Fourth Anniversary of Dobbs Decision

Floor Speech

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Mr. JOHNSON of Louisiana. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Blake Moore, a great champion and great vice chairman of the House Republican Conference, for yielding. I am so delighted with what he has done with the office. I thank him for hosting this Special Order hour. It is very appropriate and a historic moment that we are in.

Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to join all of my colleagues in celebrating the fourth anniversary of the lifesaving Dobbs decision.

As we know, and I know it has been discussed tonight, that decision reversed five decades of inhuman social engineering, the murder of tens of millions of unborn children. Ultimately, it returned the question of regulating abortion to the people's elected representatives, where it should have remained the whole time.

I was born 1 year before Roe v. Wade, almost exactly to the day. I was born in January 1972. Roe was decided in January 1973, as we know. In my 54 years of life, I will say the Dobbs decision represents the most consequential and lifesaving decision of my lifetime.

I used to go into the courts, for almost 20 years, as a constitutional law litigator to defend the sanctity of human life, but Dobbs was the big one.

Mr. Speaker, think about how many innocent, unborn children have been lost to the hands of Big Abortion. Estimates suggest it is somewhere above 65 million lives. I have always believed that is a low estimate because we know many States do not accurately report abortion numbers. It is probably much higher than that. That is just the number since Roe was decided in 1973.

It is just an unconscionable thing. It is an unspeakable evil. Thankfully, by the grace of God, the Supreme Court finally righted that egregious wrong.

The conditions that led to that decision did not materialize overnight. It took a long, long time. From the moment Roe was decided in 1973, pro-life advocates went to work to pray, organize, build faithful and effective coalitions, and educate the public on the scourge of abortion. They did not do that with hate. They were motivated by love. That is what this has always been about.

We know that mere words of support are not enough. As advocates for life, we must continue to advocate for and support the heroic mission of things like the pregnancy resource centers around the country. They do vital work that is so important. Those centers don't just provide lifesaving and practical care. They empower women to choose life.

We know the statistics. When a woman sees her unborn child on an ultrasound, she has about an 86-percent chance of going through with the pregnancy, to understand that is a child there. No matter how small, it is a person.

Of course, this anniversary and this year are particularly important. Next Friday, we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, our 250th anniversary as a nation.

The Declaration is our Nation's birth certificate. That is how we describe it all the time, because it is. In that certificate, we boldly proclaim the self-evident truths that all people are created equally by God, and all people are endowed by Him, God, our creator, with their inalienable rights. Of course, that begins, as articulated in the Declaration, with the right to life, logically.

We still have work to do to continue building a culture of life. We still have work to ensure that we are living up to the ideals espoused in the Declaration. Tonight, we should let these anniversaries serve as calls to action, to continue building a culture of life and to advance policies that protect the sanctity and the dignity of every human life.

I again thank my good friend, a great champion for the rights of the unborn, Vice Chairman Blake Moore, for organizing this Special Order.

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