Protect Babies Born Alive

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARSHALL. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, since I was a freshman in high school, I wanted to become a physician. I was blessed to get to do that. By the time of my second year in medical school, my wife and I had our first daughter, and most of us were trying to decide what type of doctor we were going to be. The moment that little girl was born, I knew that I wanted to spend my medical career delivering babies.

I think my wife can attest that, for the next 30 years of my life, most of my waking moments were spent with somebody in labor. I was so blessed to get to participate in that wonderful moment.

I was blessed to get to go to Congress and represent the people of Kansas.

I woke up a couple weeks ago to the cheering of State legislators from New York and their Governor. I turned up the volume to see what the fuss was. The fuss was they were celebrating their ability to murder the same babies that I had been trying to protect and deliver for the last 30 years of my life.

I don't think there are any Americans--I have never met such an American--who would think that it is right to murder a baby moments, days, or weeks before its due date. It is the most barbaric law I have ever heard of in our society.

If this wasn't enough, I turned the news on a week later, and now they are talking about murdering babies after they were born from so- called failed abortions.

I cannot believe that I live in a society that would even think about this. So I went to my office the next day, and I got my staff together and said, look, we have got some legislation that is going to take care of this. We have our born survivor abortion bill that protects babies after they are born, and then we have a pain-capable bill as well to protect babies who are able to feel pain from being aborted.

My staff looked at me: Right, we have got that legislation.

I said: All we will need is 20 or 30 Democrats to sign on to this. Surely, the Speaker of the House is against late-term abortion. Surely, she is against infanticide.

My staff looked at me with bewildered eyes and said: Congressman, I don't think we are going to find any Democrats to do that.

I wanted to talk a second about the moms, too. No one is talking about how horrible this is going to be for mothers. Moms are going to die from these late-term abortions. As an obstetrician, I never did an abortion, but guess who takes care of complications from abortions. It is obstetricians.

I remember the first week I was in residency. I was called to the emergency room, and there before me was a lady in shock. I apologize if this is too graphic, but the situation is so graphic, I have to tell you the details.

This young lady was bleeding out buckets of blood. I found out what had happened is she just had had an abortion done hours before, and now she was hemorrhaging.

I looked at the nurse. I said: What is going on here?

I knew that we needed to take her to the operating room. We found out during the procedure that a piece of that baby was still inside her uterus, and the uterus couldn't clamp down, so she was hemorrhaging.

This is a story I would see over and over again. The later the abortion procedure is done in the pregnancy, the more often we are going to see this. People are going to get perforated uteri. It will be catastrophic for women.

Mr. Speaker, we can't allow this to continue.

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