The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“CONDEMNING THE ACTIONS OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H5325-H5328 on July 21, 2015.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
CONDEMNING THE ACTIONS OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Ratcliffe). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 2015, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks) for 30 minutes.
General Leave
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and insert extraneous material on the topic of my Special Order.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Arizona?
There was no objection.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Mr. Speaker, I would first count it a privilege to yield to the gentlewoman from South Dakota (Mrs. Noem).
Mrs. NOEM. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, today I rise to speak on an issue that has weighed very heavy on my heart; in fact, it has kept me awake at night for many nights.
Two videos have recently come out showing senior Planned Parenthood executives and doctors callously discussing abortion procedures and the costs of that fetal tissue from aborted babies.
It has turned my stomach to hear these people at Planned Parenthood. They claim to act in the best interest of women, but instead they talk about compensation for tiny organs from aborted babies.
I find myself asking: How did we get here? How did this great country that was founded on Biblical principles get to a place where we have federally funded organizations like Planned Parenthood who claim to care for women and provide health care for them instead deceive people and use those dollars to end lives--end lives of our future women that could potentially lead this country--and then turn around and sell their body parts to put even more dollars in their pocket?
It reminds me of the Edmund Burke quote that says: ``The only thing that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.''
And today, we have seen many good men and women come to this House floor and say that we will not ``do nothing.'' We have pushed on this issue before, but we are going to push even harder. We are going to talk even more. We are going to talk to people and have uncomfortable conversations about what is going on at Planned Parenthood.
We are going to fight until we end the Federal dollars that flow into their bank accounts. We are going to fight until we make sure that our babies and our children are protected, whether they are born or unborn, and that every life is sacred; that we honor those Biblical principles that this country was founded on.
Not only is what Planned Parenthood has been doing disgusting, but it raises questions about potential illegal behavior. Profiting from fetal tissue donation is illegal under Federal law, and so is altering procedures based on fetal tissue donation.
So I have joined many of my colleagues here in the House, and we have asked our leadership team for an immediate investigation into Planned Parenthood and all of their practices. They need to be punished for what they have been doing.
All lives matter, including the unborn. We need to do all we can to protect the most vulnerable among us.
The world can be a very dangerous place, and it is dangerous because of the evil that is going on, but I believe it is much more dangerous when you have people who look on and do absolutely nothing to protect those among us.
The duplicity of this organization needs to stop; and as long as Federal dollars flow to this organization, we all need to feel responsible and do all that we can to end it.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. I thank the gentlewoman.
Mr. Speaker, as profoundly tragic as it is, no one should have been surprised by the recent revelations that Planned Parenthood is harvesting and selling the body parts of little babies. They have so repeatedly proven themselves blind to the dignity of humanity. They have always been at the forefront of the greatest human genocide in human history, and Planned Parenthood is the number one advocate of killing more than 3,000 little unborn American babies every day. These recent revelations are just one more heartbreaking reminder that the Nation's largest abortion provider has always had a legendary disregard for the sanctity of innocent human life.
It beggars incredulity that this Congress continues to give hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money--against the taxpayers' wishes, Mr. Speaker--to a heartless organization like Planned Parenthood that goes to such grotesque lengths to promote the killing of innocent unborn babies through abortion on demand at any time throughout the 9 months of pregnancy for any reason or for no reason.
This body recently passed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act that would, except in rare circumstances, protect both mothers and their little pain-capable unborn babies entering their sixth month, Mr. Speaker, of gestation from the unspeakable cruelty of Planned Parenthood and evil monsters like Kermit Gosnell.
If the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act had already been law, it would have saved the lives of thousands of late-term, pain-capable babies every year, and it would have made it much harder for Planned Parenthood to harvest and sell the organs and body parts of unborn children since they simply would not have had as many of the more mature organs and body parts of the older babies to choose from.
Mr. Speaker, there is no question whatsoever that Planned Parenthood brazenly and repeatedly violated the law in the selling of these little body parts. It is an unspeakable disgrace that the Obama Justice Department will likely never launch a criminal investigation to look into these unconscionable acts, but if this Congress and the American people now also look the other way and ignore this kind of insidious evil, we do so at our moral peril.
