Ensuring Access to Abortion Act of 2022

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman, the ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Mrs. McMorris Rodgers, for leading on this issue.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this radical movement by our colleagues on the left to go way further than Roe, under the guise of codifying Roe, to push some of the most extreme packages of pro-abortion legislation that we have seen.

Where would this push us if they got their way? Under this package of bills that the House is taking up today, the United States would end up among just a handful of countries, including China and North Korea, in radical abortion on demand up until birth policy.

Now, there has been a lot of misinformation presented since the Supreme Court made their decision, a decision that I applaud because, Madam Speaker, it is a decision that finally said Roe was a flawed decision and that, in fact, elected leaders should be the ones debating this.

How much can we debate how to protect life? States have been having this debate. Roe didn't end the debate. It started a movement, a movement for almost 50 years. The March for Life. You see young people, tens and hundreds of thousands, coming up to Washington, just praying and marching for the opportunity to protect life. Now, those States and Congress can have that debate about how much more we can do to protect life.

In fact, we brought an amendment because whether it was before the Dobbs decision or even today, a State like New York has such a radical law that a baby can be born alive outside the womb, and they can murder that baby and call it abortion. That is still legal today in States like New York. It should not be. It is murder. If a baby is born alive outside the womb, how in America can that baby be murdered under the guise of abortion? Yet, that is what is allowed.

We had the motion to recommit we brought forward--we will have a vote on that shortly--to say that barbaric act can no longer happen again in America, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. Everybody should vote for that. People pro-choice have said they think it is radical that a baby can be born alive outside the womb and still be murdered under the name of abortion.

We will have the opportunity to right that wrong today on the House floor. I hope everybody votes for it. Unfortunately, so far, we haven't gotten any support from my Democratic colleagues.

I will end with this, Madam Speaker: Our Founding Fathers empowered us with three unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The first among those is life. Let's do all we can to protect life, not have this radical, extreme agenda pushed forward today.

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