{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=415841", "\u201cThe Hyde Amendment reaffirms the fundamental truth that every life is precious and irreplaceable.\u201dSmith hosts Special Order to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Hyde Amendment", "2026-09-16", "2026", "2026-09", "Republican", "House", "NJ", "Christopher H. Smith", "S000522", "chrissmith.house.gov", "chrissmith", "https://chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentquery.aspx", "scraper", "Tonight, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Co-Chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, hosted a Special Order on the House floor to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Hyde Amendment, which protects taxpayer dollars from funding abortion, both directly and through federal health plans. Rep. Smith\u2019s remarks are provided below:\n\nFifty years ago\u2014on September 30th, 1976\u2014Congress first enacted an amendment offered by the late, great Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois to prohibit federal Medicaid funds from being used to subsidize the killing of unborn children by abortion.\n\nDuring debate in the House, Henry said: \u201cAn innocent, defenseless human life, in a caring and humane society, deserves better than to be flushed down a toilet or burned in an incinerator. The promise of America is that life is not just for the privileged, the planned, or the perfect.\u201d\n\nMr. Speaker, according to Dr. Michael J. New of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, approximately 2.7 million people are alive today\u2014and each year, another 60,000 evade the irreversible consequence of abortion and survive\u2014because of Henry Hyde\u2019s amendment.\n\nThanks to Henry Hyde, 2.7 million people\u2014who would have otherwise been aborted\u2014have experienced the joys and challenges and opportunities to thrive.\n\nBeginning in 1981, I had the honor of serving alongside Henry Hyde in the U.S. House of Representatives.\n\nHe was brilliant, compassionate, tenacious, incredibly articulate, self-effacing, a man of great wisdom and humor\u2014a one-of-a-kind lawmaker\u2014who, to this day, remains the greatest defender of unborn children and their mothers.\n\nHe was so good at debate, you always wanted him to be your closer.\n\nHenry believed sound moral principles and courage should inform and guide the decisions we make in government, and he addressed the 1990 class of incoming freshman Members of Congress with these words:\n\n\u201cThis may sound odd, even ironic. You are here in the flush of victory. And yet it is precisely now that I ask you to contemplate the possibility of defeat\u2014perhaps even the necessity of defeat\u2026.If you don't know the principle, or the policy, for which you are willing to lose your office, then you are going to do damage here.\u201d\n\nNo one wants to lose an election. However, we do great \u201cdamage\u201d when we sacrifice our core convictions on the altar of political expediency.\n\nIt\u2019s truly sad that far too many politicians\u2014who know better\u2014have abandoned unborn children and their mothers to the abortionists for political gain or upward advancement.\n\nMr. Speaker, the Hyde Amendment is under relentless legislative assault. Yet polling data consistently reflects what the 2026 Marist Poll found: a significant majority of Americans do not support taxpayer funding for abortion.\n\nAs pro-life Americans work to replace abortion violence\u2014the culture of death\u2014with compassion and empathy for women and children, the Hyde Amendment continues to stand as one of the most important human rights policies of the past 50 years.\n\nHowever, the billion-dollar abortion industry continues to cleverly market the cheap sophistry of choice, while going to extraordinary lengths to downplay the suffering and pain experienced by the battered baby victims in the womb\u2014as well as the coercion or pressure exerted on the mother to end the life of her unborn child.\n\nThe abortion pill\u2014mifepristone\u2014kills the baby by starving the child to death, while other methods of abortion dismember and decapitate the baby.\n\nWe now know that mifepristone is extremely dangerous to women. The Ethics and Public Policy Center conducted the largest-known study of the abortion pill ever and is based on analysis of data from an all-payer insurance claims database that includes 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023 and found that 10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.\n\nThe real-world rate of serious adverse events following mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of \u201cless than 0.5 percent\u201d in clinical trials reported on the drug label.\n\nMr. Speaker, someday, future generations of Americans will look back and wonder how and why such a seemingly smart and enlightened society could have permitted and perpetrated the violent deaths of more than 66 million children by abortion, often with government authorization, enabling and subsidy.\n\nHistory will note, however, the struggle of Henry Hyde and the millions of pro-life Americans who joined him in his quest to protect and defend the rights of the weakest and most vulnerable.\n\nHenry Hyde always encouraged all of us in the pro-life movement\u2014despite setbacks and harsh criticism\u2014to persevere and never give up, and famously said:\n\n\u201cWhen the time comes as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgement, I've often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God, and a terror will rip through your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there will be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world, and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, \u2018Spare him because he loved us,\u2019 and God will look at you and say not \u2018Did you succeed,\u2019 but \u2018Did you try?\u2019\u201d\n\n###", 1, "2026-09-17T09:52:05Z", "2026-09-17T09:53:00Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=415841"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.0410640388727188, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}