If the conscience of this Nation is to survive, it is now vital for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to become law. The House has already passed this critically important and timely legislation. It is now time for the Senate to do the same. We must not let the continuous and repeated manifestations of this unspeakable evil of killing late-term, pain-capable babies and selling their body parts go unanswered.
Mr. Speaker, supporters of abortion on demand have tried for decades to deny that unborn babies ever feel pain--even those, they say, at the beginning of the sixth month of pregnancy--as if somehow the ability to feel pain magically develops the very second the child is born.
Mr. Speaker, almost every other civilized nation on this Earth protects pain-capable babies at this stage and at this age, and every credible poll of the American people shows that they are overwhelmingly in favor of protecting these children. Yet we have given these little babies less legal protection from unnecessary pain and cruelty than the protection we have given farm animals under the Federal Humane Slaughter Act. It is a tragedy that beggars expression.
The voices who have long hailed the merciless killing of these little ones as freedom of choice, especially the ones who profit from it, Mr. Speaker, will be very shrill and loud. But when we hear those voices, we should all remember the words of President Abraham Lincoln, when he said: ``Those who deny freedom to others deserve not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.''
Mr. Speaker, for the sake of all of those who founded and built this Nation and dreamed of what America could someday be, and for the sake of all those who since then have died in darkness so Americans can walk in the light of freedom, it is so very important that those of us who are privileged to be Members of this Congress pause from time to time and remind ourselves of why we are really all here.
Mr. Speaker, do we still hold these truths to be self-evident? Mr. Lincoln called upon all of us, Mr. Speaker, to remember that magnificent Declaration of Independence by America's Founding Fathers and ``their enlightened belief that nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.''
He reminded those he called posterity--that is us, Mr. Speaker--that when in some distant future some man, some factions, some interest, should set up the doctrine that some were not entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that ``their posterity''--that is us, Mr. Speaker, ``might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began.''
{time} 2045
Thomas Jefferson, whose words marked the beginning of this Nation said:
The care of human life and its happiness and not its destruction is the chief and only object of good government.
The phrase in the Fifth Amendment capsulizes our entire Constitution, Mr. Speaker. It says:
No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
The 14th Amendment says:
No State shall deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Mr. Speaker, protecting the lives of all Americans and their constitutional rights, especially those who cannot protect themselves, is why we are really all here.
Mr. Speaker, not long ago, I heard Barack Obama speak very noble and poignant words that, whether he realizes it or not, apply so profoundly to this subject. Let me quote excerpted portions of his comments.
He said: ``This is our first task, caring for our children. It is our first job. If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That is how, as a society, we will be judged.''
President Obama asked: ``Are we really prepared to say that we are powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence, visited on our children year after year after year, is somehow the price of freedom?''
The President also said, ``Our journey is not complete until all our children are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm. That is our generation's task,'' he said, ``to make these words, these rights, these values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.''
Mr. Speaker, never have I so deeply agreed with any words ever spoken by President Barack Obama as those I have just quoted.
How I wish Mr. Obama and the rest of us could somehow open our hearts and our ears to his incontrovertible words and ask ourselves, in the core of our souls, why these words that should apply to all children cannot include the most helpless and vulnerable of all children. Are there any children more vulnerable than little pain-capable babies before they are even born?
Mr. Speaker, it seems that, somehow, we are never quite so eloquent as when we decry the crimes of past generations; but, oh, how we often become so staggeringly blind when it comes to facing and rejecting the worst of atrocities in our own time.
As Americans, in the land of the free and the home of brave, we now live in a day when monsters like Kermit Gosnell snip the spinal cords of born babies and Planned Parenthood that, for financial gain, uses partial-birth abortions to deliberately harvest intact body parts of innocent babies whom they have deprived of the chance to even be born.
Mr. Speaker, what we are doing to these little children, the least of these, our little brothers and sisters, is real. The President knows that, and all of us here know that in our hearts.
Medical science, regarding the development of unborn babies, beginning at the sixth month of pregnancy, now demonstrates irrefutably that they do, in fact, experience pain. Many of them cry and scream as they are killed, but because it is amniotic fluid going over the vocal cords instead of air, we can't hear them.
