Political Quotes

“I rise to urge each of my colleagues to support the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. This critical legislation would prohibit a child from being aborted at 5 months of development. For those we have watching today, I would like you to focus a little bit on these photos, and I will return to them in a moment. Again, I am urging my colleagues to support the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. By any measure, at 5 months of development, an unborn child is a child. At 5 months, babies have grown nails on their fingers and on their toes; hair has just begun to grow on their heads; and an ultrasound can tell an expectant mother or father whether their baby is a boy or a girl. These babies can detect light, hear sounds, they can swallow, and even experience taste as their taste buds grow and develop. These unborn babies in all ways are babies. There is also significant scientific evidence that at 5 months of development these babies can feel pain. By 5 months, babies begin to respond to painful stimulus with distinctive pain response behaviors that are exhibited by older babies. They will scrunch their eyes, they will clench their hands, they pull back their limbs in response to pain, just like any other child experiencing pain. There is also a great deal of evidence that stress hormone levels rise substantially when babies at this age are exposed to pain. In 2015, a Cambridge University Press medical textbook acknowledged that a ``fetus . . .…”