Advanced Geothermal Innovation Leadership Act of 2019

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. LEE. 3259 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. LEE. Madam President, it is disappointing that when we take a look at something that is controversial like abortion and we peel it back a layer further, we make it noncontroversial by making the discussion about something that most Americans--the overwhelming majority of Americans--agree about, which is, regardless of how you feel about abortion, you don't necessarily want your government taking your taxpayer dollars and the taxpayer dollars of a whole lot of people who have very strong feelings against abortion and using those to fund organizations that either perform abortions or that engage in promoting or lobbying or counseling or referring in order to encourage abortions. The overwhelming majority of Americans don't want that regardless of how they feel about life.

This shouldn't be a controversial issue. It is a non sequitur. It is a straw man argument to suggest that this somehow limits anyone's options. It doesn't. In fact, it expands options of individuals by saying: We are not going to take your money at the point of a gun, which is what governments do at the end of the day when they take money, in order to spend it on something that--depending on how you phrase the question and which pollster you are talking to, it is either a sizable majority or a bare majority of Americans who find that morally problematic. But an overwhelming majority of Americans say that, no matter what, you shouldn't be taking all taxpayer money and then using that to fund abortion or abortion-related advocacy.

Last week, the Senate had a chance to adopt some measures that would protect the dignity of human life--not just unborn human life but also born human life, including babies who had been born alive following a failed abortion attempt. Unfortunately, due to a minority of this body, we lost the opportunity to enact those reforms.

Those colleagues opposed to these measures did so largely on the claims that they were, as they put them, anti-woman or anti-healthcare. They claim somehow that these measures interfered with what should be considered personal--the personal nature of healthcare between women and their doctors.

I could not agree more that healthcare is personal. It is, after all, about healing, preserving, and prolonging the life of a human being, the life of a person. In the case of a pregnant woman, it is about two persons, sometimes three. If it is a woman who is pregnant with a single baby, it is two persons with two beating hearts, two distinct sets of DNA, and two unique and eternally valuable, unrepeatable souls--two persons with equal dignity and worth. We ought to value both of them and provide opportunity and care and rights and protection to both.

In the spirit of our founding, we ought to affirm through our laws and through our taxpayer dollars the truth that every member of our society--every woman, every man, every unborn child--is entitled to the right to life and to the full protection of that right under the laws of the United States. Our healthcare ought to heal, preserve, and protect those lives. Unfortunately, many of our laws themselves permit and subsidize exactly the opposite of life in our country and even, tragically, abroad.

Congress allows and helps fund the most radical abortion policy in the Western world, enabling procedures that impose barbaric violence upon women and unborn children and ending the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent babies in our Nation every single year. It allows our foreign aid money to go to organizations that fund and promote abortions overseas, taking the lives of thousands of innocent babies across the globe--especially, by the way, baby girls.

In some of these countries, abortions happen in much higher numbers to female babies precisely because they are female. Abortion is, in many cases, the knife's edge of sexism--the exact tool they use to denigrate women's equal dignity and value and worth and right to breathe.

In some of these countries, women don't even want the abortions. In some cases, these organizations force their own so-called enlightened values on them, pressuring these women to take their own children's lives whether or not they really want to. This form of cultural and imperialism is not pro-woman, it is not pro-child, and it is certainly not pro-healthcare. It is pro-sexism and pro-violence. And we must end it. Today, we can, through the passage of the Protecting Life in Foreign Assistance Act. This bill would permanently stop the use of our foreign aid money for funding or promoting abortions overseas.

We ought to uphold the equal dignity of women, whether born or unborn, in America and across the world, and we should treat their bodies with reverence and dignity and respect, the respect they deserve, not because any government decided to confer that respect upon them but because they exist. Today, we can choose that, too, through Senator Braun's bill, the Dignity for Aborted Children Act. That measure, as Senator Braun has explained, will ensure that aborted children's bodies are not treated simply as medical waste to be crudely disposed of and that they should instead receive a proper burial or cremation, just as we accord to all other human beings.

We have to support and value women and babies everywhere. In our laws and for our lives, we ought to uphold the dignity of each and every human person, regardless of race, sex, appearance, abilities, or age. The measures before us today--those I have outlined and those that have been proposed by Senator Braun--do just that, and we should support them for the very same reasons that we should pass them. They shouldn't be objectionable.

It is tragic that they have drawn an objection today. It is tragic that any American, much less any Member of the Senate, which calls itself the world's greatest deliberative legislative body, would object to these measures. After all, it is difficult to fathom how someone wouldn't want to protect babies. It is difficult to fathom why someone wouldn't be in favor of something at least protecting the conscience rights of U.S. taxpayers who don't want to see their hard-earned taxpayer dollars going to fund an operation, a procedure that they know is designed to end a human life--a human life that in many cases is deliberately ended because of the sex of the person whose life is being taken. This is tragic, it is unacceptable, and it shouldn't happen--not here, not on this soil, not on our watch.

We are not going to give up. The fact that we have endured these setbacks today, the fact that these well-conceived, non-objectionable pieces of legislation have drawn an objection today, doesn't mean this issue is going to go away. It doesn't mean these proposals are going to go away.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source