It is the greatest human rights atrocity in the United States today, and for us to now stand by and allow it all to continue unabated while Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of these little murdered children is to desecrate everything that America was meant to be and for those noble Americans who died to make it come to be.
Abraham Lincoln gave his contemporaries such wise counsel, Mr. Speaker, and it so desperately applies to all of us in this moment.
He said:
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation.
Mr. Speaker, these are, indeed, days that will be considered in the annals of history and, I believe, in the councils of eternity itself. This bloody shadow has loomed over America for too long.
It is time for the Senate to pass the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act because, in spite of all the political noise, protecting little pain-capable unborn children and their mothers is not a Republican issue; it is not a Democrat issue; it is a test of our basic humanity and who we are as a human family.
It is time to open our eyes and allow our consciences to catch up with our technology. It is time for Members of the United States Congress to open our eyes and our souls and remember that protecting those who cannot protect themselves is why we are really all here.
It is time for all Americans, Mr. Speaker, to open our eyes and our hearts to the humanity of these little unborn children of God and the inhumanity of what Planned Parenthood is doing to them.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa).
Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Arizona (Mr. Franks) for yielding me time, but also your longtime steadfast, earnest, and passionate leadership on this issue. It is much needed, especially in light of what we have seen this past week.
We hear the euphemisms, the terms that are used talking about the unborn humans, the unborn babies. We hear terms like cell masses, cell clumps, specimens, calvaria when referring to a baby's head. A calvarium, is this even a term anybody in real life uses, especially when applied to an unborn baby's head? Is this a word that would apply to what ISIS does in beheading humans around the world?
We don't use euphemisms like that. Why would we apply this to the unborn? These euphemisms disappear when there is a value assigned to the parts that can be harvested from the unborn. We hear descriptions of the techniques in this harvesting actually on the video that we have been hearing about and seeing, less crunchy techniques. The callousness of a terminology like that, less crunchy techniques, in order to preserve more parts for harvest.
Are we talking about cheese puffs here? No; yet that is how callous this is. We talk about the price of parts in these videos. They have a value in this market they are talking about. Are we talking about cuts at a butchers' convention in pricing these parts? This is what it is like.
It is unconscionable, Mr. Speaker, how callous, how base these terms are when we are talking about the unborn. We hear about how, for this process to happen, that consent is required. Well, who is being consented on this? The unborn donor, do they have a say in this? Obviously not.
Mr. Speaker, and for all Americans, this issue is now right out in front of everyone in bright, vivid, bold, blood red colors for all to see what the attitude is, what the modus operandi for Planned Parenthood is and has been and will continue to be unless this body does something about it.
We are right to call for investigations to get to the bottom if there is criminal activity here of what we have seen and is alleged with these videos. We are right to move forward with Mrs. Black's bill, should these come true. Even beyond that, for years, the millions of dollars that have been given to this organization, Planned Parenthood, to do what they do, it is time to defund them.
It also is time to move on my colleague from Arizona Mr. Franks' carefully crafted and obviously correct bill on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act because what kind of a country are we, what kind of a society are we to continue to allow these things to happen and not take action?
I call on the Senate to take that bill up and pass it and put it on the President's desk, and he can explain to the American public his position on this issue.
As we review, again, the grisly tactics of Planned Parenthood and others that would do as they do and the recent criminal prosecution of Kermit Gosnell--who isn't that much different than what we are talking about right here--if we don't take action, then we should be ashamed because, for all of us, the Lord is watching what we do.
I thank my colleague.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Walberg), a grandfather, a father, and a lover of children.
Mr. WALBERG. I thank the gentleman for the opportunity tonight to talk to this issue.
I, too, stand in full support of passage of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and ask the Senate to reach down deep into their consciences, their hearts, their emotions.
So often, we don't talk about that on the floor of this august body, the House of Representatives, but that is where it ought to flow because, indeed, we here, both in the House--the people's House--and the Senate, were sent to represent people, people of a great nation, people of a blessed nation, a nation that has honored the worth, the purpose, and the value of life itself since its inception.
We were formed of people with great ideals; great value; great courage; and, indeed, formed with their blood given for the rights and freedoms of all individuals. For us to concern ourselves with protecting the most innocent among us, even those that are among us in the womb, I think of my new granddaughter in the womb right now, in my daughter's body, waiting for, in just a month and a half, the opportunity to breathe air itself and become a functioning human being cared for, growing and ultimately becoming all that God intended for her. I would say the same for any human being, born or unborn, that we must protect.
