Remarks by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) — 

I met my dear wife Marie more than fifty years ago in the pro-life movement—and today, like you, we are more hope-filled than ever.

Thank you to Jennie Bradley Lichter and your team for organizing this magnificent witness for the sanctity of all human life.

 Today’s March for Life is an engraved invitation to each and every one of us to seriously recommit and rededicate ourselves to the defense of the weakest and most vulnerable.  (click on image below or here to watch video)

To recommit with love and compassion to tangibly assist women—especially through the extraordinary work of pregnancy care centers— in order to protect their precious babies and their own lives from the violence and cruelty of abortion. The Marist poll this week found that a supermajority of Americans—83%—support these centers.

Pregnancy care centers are under siege by Planned Parenthood—also known as Child Abuse Inc—an organization that has killed over ten million babies in their clinics.

We must end taxpayer funds to Planned Parenthood.

Today we recommit to exposing abortion methods to a society that has chosen to be blind to the realities of brutally dismembering helpless babies with sharp knife-like curettes or poisoning babies with pills that literally starve them to death and often result in their bodies being flushed down a toilet.

We are a people of indomitable hope—we absolutely refuse to entertain discouragement or defeat.

We thank President Trump for defeating not one but two extremist pro-abortion candidates—Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris—and for his amazing defense of unborn children.

Abortion-President Joe Biden is gone—but his morbid legacy of packing the judiciary with litmus-tested abortion activists, using executive orders to kill more babies and integrating the nefarious abortion agenda into countless benign and necessary programs like veterans’ health and global health will be reversed.

President Trump has done more to protect the innocent than any other President in history—and now, thank God, he’s back. 

Since the reversal of Roe v Wade—achieved by the three Supreme Court Justices President Trump appointed—half the states have enacted laws to protect unborn children saving over 200,000 children over two years.

On Monday, President Trump issued a powerful executive order designed to defund the outrageously pro-abortion World Health Organization (WHO), and another— the soon reinstatement of the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance to reverse Biden’s hijacking of global health funding, which shamelessly promoted abortion on demand around the world including President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR),

Last week, the most recent revelation was that PEPFAR broke U.S. law to pay for abortions in Africa—a tip of the iceberg of the Biden-Harris anti-child activism at home and abroad—while the most recent Marist poll found that 73% of Americans oppose using tax dollars for abortions in other countries.

And a special thanks to President Trump for pardoning 23 pro-life activists wrongly jailed by Biden.

In Congress, Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader John Thune and the Republican leadership in the House and Senate are pushing lifesaving legislative initiatives, including legislation to save babies born alive during the grisly abortion process.

            The Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act passed the House 217 to 204 and is designed 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.           

Why is there opposition? Dr. Willard Cates, MD, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Abortion Surveillance Unit, explained 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.” Cates was quoted by the Philadelphia Inquirer in “Abortion: The Dreaded Complication”.

Bottom line: pro-lifers are a people of persevering faith in God willing to bear any burden and endure any attack. We know that the cruel injustice of abortion need not be forever and that each day, despite setbacks, many unborn children and their mothers have been and are being protected.  We have hope. We have just begun.