and women's suffrage were to be decided in a popular
vote, although both ideas were sadly rejected at the polls. Stanton was a historian, a scholar, and one of the founders of the American Woman Suffrage Association formed in the 1880s and from which the suffragette movement was born that ultimately resulted in the passage and adoption of the 19th amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.
This great American woman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, is by all definitions a hero of American women. Like Susan B. Anthony, her friend, who also appears on that extraordinary monument in the Rotunda, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was pro-life, and unapologetically so. Think about these two women who appear on a miniature version of Mount Rushmore right here in the Capitol. We have three women who essentially represent a life-size smaller version of Mount Rushmore for women's issues in America; and they were women committed to equal rights, to the right to vote, and they were women committed to the right to life.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton classified abortion as a form of infanticide. She wrote in a letter to Julia Ward Howe, which is recorded in Howe's diary at Harvard University library on October 16, 1873, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, ``When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.''
Elizabeth Cady Stanton in essence saw a connection, Mr. Speaker, between that vile reality that was part of American life that the woman herself was property and the belief that an unborn child within the woman was property as well. She saw them as equal evils, related together; and so they are. On 12 March, 1868, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, ``There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as this,'' referring to abortion, ``but where shall it be found, at least where it begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women.''
Elizabeth Cady Stanton looked at abortion that was a reality in America in 1868 and said the antidote to end this evil is to raise women up. She saw abortion as a natural consequence of the subordination of women in our society. It is an astounding historical fact and a dark irony, Mr. Speaker, when one thinks of the extraordinary sacrifices and advancements of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the great American women that won women their equal status in our society, that that same momentum would be used in 1973 to rejustify the practice of abortion, which those same heroic American women loathed to the depths of their being.
Think about those words, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the three heroes of the women's movement in America that is memorialized in this Capitol building in stone. In the Rotunda where only Presidents, Alexander Hamilton, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., are memorialized, there are also these three women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw a relationship between reducing women to property and reducing the unborn children growing within them to property.
Let me read these words again. She said, ``There must be a remedy for even such a crying evil as this, but where shall it be found, at least where it begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women.'' A powerful thought that the heroes of the suffragette movement would look to future generations and say that the abortions that were taking place in the middle 19th century would some day go away, we would no longer treat unborn children as property if we could achieve the day when women were not viewed as property.
Alice Paul is credited as one of the leading figures responsible for the passage of the 19th amendment, which is the women's suffragette amendment extending to women the right to vote in the Constitution of the United States of America. Alice Paul was raised as a Quaker, attended Swarthmore College and worked at the New York College Settlement while attending the New York School of Social Work. She left for England in 1906 to work in a settlement house movement there for 3 years. She was Chair of a major committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association within a year, in her mid-twenties.
In England she had taken part in the women's suffragette movement, even participating in hunger strikes to make her point. She brought back this sense, some would say, of militancy, I would say more generously of urgency, to the women's movement in America. It was that urgency that characterized the life of Alice Paul.
Her emphasis on a Federal constitutional amendment for suffrage was at times at odds even with some within the women's movement; and after the 1920 victory for the Federal amendment, Alice Paul became involved in the struggle to pass an Equal Rights Amendment, which actually passed this Congress in the year 1970, was sent to the States, and it failed. Paul died in 1977 in New Jersey with the heated battle of the Equal Rights Amendment having brought her international acclaim.
Like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton before her, Alice Paul was pro-life. Alice Paul said famously, and remember now, this is Alice Paul, born January 1885, died 1977, essentially the author of the Equal Rights Amendment, seen even as a young woman as one of the principal driving forces behind the constitutional amendment which won women the right to vote; Alice Paul was pro-life. It is an astonishing thing to think about, that the author of the Equal Rights Amendment, which I scarcely doubt I would have supported for a variety of cultural arguments, but someone who undoubtedly would be a hero of feminists to this day, and Alice Paul said, ``Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.''
Let me say again, hoping that somewhere in America those words land with a thud in the conscience of a feminist, that these women who are rightly remembered as heroes of the women's movement in America, a woman in Alice Paul who even in her twenties was seen as a driving force behind the constitutional amendment that won women the right to vote, seen as instrumental in the passage of the 19th amendment, and then would go on, however I might disagree with her, to be the author of the Equal Rights Amendment which passed this Congress in 1970, some 33 years ago.
Alice Paul would say, ``Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.''
Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul knew and spoke the truth. And so it ever was of women who achieved great distinction in the cause of women's rights in America from the 19th century through the 20th century, until 1973 when women's issues became simply another way of speaking about the right to have an abortion.
It is an extraordinary irony of history, Mr. Speaker, to think that a women's movement that was born on names like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, that was born on the moral consciousness of women, who said I am not property to be owned by a man, and who understood that that unborn child within them likewise should never be seen as property, that that same women's movement in 1973 would be hijacked by those whose moral view of the sanctity of human life is diametrically opposed to those that founded the women's movement in America.
Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women, so said Alice Paul, author of the Equal Rights Amendment, and I agree. It is an exploitation of women for physical and emotional reasons. Let me speak to those tonight as I conclude this portion of the case for life, abortion, and American women.
There are many who believe that abortion is safe in America. But truthfully, despite the use of local anesthesia, a full 97 percent of women that have abortions report experiencing pain during the procedure, which more than a third describe as intense, according to medical studies, severe, or very severe. Compared to other pains, researchers have rated the pain from abortion as more painful than a bone fracture, about the same as a cancer pain, although not as painful as amputation, according to medical experts.
There are some, including former President Bill Clinton, who used to repeat the mantra that it was his goal that abortion would be safe, legal and rare; but abortion is not safe for women, Mr. Speaker. Complications
are common. According to medical experts, bleeding, hemorrhaging, laceration of the cervix, menstrual disturbance, inflammation of reproductive organs, bowel and bladder perforation, and serious infection are commonplace in the aftermath of the most routine abortions in America. Even more harmful than the short-term pain, which women describe as severe, are the potential long-term physical complications that we never talk about in America.
And when I say ``we,'' I mean those who support the right to an abortion and even those of us in the pro-life movement. I will never forget President Clinton's Surgeon General saying, so thoughtfully, that one particular denomination of Christianity needed to get over their ``love affair with the fetus.'' So said Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. Despite the horrific aspects of her comment, the truth is that even we, in the pro-life movement, have not thought enough about the other victim of abortion as well, for there are, as I said at the opening of this Case for Life, two victims. We grieve the loss of unborn life, but we need to speak more boldly about the impact on American women, physical and emotional, that abortion extracts.
Among those long-term physical complications, Mr. Speaker, for example, overzealous curettage, a medical procedure, can damage the lining of the uterus and lead to permanent infertility. Overall, women who have abortions face an increased risk of tubal pregnancy and more than double the risk of future sterility. Perhaps the most important are that all the risks of these sorts of complications, along with the risk of future miscarriage, increases with each subsequent abortion. I am not altogether sure that women that make their way into clinics know that, that with each abortion they risk infertility, sterility or when the time comes that they decide to say yes to life, that they may be greeted with the heartbreak of miscarriage in increasing measure. More controversially, according to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, there is strong evidence that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. A study by the Institute of more than 1,800 women in 1994, which was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found that overall women having abortions increased their risk of getting breast cancer before the age of 45 by 50 percent. For women under 18 with no previous pregnancies, having an abortion after the eighth week increased the risk of breast cancer, according to this medical study, by 800 percent. Women with a family history of breast cancer fared even worse. All 12 women participating in the study who had abortions before 18 and had a family history of breast cancer themselves contracted breast cancer before the age of 45. I say this as someone who has consistently supported research with the National Institutes of Health to confront breast cancer. I have had dear friends beset by this scourge and disease and I do not mean to speak in any way insensitively about it or in any way to associate breast cancer with abortion, that one fits the other, but rather simply to cite the research, that we can hear the truth echoing perhaps from this place tonight that according to the medical community and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, there is strong evidence that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer and women should know that.
There are also psychological consequences to American women for abortion. It seems to me that this may have been in the mind of Alice Paul, the author of the Equal Rights Amendment, when she said, ``Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.'' Because it seems to me it is altogether convenient for men for a woman to have an abortion. Men have a rather unlimited capacity to compartmentalize and move on, but what the medical community is finding out is what most men have known throughout the eons, that women by and large have better hearts than we do, have a greater moral sensitivity than we do, and it is reflected in the research of what has come to be known as postabortion syndrome, which is rising to epidemic levels in America. Clinical research provides a growing body of scientific evidence that having an abortion can cause psychological harm to some women. Psychologist Wanda Franz, Ph.D., in the March 1989 congressional hearings on the impact of abortion said, quote, women who report negative aftereffects from abortion know exactly what their problem is. They report horrible nightmares of children calling to them. When they are reminded of the abortion, Franz testified the women reexperience it with terrible psychological pain. They feel worthless and victimized because they failed at the most natural of human activities, the role of being a mother.
I think in my own heart of conversations with women of my generation who have become active in the pro-life movement but who have found in their faith the grace and the healing to move beyond that choice. And I think of a woman who said in my presence once, some 20 years after having an abortion, that not a day went by that she did not think how old that child would be. They do not tell you that in the lobby at the abortion clinic, Mr. Speaker, but they should. The exploding incidence of postabortion syndrome has even caused major medical associations in this country to recognize it. Women suffering postabortion stress may experience drug and alcohol abuse, personal relationship disorders, sexual dysfunction, communication difficulties and even in some cases attempt suicide. Postabortion syndrome appears to be a type of pattern of denial which may last for 5 to 10 years before emotional difficulties surface.
Now that clinicians have established that there is an identifiable pattern to PAS, postabortion syndrome, they face a new challenge. What is still unknown is how widespread psychological problems are among women who have had abortions. The LA Times did a survey in 1989 and found that 56 percent of women who had abortions felt guilty about it. And 26 percent, quote, mostly regretted the abortion, in a poll done by the LA Times. Clinicians' current goal now is to conduct extensive national research studies to obtain data on the size and scope of postabortion syndrome.
