Abortion

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, last month, Speaker Pelosi was asked if she thought a 15-week-old unborn baby was a human being. She declined to answer. A few days later, the President's Press Secretary was asked if the President thinks a 15-week-old unborn baby is a human being. She also declined to answer.

In case the President and the Speaker are in any doubt, let me just clear things up for them. A 15-week-old unborn baby is a human being. That baby has a human mom and a human dad, and human beings have other human beings. That is not a complex moral or philosophical question. That is biology 101.

Of course, I am pretty sure the reason the Speaker and the President's Press Secretary declined to answer these questions is not because they are confused about the answer. I don't think there is anybody out there who isn't aware on some level that unborn human beings are human beings. The moment of birth does not magically confer humanity.

No, the Speaker and the President don't want to admit that unborn children are human beings because admitting it would make it hard to defend the fact that they support the right to kill these babies. If you support abortion, it is much easier to pretend an unborn baby is just a clump of cells rather than a separate human being with his or her own fingerprints and DNA. It is a lot easier to defend killing that baby if you pretend that baby is just a part of the mother instead of a unique, separate, unrepeatable individual.

That is why the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Press Secretary for the President of the United States have declined to answer a question any 10-year-old could answer: whether the baby inside his or her mom is a human being.

At the end of May, President Biden released his budget. It was a slap in the face to pro-life Americans. The President's budget abandons decades of bipartisan compromise and calls for the elimination of the Hyde amendment, which protects taxpayers from having their tax dollars go to fund abortions.

And that is not all. The budget contains a whole host of pro-abortion measures that would, among other things, direct taxpayer dollars to fund abortion providers here at home and overseas.

This isn't just some theatrical proposal. Democrats in the House of Representatives have already acted in committee to exclude the Hyde amendment and other pro-life measures from appropriations bills. If we can't agree that unborn human beings deserve to have their human rights protected, we should at least be able to agree that taxpayers should not be forced to fund the killing of unborn persons.

The American people don't think taxpayers should fund abortions. In fact, nearly 60 percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortions. The President himself has, as recently as his Presidential campaign, supported the Hyde amendment, but there is one interest group that controls the Democratic Party. It is the abortion industry and its supporters, and I guess the President figured that he needed to sacrifice his support for the Hyde amendment if he wanted to win the election.

And now Democrats and the President are following through by attempting to force taxpayers to pay for abortions. To hear Democrats talk, you would think abortion on demand, without limits, up until the moment of birth, was the standard position of this country and the world. But it is actually not. The United States is one of only a tiny handful of countries in the world--in the entire world--that allow elective abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Americans are squarely to the right of the Democratic Party on abortion. A strong majority of Americans believe abortion should be illegal or there should at least be some restrictions on abortion, and that has been the position of the American people for a long time

Despite the Democrats' best efforts, Americans still aren't convinced unlimited abortion on demand should be the law of the land. It is really not surprising. No one who has ever heard the thump, thump, thump of an unborn baby's heartbeat really thinks that we are just talking about a clump of cells. No one who has ever looked at an ultrasound screen and seen an unborn baby waving her hands or kicking her feet is in any doubt that that baby is a human being.

And at some level, every person knows that human beings have human rights and that human beings deserve to be protected, even when they are small and weak and vulnerable--especially when they are small and weak and vulnerable.

No matter how hard the abortion lobby pushes, they can't convince the majority of Americans that abortion is an unqualified good. Unfortunately, however, they succeeded in turning the Democratic Party into their legislative arm. And President Biden and Democrats in Congress are obediently pursuing a radical abortion agenda that puts them squarely to the left of the majority of the American people.

It is not limited to taxpayer funding of abortion or abortion providers. President Biden nominated a radical pro-abortion crusader as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. In May, Secretary Becerra appeared before a House subcommittee where he chose to answer a question on Federal abortion law by indulging in a game of semantics. Not only did he fail to commit to enforcing the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, he refused to even acknowledge its existence, even though he voted against the law repeatedly during his time in the House of Representatives.

Then there is the so-called Equality Act--Democrats' unprecedented assault on free speech and religious liberty that would also erode conscience protections on abortions as well as restrictions on Federal funding. Under the Equality Act, doctors and nurses who have a moral objection to participating in abortions could be forced to participate or lose their jobs.

I haven't even mentioned the Women's Health Protection Act, sponsored by almost every Democrat in the Senate, which would threaten even the mildest State limits on abortion.

It is deeply disheartening that making sure unborn children are deprived of their human rights has become a defining cause for one of the two major parties in this country. We can do better than this. We have to do better than this.

Congressman Henry Hyde, for whom the Hyde amendment was named, once noted that abortion--which, as he said, denies ``an entire class of human beings the welcome and protection of our laws''--is a betrayal of ``the best in our tradition.''

And he was right. What kind of a message does it send to our children when we tell them that an entire class of human beings is not worthy of protection, when we deny human rights to the most innocent and vulnerable humans among us? We have to do better.

To my Democratic colleagues, I would say, if we cannot act today to secure justice and human rights for unborn human beings, let's at least stand for the great American tradition of freedom of conscience and protect the rights of doctors and nurses who decline to participate in abortions. Let's at least spare Americans who oppose the taking of innocent human life from having their tax dollars go to fund abortions. At the very, very least, we should be able to agree upon that.

As I said, I am saddened and disheartened that a major political party in this country made depriving unborn human rights as their defining cause, but their right to life will not be ignored.

While Democratic leaders may deny the humanity of the unborn, there are a lot of Americans out there--a lot of Americans--who recognize it. I have faith that sooner or later this country will live up to its founding promise and the best of its tradition and extend the protection of its laws to every human being, born and unborn.

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