Charles T. Canady: “as I thought about the subject upon which I rise to speak today, I was reminded of the words of William Butler Yeats's…”

“as I thought about the subject upon which I rise to speak today, I was reminded of the words of William Butler Yeats's poem ``The Second Coming,'' where he wrote: ``Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.'' Now, that is a pretty bleak picture, but I think it is an accurate reflection of the problem addressed by the bill I am here to discuss today. H.R. 4292, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, legislation that would provide legal protection to living, fully born babies who survive abortions; tiny, helpless infants brought into the world through no choice of their own and struggling to survive. Now, surely we may say such legislation could not possibly be necessary. Surely fully born babies are already entitled to the protections of the law. Well, until recently, that certainly was true, but the corrupting influence of a seemingly illimitable right to abortion, created out of whole cloth by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade has brought this well-settled principle into question.”