CONGRESSIONAL RECORD\
HOUSE\
PAGE H8942\
Sept. 25, 2003

**THE CASE FOR LIFE**

    The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.

    Mr. PENCE. Mr. Speaker, I rise at the end of a week of activity here
on Capitol Hill to do nothing less than to begin a process and an effort
that I hope will be a part of the fabric of my career for however long I
have the privilege of serving in the United States House of
Representatives.

    I rise very simply, Mr. Speaker, to make the case for life; to make
the arguments, philosophical, intellectual, moral and historical, on
this blue and gold carpet, on a regular basis, for the sanctity of human
life.

    My inspiration, oddly enough, Mr. Speaker, for this series, was just
mentioned by the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) in his remarks
immediately preceding mine. It is almost uncanny to me to have heard it.
For my inspiration in rising today on the House floor is none other than
a former Member of this body who served as a Member of Congress from
1827 until his death in 1848.

    Prior to being a Member of the House of Representatives, John Quincy
Adams was President of the United States, and his father President
before him. But, remarkably, after one term in Congress, John Quincy
Adams felt compelled, Mr. Speaker, to be elected to Congress from the
State of Massachusetts and to come to this place. And more than any
other purpose, it is clear as one studies his speeches and
pronouncements on this floor, that he was a man deeply committed to the
abolition of slavery in America.

    Just as the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) reflected, it is
reported that oftentimes on a weekly basis or more throughout the nearly
20 years that John Quincy Adams served as a Member of this Congress, in
a Chamber, as you know, Mr. Speaker, just down the hall, the great,
grand old man and former President would come, history records, and
bring his papers with him and make the moral and the intellectual and
the historical and even the Biblical case against slavery in America.

    We are even told that some of his colleagues at the time during the
course of those two decades actually tried to change the procedural
rules of the House, because they thought it rather impolitic to have old
Mr. Adams coming down and bringing up that difficult issue again. But he
did it, and he did it well, and he did it without apology. And as I rise
today to begin what I hope for however many years I serve in Congress to
be a series on the case for life, I am inspired and magnetized by John
Quincy Adams.

    Now, many may say that John Quincy Adams, who perished, we are told,
in the midst of a session of Congress, fell over backwards in his Chair,
was carried into a waiting room where he died the next day, some may say
that his death in 1848, long before slavery would vanish from this
continent, proved that he had failed in his endeavor.

    But God works in mysterious ways, Mr. Speaker, and I cannot help but
feel to this day that at some time from heaven John Quincy Adams smiled
down when he realized that on the back row of the Congress in which he
gave those lectures arrived in the year 1847 a tall, lanky man from the
State of Illinois who served for one term in Congress, and Abraham
Lincoln would later reflect that the speeches on the abolition of
slavery that he heard from the great man John Quincy Adams deeply
impacted his thinking and his life. And when Abraham Lincoln would then
run for the Senate in Illinois and lose, and then be propelled on that
same issue to the Presidency, he, no doubt, as is all of our posterity,
was in debt to the rantings of that old man.

    And here is hoping that my rantings may cast seeds, somewhere, Mr.
Speaker, whether in this Chamber or through the means whereby people
observe what we do here, that some might reflect on the principles that
we share over the course of this series on the case for life and be
inspired by it, because it matters.

    Despite the fact that ever since Roe v. Wade became law in 1973
America has looked across the street to the U.S. Supreme Court to define
this business of the rightness and the legality of abortion, and despite
the fact that, frankly, even in this Congress we pay scant attention to
the issue, it, nevertheless, is a colossal issue about which our Nation
must attend, for one reason and one reason only: 1.6 million abortions
are performed in the United States each year. Ninety-one percent are
performed during the first trimester, twelve or fewer weeks gestation.
Nine percent are performed in the second trimester.

    Approximately 1.5 million U.S. women with unwanted pregnancies
choose abortion every year, and most are under the age of 25 years and
unmarried. And as psychologists across America now reflect,
post-abortion stress syndrome, which seems to viciously take hold of
women at or around the age of menopause, where in many cases women are
led into therapy because of a deep sense of remorse about decisions they
made decades before, it is a decision that those 1.5 million women make
not just for that day, but for many, Mr. Speaker, a decision that colors
much of the rest of their life.

