Charles T. Canady: “Mr. Speaker, H.R. 4292, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is a simple but critical piece of legislation that is…”

“Mr. Speaker, H.R. 4292, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is a simple but critical piece of legislation that is designed to ensure that, for purposes of Federal law, all infants who have been born alive are treated as persons who are entitled to the protections of the law. We may ask why such a legislation is necessary. Has it not been long accepted as a legal principle that infants who are born alive are persons who are entitled to the protections of the law? Indeed it has. But the corrupting influence of a seemingly illimitable right to abortion has brought this well-settled principle into question. Mr. Speaker, in Stenberg v. Carhart, five Justices of the United States Supreme Court struck down a Nebreska law banning partial-birth abortion, a gruesome procedure in which an abortionist delivers an unborn child's body until only the head remains inside the mother, then punctures the back of the child's skull with scissors and sucks the child's brains out before completing the delivery. Every time I describe that horrible procedure, I wince because it is truly a horror. But that is what the Supreme Court of the United States, speaking through five Justices has found is protected by our Constitution.”