When one thinks, Mr. Speaker, of 1.5 million women undergoing abortions every year since 1973, it is almost overwhelming to think of the heartache that must grip the quiet moments of millions of women in our land. And because I am not standing in my home church, Mr. Speaker, I will not tonight explain to them that there is a way out under it, that there is grace and there is forgiveness and there is healing, and in a church near to them they can find it. It will always be my prayer as the Case for Life series goes forward in this Chamber that any woman who has experienced this under the sound of my voice would never in any way feel judged by this sinner, but that they would know that there is healing and there is grace in a God of mercy, and they would know there is a Nation that urgently needs them to take a stand and to tell the truth to the next generation of women about the cost of an abortion, not just the ending of an innocent human life and every potential that it would ever have but, Mr. Speaker, about the breaking of a heart.
Oftentimes, as I stand before groups of young women in the prime of their life, I am asked about my position on abortion. My pro-life views are fairly widely known in Indiana. I always make the point to offer young women in the room a promise, and it is a good place for me to close this installment of the Case for Life tonight as I think about Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony who believed that abortion was the ultimate exploitation of women. I will look at these young women, oftentimes in a high school classroom, sometimes in a small church group, and I will look around the room knowing just statistically speaking that there may be some young women in that room who are faced with an unwanted pregnancy and are faced with a choice between bringing that unborn baby to term or ending its life in the womb. I always look at those young women and I say, I want to make you a promise that the other side can never make. I said, if you are faced with an unwanted pregnancy and you make the decision, however difficult, with your family's assistance or a crisis pregnancy center near you to take that baby to term and even if you turn that baby over to another family for adoption, versus if you choose to end that life in the womb, if you choose life, I will promise you from
the moment they hand you that wiggling little baby in the operating room, whether you raise it or you give it up, there will never be a day in your life but that you know that you did the right thing. And the other side cannot make that promise.
And if the statistics that we heard tonight, the physical cost and the emotional cost of abortion, are not jarring, perhaps that challenge would be, Mr. Speaker. My prayer is that as we think about the great women of American history, the great women of the suffragette movement that won women the right to vote, that wrestled equal status for women in our society, people like Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul and others, when I think about the tender and wonderful women of my family and of America, I have hope for the cause of life, because I cannot help but believe that women who could take American society from a medievalist view of women as property and have the moral courage to win the right to vote and to win equal standing in the public square because of their courage and their conscience, that those same American women and their daughters and their granddaughters will not someday lead us back to the truth that life is sacred, to the truth that echoes through history in those ancient words, ``See, I set before you today life and death, blessings and destruction. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.''
It is my belief that it will be when that day comes, that abortion comes to an end in America, it will be the women of America who lead us home, just as it was the women of America who led us to a more just society and to an equal station in our culture for women.
With that, I would conclude my part of this Case for Life series, Mr. Speaker, and yield for whatever approach he would choose to make to this issue to a man who while he has served in Congress for over 20 years, his vibrancy and vitality is intimidating to most of us who serve with him.
The gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) has been an advocate of the cause of life since before Roe v. Wade, and he brings an energy and a commitment to this cause like no other, and I am deeply humbled that he would join me in this series of a case for life, and I yield gratefully to the gentleman from New Jersey.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for his passion, for his generous remarks, and for his dogged determination in this issue.
We come to the close of this case for life much as we began, and it is always remarkable to me how sometimes God bookends things in ways that we could never have planned. Because we heard the gentleman from New Jersey begin his remarks by simply using a phrase I heard him use many times on floor, but I know he did not hear me use tonight. He said, ``Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women,'' which was precisely the words of Alice Paul, who in her 20s was a driving force behind winning women the right to vote in America; a woman who was the driving force behind even another great signature item of the feminist movement in America, the Equal Rights Amendment. She said, ``Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.''
And I close with the words of Susan B. Anthony, who now every time I walk through the Rotunda and I look at those heroes of the suffrage movement carved in stone, I will think of it, if the Speaker will forgive me, as much a memorial to their moral courage as to their political accomplishment because these women were simultaneously about the elevation of women to equal political status, but they were also women committed to the sanctity of human life. Susan B. Anthony, and I close, said of abortion: ``No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save the suffering of the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life. It will burden her soul in death. But, oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the deed.''
Susan B. Anthony, without whom American women would have not a fraction of the status and the political power they have today, was a woman committed to the sanctity of human life. And as we go forward and as American women, in particular, listen in on our conversations on this Capitol floor, it is my hope that another generation of courageous and visionary American women of courage and conscience will lead us back to that profound moral truth echoed through the ages to choose life.
With that I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Ferguson), another of my colleagues in this series, a man who brings with him an enormous pedigree in the right-to-life movement.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Ferguson), who, along with his wife, Maurine, has been a champion for life in and out of the Congress for many years.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Aderholt), a moral leader in the United States House of Representatives.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Ferguson), the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) and the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Aderholt), for joining me in this case for life.