    Approximately 6 million women in the United States become pregnant
every year. About half of those pregnancies are unintended, and 1.5
million elect to terminate them with legal abortion.

\[\] 1530

    Each year, more than 1 million U.S. teenagers become pregnant, and
the teen pregnancy rate has moved in the last 30 years to truly
startling statistics. Eighty percent of women having abortions are
single, 60 percent are white, 35 percent are black, 82 percent of women
having abortions are unmarried or separated, and almost half, this is
almost incomprehensible to me, but statistics from Planned Parenthood's
National Center for Health Statistics suggest that almost half of
American women, 43 percent, will have an abortion sometime in their
life. Yet, we rarely talk about it here. A procedure of deep physical
and emotional and moral and perhaps even spiritual consequences
reflected on through the millennia is scarcely talked about in the
center of the most powerful government on Earth.

    Today I would like to speak, if I may, about a few of the historical
aspects of the case for life. Oftentimes, when I am standing before
groups of young people, I will say, rather obliquely, that for roughly
3,000 years in Western Civilization, until 1973, it was the unanimous
position of medical ethicists throughout Western Civilization that
abortion was immoral and unethical. And I am always amazed at the
startled look on children's faces. Because, of course, every student
that I see in a classroom was born in the post Roe v. Wade America where
abortion is a settled fact. It is a settled legal reality. But to begin
with the realization that for 3 millennia through, if I can use the
word, through the gestation of Western Civilization, there was, as
Mother Teresa often reflected, that core principle that human life is
sacred. Often rejected, even by nations and peoples in the midst of our
civilization, nevertheless, the sanctity of human life rises out of the
march of our civilization, almost like no other.

    We all are familiar with the founding documents of this Nation that
speak of certain unalienable rights endowed by our Creator, and among
them are life. It is an astounding thing to consider. But what did our
Founders think of when they thought of life? They were men who reflected
on the ancients; they reflected on history. The Founders of this Nation,
some of whom are remembered on the walls and carved in stone throughout
this building, were truly learned men. So it is important when we think
about a reference to the unalienable right to life, what did our
Founders think about when they said life? What did they think of as
human life? In the context of our common law and in the context of the
history of the ancients or the Middle Ages, or even the early church
fathers who so deeply influenced the Founders of this country, it is a
consistent, one after another element of the law in history that argues
beyond a doubt that abortion was considered a deep moral offense.

\[Page H8943\]

    In the Lex Cornelia 81 B.C., the Jurist Iulius Paulus applied a text
of this law that applied to poisoners and those who dispensed drugs
specifically intended to cause abortion, saying that whoever dispenses
an abortion pill, regardless of its intention, the law read, set a bad
example and was condemned to work in the mines in 81 B.C. One thinks of
that story of a young girl who may have had medical complications just
last week from having taken the pill RU486 and died. And one thinks of
the wisdom of Lex Cornelia from 81 B.C., the dispensing of a pill and a
poison that causes an abortion and its harm.

    Cicero actually placed it beyond doubt that the offense of abortion
was a capital offense punishable even by death. In the Persian Empire,
criminal abortions were severely punished. And so it goes.

    In fact, the Ephesian, Soranos, often described as the greatest
ancient gynecologist from whom we obtain the word and the practice of
gynecology were, as history records, deeply opposed to Rome's prevailing
free abortion practice. Soranos found it necessary to think first of the
life of the mother and resorted to an abortion when he thought the life
of the mother was in danger, but it was otherwise unacceptable. At the
time of Soranos, Greek and Roman law afforded little protection to the
unborn until Christianity took root in the Roman Empire, and then it
changed. And from that point forward, after the spread of Christianity
in the Roman Empire, infanticide and abortion were treated as equally
criminal acts, alongside murder.

    Throughout the Middle Ages, the severe penalty for abortion remained
in force in all countries of Europe well into the Middle Ages, and it
was reflected in many of the writings. I think of John Calvin, one of
the early church fathers and someone who deeply influenced the
development of common law and Christian theological thinking. He said,
John Calvin now, \"The fetus, though enclosed in the womb of his mother,
is already a human being, and it is a monstrous crime to rob it of life
which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a
man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place
of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to
destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light,\" John Calvin
wrote in the commentary in the Book of Exodus.

    Truly astonishing words, but not at the time that he wrote them. To
think of that time and to think of that context, what John Calvin wrote
about, what the ancients embraced was what was common accepted law, and,
of course, our own common law was given birth by those historical
moorings.

