Jerry Nadler: “Mr. Speaker, today we have a very bad combination, a combination of Members of Congress who want to play doctor and…”

“Mr. Speaker, today we have a very bad combination, a combination of Members of Congress who want to play doctor and Members of Congress who want to play Supreme Court. When you put the two together, you have a prescription for some very bad medicine for the women in this country. We have been through this debate often enough to know that you will not find the term ``partial-birth abortion'' in any medical textbook. There are procedures that you will find in medical textbooks, but the authors of this legislation would prefer to use the language of propaganda rather than the language of medical science. This bill is so vague that it could be read to prohibit many common procedures used during the second trimester. This, the Supreme Court has said, Congress may not constitutionally do. The bill as written fails every test the Supreme Court has laid down for constitutional regulation of abortion. It reads almost as if the authors went through the Supreme Court's controlling decision in Stenberg v. Carhart and went out of their way to thumb their noses at the Court. Unless the authors think that when the Court has made repeated and clear statements over the years of what the Constitution requires in this area, they were just pulling our leg, this bill has to be considered facially unconstitutional.”