
By Rep. Chris Smith – Thursday, January 23, 2025
OPINION:
The annual March for Life is an engraved invitation to each and every one of us to seriously recommit and rededicate ourselves to the defense of the weakest and most vulnerable.
To recommit with love and compassion to tangibly assist women — especially through the extraordinary work of pregnancy care centers — to protect their precious babies and their own lives from the violence and cruelty of abortion.
Pregnancy care centers are under siege by Planned Parenthood — also known as Child Abuse Inc. — an organization that has killed more than 10 million babies in its clinics.
Today, we recommit to exposing abortion methods to a society that has chosen to be blind to the realities of brutally dismembering helpless babies with sharp knifelike curettes or poisoning babies with pills that literally starve them to death and often result in their bodies being flushed down a toilet.
We are a people of indomitable hope; we refuse to entertain discouragement or defeat.
We thank President Trump for defeating not one but two extremist pro-abortion candidates — Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Kamala Harris — and for his amazing defense of unborn children.
Abortion President Joseph R. Biden is gone, but his morbid legacy of packing the judiciary with litmus-tested abortion activists, using executive orders to kill more babies and integrating the nefarious abortion agenda into countless benign and necessary programs like veterans’ health and global health must be immediately reversed.
Mr. Trump has done more to protect the innocent than any other president in history — and now, thank God, he’s back.
Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade — achieved by the three Supreme Court justices Mr. Trump appointed — half the states have enacted laws to protect unborn children, saving over 200,000 children over two years.
On Monday, Mr. Trump issued a powerful executive order designed to defund the outrageously pro-abortion World Health Organization. Another, the reinstatement of the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance, is still pending to reverse Mr. Biden’s hijacking of global health funding, which shamelessly promoted abortion on demand around the world, including in President George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Last week, the most recent revelation was that PEPFAR broke U.S. law to pay for abortions in Africa — a tip of the iceberg of the Biden-Harris anti-child activism at home and abroad. The 2025 Marist poll has found that 73% of Americans oppose using tax dollars for abortions in other countries.
Other pro-life executive orders are expected soon.
Special thanks to House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other Republican leadership in the House and Senate for their ongoing courageous legislative initiatives, including legislation to save babies born alive during the grisly abortion process.
The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, under consideration in both the House and Senate, seeks to end or at least mitigate this egregious child abuse by requiring that a health care provider “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age” or be fined and/or face up to five years in prison. The bill makes clear that no mother of a child born alive can ever be prosecuted. It also empowers the woman upon whom the abortion is performed to obtain appropriate relief in a civil action.
This is humane, pro-child, human rights legislation.
Why is there opposition? Dr. Willard Cates, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s abortion surveillance unit, explained years ago: “[Live births] are little known because organized medicine, from fear of public clamor and legal action, treats them more as an embarrassment to be hushed up than a problem to be solved. It’s like turning yourself in to the IRS for an audit. … What is there to gain? The tendency is not to report because there are only negative incentives.” The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Dr. Cates in “Abortion: The Dreaded Complication.”
The bottom line is that pro-lifers are people of persevering faith in God who are willing to bear any burden and endure any attack. We know that the cruel injustice of abortion need not be forever and that each day, despite setbacks, many unborn children and their mothers have been and are being protected.
We have hope. We have just begun.
- Chris Smith, a co-chair of the Pro-Life Caucus, is a Republican congressman from New Jersey.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jan/23/march-life-defending-weakest-vulnerable/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIA6sFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHfFdjl_vbd2vzKSxWA1OmYN3YicGrVyMa9sHblhaK4EMxvPOuvzHEvqwVw_aem_L1iQ1FjMFUsss-_VcuZDEg