March for Life Rally C-SPAN at noon

33rd Annual March for Life on the National Mall. President Bush is expected to speak via audio connection.

The Case for Life: Pro-Life Speech by Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana)

Summary:
The first of a series of pro-life speeches that Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana) gave on the House
Floor.

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.

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 Parenthood4s 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 children4s 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 ci!
vilization, 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.

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
Rome4s 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 man4s 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 mother4s
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
Hippocrates4 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 eth!
ics, 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 Blackstone4s 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 people4s House, in the
Congress, and in the State legislatures of all 50 States have very little to say about this
issue.

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 Schindler4s 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.4 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 colleagues4
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 God4s 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.

PD03I02

This article was taken from The Family Reasearch Council www.frc.org

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