Washington, DC, Nov 5 -


FULL TRANSCRIPT

Madam/Mr. Speaker,

Abortion is a destructive perversion of our society; it is a distorted emphasis on rights to the disregard of individual responsibilities.

Our country was founded on fundamental human rights, and rightly so: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

These rights were reinforced and more succinctly elaborated in the first ten amendments to the US Constitution.

These 10 amendments, more commonly known as the Bill of Rights, have served as the heart and soul of our legal tradition and the foundation upon which we have built the most powerful democracy in the history of the world.

 
But life is “short and brutish” said Sir Thomas Hobbes, and left to our own [devices], absolute right will lead to anarchy and chaos. 

Rousseau, Hobbes, and other thinkers in the age of the Enlightenment saw the dangers of absolute right and proposed a social contract upon which to build a civil society where mutual obligations are imposed on all parties to the agreement.

The balance between rights and responsibilities has served as a basis for an ethical context.

But, our society has disrupted this delicate balance between rights and responsibilities by accentuating rights and contrived an anthropology detached from the moral conscience and call[ed] it “social progress.”

The result is a skewed social politic devoid of moral coherency. 

In his encyclical, Caritas en Verita Tae, Pope Benedict XVI loudly proclaimed: “Individual rights detached from a framework of duties can run wild.”

 And, this is what we have seen in our society today.

We provide rights to convicted murderers but at the same time sanction the slaughter of the innocent. 

We protest in rage at the slaying of dogs but barely wink an eye at the murder of the millions of innocent children.

Traditional principles of social ethics like transparency, honesty, and responsibility have been ignored or attenuated, and as a result, our moral tenor does not respect the right to life and the dignity of a natural death. 

To protect individual rights, we have distorted the continuity of human development to portray the human fetus as something less than human and therefore, can be disposed of. 

What happened to personal responsibility?  The responsibility to respect and nurture a human life who happens to be one’s own child?

Our children cry out for life, for justice, and, until the U.S. Supreme Court can garner enough courage to overturn Roe v. Wade, it is up to the voices of the Christopher Smiths, to the Bart Stupaks, to the Jean Schmidts, to the Marsha Blackburns, and to others like myself to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves.

Yes, health care reform is important, and I support responsible reform. 

But, Madame Speaker, as my friend, Christopher Smith so eloquently articulated, abortion is wrong, and I can never support a reform bill that seeks to fund abortion with the taxpayer dollars of hardworking Americans.

Thank you, and I yield back my time.