The following are remarks by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Co-Chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, during today’s debate on the House Floor on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (HR 26):

            “In a Florida abortion clinic, Sycloria Williams delivered a live baby girl at 23 weeks.

            The clinic owner took the baby who was gasping for air, cut her umbilical cord, threw her into a biohazard bag and put the bag in the trash.

            Heartbroken, Ms. Williams later had a funeral for her baby girl who she named Shanice.

            CNN has reported that Ms. Williams suffers PTSD from the ordeal.

            Mr. Speaker, why are these live births from abortion ‘little known’?

            Dr. Willard Cates, MD, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Abortion Surveillance Unit, said several years ago: ‘(Live births) are little known because organized medicine, from fear of public clamor and legal action, treats them more as an embarrassment to be hushed up than a problem to be solved.  It’s like turning yourself in to the IRS for an audit…what is there to gain?  The tendency is not to report because there are only negative incentives.’

            Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell, one of the few who got caught, was convicted of murder for killing children who were born alive after attempted abortions.  The Grand Jury report described it this way: ‘Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered: he killed them.  He didn’t call it that.  He called it ‘ensuring fetal demise.’  The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord.  He called that ‘snipping.’’

            The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act seeks to end or at least mitigate this egregious child abuse by requiring that a health care provider must ‘exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age’ or be fined and/or face up to five years in prison.

            The bill makes clear that no mother of a child born alive can ever be prosecuted.

            And it empowers the woman upon whom the abortion is performed to obtain appropriate relief in a civil action.

            This is humane, pro-child, human rights legislation.”

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