Chris Smith: “I thank my very good friend for yielding and thank her for her strong leadership for human rights and for the unborn.…”

“I thank my very good friend for yielding and thank her for her strong leadership for human rights and for the unborn. Mr. Speaker, pain--we all dread it, we avoid it, we even fear it, and we all go to extraordinary lengths to mitigate its severity and its duration; yet an entire age group of human beings are, today, subjected to a deadly, extraordinarily painful procedure, one of which is called the dismemberment method, the D&E. The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act is a modest but necessary attempt to at least protect babies who are 20 weeks old and pain capable from having to suffer and die from abortion. Children, including children with disabilities, Mr. Speaker, deserve better treatment than pain-filled dismemberment. One leading expert in the field of fetal pain, Dr. Anand, at the University of Tennessee, stated in his expert report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice: The human fetus possesses the ability to experience pain from 20 weeks of gestation, if not earlier, and the pain perceived by a fetus is possibly more intense than that perceived by term newborns or older children. {time} 1245 Dr.…”