Jerry Nadler: “Mr. Speaker, I rise once again in opposition to this bill. We have been through this debate often enough to know that we…”

“Mr. Speaker, I rise once again in opposition to this bill. We have been through this debate often enough to know that we will not find the term partial-birth abortion in any medical textbooks. There are procedures that we 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, as written, fails every test the Supreme Court has laid down for what might or might not be a constitutional regulation on abortion. It reads almost as if the authors went through the Supreme Court's recent decision in Stenberg v. Carhart and went out of their way to thumb their noses at the Supreme Court, and especially at Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who is generally viewed as a swing vote on such matters and who wrote a concurring opinion stating specifically what would be needed to uphold a statute. 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 facially and obviously unconstitutional.”