David Schweikert: “To my good friend, Mr. Smith, thank you. Thank you for managing this. The last handful of Congressmen that have come up…”

“To my good friend, Mr. Smith, thank you. Thank you for managing this. The last handful of Congressmen that have come up to the mic have been medical doctors. I get to stand here behind the microphone and share a slightly different story. This is that one very special time of year I get to stand here and say ``thank you'' to a woman named Mary Lynn Sheridan, at the time who was named Mary Lynn Gephart. She was a 17-year-old who found out she was pregnant, and she was in the car on the way, at that time in southern California, on her way to, apparently, Tijuana. And she broke down crying and kept crying more and kept hyperventilating. The two girlfriends she was with were so terrified she was getting sick in the car, they turned around and took her back home. Heaven forbid, she told her mother she was pregnant. I was born a few months later at Holy Family Unwed Mother's Home in downtown L.A. The amazing thing is--picture this: You're in your thirties. You come into work one day. You turn on your computer, and there's an email saying, Hi, David, you have no idea who I am, but your sister gave me information. Here's your birth mother. What do you do? How about if she's never told her family, told her two daughters that I'm out there? And I send a really carefully worded note after having a family meeting, and I had one of the most amazing experiences you could imagine.…”