Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I have been concerned about this issue for some time as a Governor. When I became Governor of Delaware, we had the highest infant mortality rate of any State in the country. This is a State that is reasonably wealthy. I am the cochairman, with the gentlewoman from New York [Mrs. Lowey], of the Congressional Advisory Panel for the National Campaign to Reduce Teen Pregnancy. It is a tremendous concern. One point that I just want to discuss here tonight is the correlation that we are hearing between the advent of family planning and the increase in teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and sex in general, in this country. I just do not happen to believe that. Mr. Chairman, I do not have the percentages, quite frankly, of how many people actually go to these clinics. But I imagine it is a very small percentage of young teenagers who are involved in sex or who become pregnant in any way whatsoever. But obviously with permissiveness in society across the board, with a greater disregard of marriage than we have had heretofore, we have some tremendous societal problems that we have to address. Mr. Chairman, so to say that these two are directly related to each other I think is really going too far.”