The following are excerpts of remarks by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) on the House Floor on the Biden Administration’s new Veterans Affairs (VA) abortion policy:

            “As former chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, I have always deeply respected and strongly supported the unique mission of VA healthcare.

            Comprised of 171 medical centers and 1,113 outpatients’ clinics, the VA operates the largest integrated health care network in the world.

            VA medical personnel—371,000 professionals and support staff—are absolutely committed to healing, nurturing, rehabilitating.

            So, it is beyond disappointing that President Biden issued an illegal rule—violating Section 106 of the Veterans Health Care Act of 1992—to turn the life-saving, life-enhancing mission of the VA into new venues for abortion on demand.

            The Biden VA abortion rule authorizes and forces taxpayers to fund the violent death of unborn baby girls and boys by beheading, dismemberment, forced expulsion from the womb, deadly poisons, or other methods at any time until birth.

            Abortion is not health care unless one construes the precious life of an unborn child to be analogous to a tumor to be excised or a disease to be vanquished.

            For decades, abortion advocates have gone to extraordinary lengths to ignore, trivialize and cover-up the battered baby-victim.

            But today, thanks to ultrasound, unborn babies are more visible than ever before.

            Today science informs us that birth is an event—albeit an important one—but not the beginning of life.

            Modern medicine today also treats unborn children with disability or disease as a patient in need of diagnosis and treatment—not death by abortion.

            Unborn babies are society’s youngest patients and deserve benign life-affirming medical interventions—not medicines that kill.

            The weakest and most vulnerable—unborn babies—deserve our respect, empathy, protection, and love."

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