Mr. Speaker, I certainly thank the gentleman from Arizona for his courage to push for this, with unwillingness to bend and bow under those that would say: Oh, get over it; stop defending something that is indefensible.
I would say thank God for defending something that is totally defensible.
As was mentioned earlier, we were founded on principles, principles that were firm and correct. The Founders and Framers long understood the power of truths versus human wisdom, truths and wisdom that said:
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator, by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
{time} 2100
John Adams said, ``Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.''
And, indeed, what we have seen in videos in recent days, has evidenced that, when you step out of that moral principle, you go into things unthinkable and grotesque.
It has been said that righteousness exalts a Nation, but sin is a reproach to any land. How could we not feel reproached in looking at videos of a licensed doctor who is willing to take and sell body parts and to countenance pain as something that is just part of the process and to be totally unconsidered?
Mr. Speaker, I spent a good deal of my early adult life in the pulpit, ministering to people from an authority far greater than this government or even this Constitution, the greatest document on the face of this Earth, manmade.
But the psalmists said, ``Behold, children are a gift of the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward.'' That is true. Certain commentators will denigrate me for bringing up these truths, and so be it. But they are truths.
Jeremiah, the prophet, speaking of God, said, ``Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart.''
The psalmist David, who became King David, said, ``For you formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother's womb.''
Does that sound like what that doctor was doing in the womb, weaving, carefully forming? No. She was destroying. We must fight back against that evil.
He want on to say, ``I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the depths of the Earth. Your eyes have seen my unformed substance. And in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me when, as yet, there was not one of them.''
I thank the gentleman from Arizona. I thank him for his courage and standing for life itself and acknowledging the fact that the Creator has formed something of greatness.
And we must not stand in the way, but do everything possible to reject the pain, to reject the defeat, to reject the conquering of the human spirit beginning right in the womb.
May God help us in this country to repent, to seek his healing, to do right, and to spare the innocent among us.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. I thank the gentleman from Michigan.
Mr. Speaker, my time is nearly gone. And I suppose I take great heart from what I have heard here tonight because it seems to mirror history itself.
When people of goodwill finally saw the victims in tragedies and recognized them as fellow human beings, their hearts and minds began to change.
Mr. Speaker, I feel like the winds of change are beginning to blow here. I feel like people are starting to ask the real questions.
And I know that, when we talk about abortion, it seems like all of the rules change. Sometimes you wonder if the furniture is going to start floating in the room when you hear some of the arguments.
But the real question is: Does abortion take the life of an innocent child? If it doesn't, Mr. Speaker, I am willing to stop talking about it.
But if it really does take the life of a child, then those of us in this Chamber standing in the seat of freedom of the greatest Nation in the history of the world also stand in the midst of the greatest human genocide in the history of the world.
Mr. Speaker, I feel like America is finally beginning to see through some of the facade of the abortion industry and Planned Parenthood's obfuscation.
But I have another fear, and that is that sometimes we have seen such horrors lately--the Kermit Gosnell clinic that snipped little babies' spines, the killing of children that are late-term, pain-capable--that recognition is beginning to seep through the conscience of America.
But I paraphrase an old saint quote that said vice is an evil which is so frightening and mean that to be hated means only to be seen, but seen too often with its familiar face, first we endure and then we pity and then we embrace.
One of the great weaknesses of mankind is that sometimes, when we see evil often enough, we become desensitized to it. Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry has shown us so much evil in recent decades that I wonder if we are becoming a little calloused to it.
Do you ever wonder, Mr. Speaker, or ask yourself: Are we really killing more than 3,000 unborn children every day? Are we really staining the very foundations of this Nation with the blood of our own children? Is that really happening in America?
Mr. Speaker, I would just suggest that it is past the time for great introspection on the part of this country because we are either the last best hope of the Earth or we will simply be another empire that lost its way.
I am of the opinion that America, as they led the way to stop slavery, will someday recognize the humanity of these little babies and see all of humanity then begin to understand that protecting them is really part of who we all are.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________
