The following are excerpted remarks pro-life Senator Ted Cruz gave during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Watch his full remarks here.
“Forty-eight years ago, the Supreme Court created a right to abortion that had never before existed, that had never received a vote from the American people, that could never have been imagined by the drafters of the Constitution. As Justice Thomas recently wrote, the Supreme Court, ‘Created the right to abortion out of whole cloth without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text.’
“Since that tragic decision, over 62 million unborn children have lost their lives. That 62 million little boys and little girls never got the chance to breathe a breath of fresh air, never got to laugh, never got to play, never got to grow up to be scientists, to be inventors, to be athletes, to be poets, to be artists. 62 million souls that never got the chance to live their own unique lives. Protecting human life is the central responsibility of the law.”
“Many state laws protecting life, laws that protect unborn life from the most inhumane abuses and atrocities, should be completely uncontroversial. I want to highlight three examples of these common sense laws. First are laws that protect infants who are born alive or breathing and crying outside the womb after surviving an attempted abortion procedure. This year alone, the states of Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, and Wyoming have passed laws requiring physicians to provide medical care to these infants because protecting a child who is born alive shouldn’t be even remotely controversial.
“Second are laws that protect unborn children from being killed by horrific dismemberment abortions. These abortions, known as dilation and evacuation, or D and E abortions, are horrendous. They have no place in civilized society. In these abortions, a physician cuts and rips apart the unborn child’s body and extracts piece by piece, arm by arm, leg by leg. What moments before had been a living human being. The unborn child dies the same way as an adult would die who had been dismembered – by bleeding to death as his or her body is torn apart. If an individual murdered an animal in this way, tearing apart a kitten or a puppy, everyone would understandably be horrified and demand that the individual be prosecuted. How can it be that unborn children should be protected less than animals?
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“Third, are laws that protect unborn children from being killed because of their immutable characteristics, such as race, sex, or disability status. These are anti-eugenics laws. Plain and simple. Right now, 67 percent of babies prenatally diagnosed with Down Syndrome in the United States are aborted.”
“Senator Blumenthal’s bill, the misleadingly named ‘Women’s Health Protection Act,’ would make sure that physicians can refuse medical treatment to infants who survived an abortion. It would make sure that unborn children can be aborted by tearing them limb from limb, and it would make sure that unborn children diagnosed with Down Syndrome can be terminated because of their disability. This is inhumane. It goes much further than even the deeply mistaken pro-abortion cases from the Supreme Court.”
“The position of virtually every elected Democrat in the United States Senate, including the President of the United States and the Vice President of the United States, is they support unlimited abortion on demand up until the moment of birth, partial-birth abortion with taxpayer funding, with no parental consent and no parental notification. That is an extreme, radical view far out of step with the American people. Indeed, just 9 percent of Americans agree with that radical view – 91 percent say that goes too far. But in today’s Democratic Party, that is the orthodoxy, the radical orthodoxy that they would force on the entire country, and that they would use to strike down any state laws protecting human life.”