    As James S. Cole wrote in an essay entitled \"Abortion at Common
Law,\" long before the settlement of the English colonies on this
continent, the common law of England, that is, the law recognized as
common to all Englishmen, defined abortion as a crime. In accord with
the limits of biological knowledge of the day, it was believed that
there was no life until what was known as \"quickening,\" when the
movements of the baby could be discerned. Abortion was therefore
declared by the earliest authorities a lesser crime than criminal
homicide until quickening, and then it was a felony after quickening.
Much later, in the 1600s, there was some hesitation to prosecute
abortions in which a child died in the womb as opposed to those in which
the baby was expelled before dying, because of the problems of proving
that the act of beating the mother's abdomen or giving her a poison had
caused the death of the child. However, there was no doubt that abortion
of a woman who was either \"quick or great with child\" was unlawful.

    In colonial America, abortions were prosecuted under the common law.
After the Revolution, the new American States adopted the common law of
England as the basis of their own law, including common law crimes.
Within a generation, the independent States began to outgrow the English
common law, and State legislatures increasingly defined crimes in their
States. However, common law crimes survived until superseded by
legislative enactment.

    Although common law prohibitions on abortion were largely replaced
over time with legislative enactments through the 19th century, there
was never a gap in which the common law had anything other than a
prohibition of abortion. Abortion was a crime during the hundreds of
years before the founding of this Nation, and it remained a crime in
every State at the beginning of our Nation and throughout the 19th
century.

    Until the advent of Roe v. Wade that, it is worth noting, struck
down simultaneously those laws promulgated from the common law in all 50
States, abortion was considered a crime, a deep moral offense, and
anathema to medical ethicists.

    It is altogether appropriate to point out as well as we consider the
ancients today, Mr. Speaker, that the Hippocratic Oath itself carved,
depending on who you believe of the historians, and doctors will argue
the point, but somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, the
Hippocratic Oath authored by the great physician Hippocrates begins in
many versions with the phrase, \"First, do no harm,\" and in its most
classic versions will make reference to abortion; that it was altogether
and always inappropriate for the healer ever to end human life, either
born human life or unborn human life. It is contained in the Hippocratic
Oath. It was what it meant to be a doctor, that you heal; your charge
was to heal human beings. And so the bright line, to put it in modern
terminology, Mr. Speaker, the eight-lane superhighway in Hippocrates´
mind, it seemed to me, was that the doctor does not kill human beings.
Doctors do not end human life. And for 4,000 years, the advance of
medical ethics, and every doctor in my State of Indiana and every doctor
who takes an oath throughout the Western world raises their hand, in
many cases, and takes the Hippocratic Oath.

    Now, the edited version oftentimes does not include reference to
abortion, but it still includes that line, \"first, do no harm.\" And it
is why today so many doctors in America refuse as a professional
decision to perform abortions. They simply choose not to be a part of
it. In fact, there seems to be some evidence in the medical community of
a diminishing availability of abortion in America, because men and women
that wear the white smocks and the green smocks of physicians are less
and less interested in that fundamental compromise of their mission and
their ministry as a healer, according to the Hippocratic Oath.

    I spoke of the English common law, which specifically
forbade abortion. It did, in some cases, as I mentioned, treat it as a
felony and, in other cases, treated it as a misdemeanor; but in all
cases it was immoral, wrong, and illegal. Blackstone, who wrote, as I
learned in law school, the famous Blackstone Commentaries at the
founding of the country; it can be accurately observed that a practicing
lawyer could literally consider themselves as having an entire legal
library if they possessed one book, not counting the Bible, but
Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law. It is taught even to this day in
the most secular of law schools, and people understand that Blackstone
was, for people practicing the law in the colonies and in the States and
in the territories, it was the ultimate resource. And Blackstone was
clear on abortion, writing in one of his commentaries, \"If a woman is
quick with child and by poison or otherwise killeth it in her womb, or
if anyone beat her whereby the child dieth in her body and she is
delivered of a dead child, this, though not murder was, by the ancient
law, homicide or manslaughter.\"

    So whatever may have been the exact view taken by common law of any
specific offense, in and around 1803, there was no question that
abortion was a crime. And yet, in America today, by a judicial decision
and by judicial fiat, that has fundamentally changed.

    So why does all this matter? As I talked to some colleagues today,
they said to me, now, why are you doing that? Is there some legislation
coming to the floor that is going to change things in abortion? And I
granted the point that ever since Roe v. Wade, we, in the people's
House, in the Congress, and in the State legislatures of all 50 States
have very little to say about this issue.

\[Page H8944\]

\[\] 1545

    It comes down to nine men and women in black robes and the
Presidents who appoint them. But it seems to me to be altogether fitting
that something that so deeply troubles the heart of half of the American
people ought to be something that resonates in the heart of our national
government.

