House Republicans' Legislative Efforts This Week
Floor Speech
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Mr. SELF. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak on a very heavy subject. I have images of a very disturbing and graphic nature here with me showing the violent, horrific reality of abortion. This should shock every American.
What would you do if you found the dead bodies of five babies inside a cardboard box? Would you call the police? Would you throw the box out? Would you let it be taken away to a medical waste incinerator and forget you ever found it?
This is not a hypothetical. This is exactly what happened right here in this city just 3 miles from this House Chamber. On March 25, 2022, Laurel Handy and Terrisa Bukovinac found these children in a box labeled ``medical waste'' outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic abortion facility.
They suspected it contained human remains, and the medical waste services truck driver agreed to give it to them for a proper burial. What they found inside scarred them: the bodies of five late-term aborted children. Experts attest that these babies were between 26 and 32 weeks of development when they were aborted. They had lungs, beating hearts, fully formed fingers and toes, eyelids that would open and close. These children could feel pain.
As these images show, their bodies were disfigured, crushed, chemically burned. One baby girl bore wounds, a deep laceration to the back of her neck that likely indicates an illegal partial birth abortion.
Another baby girl had the marks of a D&E abortion, dilation and evacuation in which the abortionist dismembers the baby limb by limb and crushes its skull to remove it from the womb.
This occurred nearly 2 years ago. Yet, shamefully, neither the Department of Justice nor the D.C. Metropolitan Police nor the D.C. Medical Examiner did anything. No autopsies were done. No investigations were opened. The entire case of the D.C. five was swept under the rug.
Something is very sick in our society. When a baby at 30 weeks in utero is wanted, a doctor will do anything to save its life. However, when a baby is unwanted, the abortionist takes its life.
When a mother miscarries, we mourn with her for the loss of her unborn child, but when she gets an abortion, we are told there is nothing to mourn, nothing to see. These aren't human beings. These aren't real babies. They are only medical waste. Move along. Don't be bothered. Don't open the cardboard box.
Lauren and Terrisa opened the box. They recognized the dignity and inherent value of all human life, even babies still in the womb.
Five days after discovering the box, Lauren was arrested on charges of protesting outside an abortion clinic. Today, she is still detained and could face 11 years in prison.
What has gone wrong in our country, that a woman who found these babies is imprisoned while the man who killed them, the notorious late- term abortionist, Dr. Santangelo, goes free?
The District of Columbia allows abortion up to and including the moment of birth. In other words, in this city, a baby's right to life depends on which side of the birth canal it is on.
Location, mere geography, is the difference between legal abortion and murder. One pro-abortion surgeon became pro-life the instant he witnessed the abortion of a 19-week-old baby. He wrote: ``And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?''
These are second- and third-trimester babies. What can any pro- abortion argument say against these images?
The D.C. 5 were children, human beings with distinct DNA, weeks from birth, before their lives were brutally and barbarically snuffed out.
The DOJ must immediately investigate the likely violation of the partial birth abortion ban. I demand the D.C. medical examiner allow an autopsy, and I stand with my House colleagues in calling for Congress to investigate. Justice for the D.C. 5 demands no less.
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