Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. NADLER. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Madam Speaker, we're back again considering cruel and unconstitutional legislation that would curtail women's reproductive rights. This bill contains a nearly total ban on abortions prior to viability, which the Supreme Court says violates women's rights under the Constitution.

Just recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit struck down a nearly identical Arizona statute, saying:

Since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case law concerning the constitutional protection accorded women with respect to the decision whether to undergo an abortion has been unalterably clear regarding one basic point ..... a woman has a constitutional right to choose to terminate her pregnancy before the fetus is viable. A prohibition on the exercise of that right is per se unconstitutional.

Perhaps most cruelly, this bill fails even to provide any exception to protect a woman's health. The exception for a woman's life is so narrowly written and so convoluted that even a physician wanting to comply with the law in good faith would have trouble determining when the woman is sufficiently in extremis that her condition qualifies. So the morally arrogant authors of this bill would tell a woman who faces permanent injury or disability that she must bear that calamity by carrying her pregnancy to term.

Recently added language is supposed to take the heat off the recent uproar over the absence of a rape and incest exception in this bill, but the bill would provide an exception for rape or incest only if the victim first reported it to the authorities. In the best of all possible worlds, every assault would be reported and every rapist prosecuted. But we all know that there are many reasons why rapes and incest often don't get reported--the toll our criminal justice system takes on rape victims: the humiliation, the harassment, the psychological trauma.

Why force women to be victimized twice? The only reason we have been given by the supporters of this bill is that women lie about having been raped. So the sponsors are telling us not only that women are not competent to make this very personal decision for themselves and that we here are more competent--we should substitute our judgments for theirs--but women are also too dishonest to be believed when they say they were raped.

This bill would use the trauma of the assault to erect another unnecessary and cruel barrier to a raped woman. Congress should not side with her abuser to force her to carry that abuser's child to term.

The incest exception applies only if the victim was a minor when the incidents occurred. Why? Do my colleagues believe that this was nice, consensual sex? That if a young woman is abused by her father from age 8 and he gets her pregnant at 18, it doesn't count? Or that she asked for it and deserves it?

These restrictions are new. The rape and incest exceptions in the previous legislation passed by this House have no such conditions or restrictions. Even the Hyde amendment, embodied in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill, says:

The limitations established in the preceding section shall not apply to abortion if the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.

No conditions, no restrictions, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Some Members want to redefine rape and incest to satisfy an extremist base that wants to outlaw all abortions, even for victims of rape and incest. I hope that we can agree that no woman should ever be forced to carry her abuser's child.

I urge my colleagues to reject this cruel and unconstitutional.

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