    That is how I see this Chamber, Mr. Speaker. I said it shortly after
9/11 in a speech that I gave on this same floor, that I viewed the House
of Representatives as the heart of the American government and that it
ought to resonate with the hearts of the American people. When the
hearts of the American people are troubled about an issue at home or
abroad, this should be a troubled room. When the hearts of the American
people are quiet and at rest, this should be a quiet and amicable place.

    It may be over-literalizing it, trying to turn the government into
some homotropic version of man, but I think it has merit. And the truth
is that while there are millions of Americans who embrace the right to
choose an abortion, who take to the street to defend it, who take to the
polls to support it, there are, by any measure, a growing number of
nearly half of this country who are deeply troubled to live in an
America where innocent human life is so callously discarded. It was as
Meghan Cox Gurdon called it in an article in the Wall Street Journal a
number of years ago, it is, in my judgment, the mother of all rights.

    Meghan Cox Gurdon, and I borrow from her essay now, wrote, \"The Roe
versus Wade anniversaries make me think of the last scene in
Schindler\'s List, the film about Oskar Schindler, the German
industrialist who saved a small number of Jews during World War II. The
final scene,\" for those who have seen it, \"features actual Schindler
survivors with their children and grandchildren line up to place stones
on his grave in Israel. What makes the scene so powerful is not just the
surprising number of progeny already produced by the Holocaust escapees,
but the staggering number of men, women and children who are not there,
who never had a chance of life because the Nazis gassed those who would
have been their parents and grandparents.\"

    Meghan Gurdon goes on to write compellingly, \"When Roe comes up, it
has a Schindler-like reverberation in my own family. The fact is, my
husband and I, our four children, his three siblings and their combined
eight children all owe our lives to the fact that the famous Supreme
Court decision did not come until 1973 (and its British equivalent until
1967). For all 17 of us, all descended from two unwanted pregnancies-two
pregnancies that produced hasty marriages, some unhappiness, rather more
sadness, and even actually two divorces. And I have to say, boy, am I
glad that those pregnancies, dismaying and unexpected as they were,
entailing the compromises that they did for those involved, were not
tidied up in a clinic so that the young mothers in question could \`get
on with their lives.´ You, gentle reader, would have been deprived of
nothing more than my editorial voice. I and 16 kinsfolk would have been
robbed of everything.\"

    It is in every sense, as Meghan Gurdon writes, \"the mother of all
rights.\" I think it is why our founders listed life first, that they
knew from the spilled blood that had happened on our shores and would
happen at the hands of a despotic king. They knew that if a man does not
have an unalienable right to life, he has nothing. That if a man or a
woman cannot anticipate that government cannot deprive them of their
life without due process of law and cannot deprive any human person of
their right to life without due process of law, then they are, in the
words of John Calvin, like that man in his own home, most grievously
offended to have been attacked in what is to be his safest place.

    Alexander Hamilton cautioned us against forgetting the ancient
parchments, the teachings of ancients, and cautioned those who believed
that we could create a society that separated law from moral truth
saying, \"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among
old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in
the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the Divinity and can
never be erased or obscured by mortal power.\"

    It is a truth, Mr. Speaker, I have tried humbly to advance today for
your and my colleagues´ ears and for anyone else who is listening and in
the weeks and months and, if the Lord wills it, years ahead. I hope from
time to time to come to this floor and do likewise. To begin to take a
break from the arguments of the day at home and abroad and to take a
longer-view perspective on this Nation and on the vitality of its legal
and moral traditions. For it seems to me that abortion is the issue of
our time.

    I used to say to people when I was younger that I thought abortion
was the most important moral issue of our time, and I have since
abandoned the adjective because I really do believe that as the late
Mother Teresa would say often, that it is the defining issue of our age,
and on some days, I believe in a hopeful view of the future, that our
posterity will look back and say there was a time when America lost her
way, but largely because of a broken heart, she came back. She came back
to the truth of the ancient, not because she returned to a puritanical
society that judged people in their hour of need, but because America
again became a broken hearted society that said, we want to be a place
where there are no unwanted children. We want to be a society where
crisis pregnant centers come to replace entirely centers where innocent
life is destroyed; where women know that there are better choices, not
only for their unborn child, but for them than ever the choice of ending
that life.

    That is my hope and that is my dream that they will look back on
this time and they will say, Mr. Speaker, America got off the path, but
she reflected on the truths of the ancients. She reflected on the
unalienable rights that she had alienated for a while, of life, and
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And by God's grace, she found her
way back, to be a compassionate society and a caring society, but a
society that once again embraced the unalienable right to life.