Chris Smith: “I thank my good friend for yielding. I want to thank Virginia Foxx for her extraordinary leadership on behalf of the…”

“I thank my good friend for yielding. I want to thank Virginia Foxx for her extraordinary leadership on behalf of the weakest and the most vulnerable among us. Madam Speaker, because abortion dismembers, decapitates, or chemically poisons an unborn child to death, Americans have consistently demanded that public funds not pay for abortion. I would note parenthetically--and we just saw this last week--since 1973, some 56 million babies, unborn babies, have been killed by abortion, a number, a death toll that equates with the entire population of England. Madam Speaker, a huge majority--well over 60 percent according to the most polls--show that women and men in this country don't want to be complicit in abortion by subsidizing it. A December 2009 Quinnipiac poll found that 72 percent opposed allowing abortion to be paid for by public funds under health care reform. Another poll asked: If the choice were up to you, would you want your own insurance policy to include abortion? Sixty-nine percent of women said no. Madam Speaker, this is because an ever-growing number of people recognize that abortion isn't health care; it kills babies and it hurts women. We live in an age of ultrasound imaging: the ultimate window to the womb and the child who resides there. We are in the midst of a fetal health revolution, an explosion of benign life-affirming interventions designed to diagnose, treat, and cure the precious lives of these youngest patients.…”