{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=4468FC33-9D8E-4DE1-A519-DDDE6F105F1E", "Thune: We Must Stand Up For the Human Rights of Unborn Americans", "2021-11-30", "2021", "2021-11", "Republican", "Senate", "SD", "John Thune", "T000250", "www.thune.senate.gov", "thune", "https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases", "scraper", "U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) today spoke on the Senate floor to defend the rights of the unborn. Thune noted that Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u2019s Health Organization, which the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this week, is the best opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade, but regardless of the outcome, he will continue to be a tireless advocate for the unborn.\n\nThune\u2019s remarks below (as prepared for delivery):\n\n\u201cMr. President, tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Dobbs case, which deals with a Mississippi law that would prohibit most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.\n\n\u201cThis case offers the best opportunity in many years to see Roe v. Wade overturned or modified \u2013 something that is long overdue.\n\n\u201cRoe v. Wade was a bad decision that should long ago have been reversed.\n\n\u201cLegal scholars from across the ideological spectrum have criticized the decision, noting, in the words of one expert, \u2018As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether.\u2019\n\n\u201cOr as another legal scholar put it, Roe is \u2018a very bad decision \u2026 because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.\u2019\n\n\u201cI should note, Mr. President, that both of the individuals I just quoted are actually supportive of abortion, but, like many others, both recognize that Roe is simply bad law.\n\n\u201cIn the Roe decision, the Supreme Court reached far beyond the Constitution and the court\u2019s interpretive role to impose a new abortion regime on the entire country.\n\n\u201cAnd it is past time for this unconstitutional decision to be overturned and for the court to return jurisdiction over abortion to the states.\n\n\u201cAnd, Mr. President, it\u2019s important to note that overturning Roe would do just that \u2013 return jurisdiction over abortion to the states and to elected officials who can be held accountable for their decisions, and ultimately to the American people.\n\n\u201cMany assume \u2013 incorrectly \u2013 that overturning Roe would somehow automatically ban abortion nationwide.\n\n\u201cIt wouldn\u2019t.\n\n\u201cIt would simply return jurisdiction to the people\u2019s elected representatives.\n\n\u201cAbortion law would become the domain of states and Congress, instead of the domain of unelected, activist members of the judiciary.\n\n\u201cMr. President, members of the radical pro-abortion lobby \u2013 which controls the abortion policies of the Democrat Party \u2013 are of course up in arms over the Dobbs case.\n\n\u201cThey are terrified that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe \u2013 and I suspect that the root of that fear is the knowledge that they need an activist court for their radical abortion agenda.\n\n\u201cWhy?\n\n\u201cBecause the American people do not agree with the radical abortion lobby on abortion.\n\n\u201cFor all its efforts to paint abortion on demand, at any time, up until the moment of birth, as the only possible position, the pro-abortion lobby has completely failed to convince the American people.\n\n\u201cPolls consistently show that a strong majority of the American people support at least some restrictions on abortion.\n\n\u201cGallup has been polling on abortion for decades, and in all that time the percentage of Americans who believe abortion should be legal under any circumstance has always remained under 35 percent.\n\n\u201cIn fact, for most of the past several decades that number has remained squarely under 30 percent.\n\n\u201cAn Associated Press poll from this June found that 65 percent of Americans believe that abortion should generally be illegal in the second trimester \u2013 or from about 13 weeks of pregnancy \u2013 while a whopping 80 percent of Americans believe that abortion should generally be illegal in the third trimester.\n\n\u201cAnd it\u2019s no surprise.\n\n\u201cDespite the abortion lobby\u2019s attempts to dehumanize unborn children and portray them as nothing more than clumps of cells or unwanted growths, most Americans are well aware that an unborn child is a baby.\n\n\u201cA human being.\n\n\u201cAn innocent human being.\n\n\u201cAnd because Americans generally gravitate toward justice and the defense of human rights and vulnerable human beings, they remain \u2013 despite the best efforts of the abortion lobby \u2013 fundamentally uncomfortable with unrestricted abortion.\n\n\u201cAnd so I think the root of the abortion lobby\u2019s outrage is the knowledge that if Roe is overturned, their radical abortion agenda is unlikely to prevail nationwide because the American people simply do not agree with them on abortion.\n\n\u201cMr. President, the pro-abortion lobby \u2013 and its allies in the Democrat Party \u2013 would like Americans to believe that Mississippi\u2019s 15-week abortion ban is extreme, radical legislation.\n\n\u201cWell, nothing could be further from the truth.\n\n\u201cIn fact, the United States of America is a radical outlier on abortion.\n\n\u201cWe are one of only seven countries in the world that allow elective abortion past 20 weeks.\n\n\u201cOne of just seven countries in the world.\n\n\u201cAmong those other countries are China and North Korea.\n\n\u201cNot exactly the kind of company we want to be keeping when it comes to defending human rights.\n\n\u201cForty-seven out of 50 European countries \u2013 47 out of 50 \u2013 either require women to have a specific reason for seeking an abortion or limit elective abortion to 15 weeks or earlier.\n\n\u201cThirty-two European countries \u2013 including France, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, and many others \u2013 limit elective abortion to at or before 12 weeks\u2019 gestation.\n\n\u201cLet\u2019s just consider that for a minute, Mr. President.\n\n\u201cA substantial majority of European countries limit abortion to at or before 12 weeks.\n\n\u201cIn other words, Mississippi\u2019s 15-week abortion law is not on the radical fringe when it comes to abortion, it is squarely in the mainstream for western democracies \u2013 and is in fact more permissive than the abortion laws of a majority of European countries.\n\n\u201cAnd yet the abortion lobby would have us believe that Mississippi is pushing some kind of extreme abortion legislation.\n\n\u201cMr. President, let\u2019s talk about unborn babies at 15 weeks.\n\n\u201cFifteen-week-old unborn children have fully developed hearts that have already beat more than 15 million times.\n\n\u201cThey yawn, make facial expressions, and suck their thumbs.\n\n\u201cThey respond to taste and touch.\n\n\u201cAnd, Mr. President, scientific evidence suggests that they can feel pain.\n\n\u201cPro-abortion activists may not like to hear it, but scientific evidence shows that the neural connections necessary to transmit pain are fully in place by around 20 weeks, and that babies may actually begin to experience pain as early as 12 weeks.\n\n\u201cSo when we\u2019re talking about a 15-week-old unborn baby, we\u2019re talking about a baby who may very well already be able to experience pain \u2013 and will certainly be able to experience it a few weeks later if she can\u2019t now.\n\n\u201cAnd yet in this country, it is perfectly legal to kill unborn children who are able to feel pain \u2013 and kill them with an abortion procedure so brutal and barbaric it is difficult to even describe.\n\n\u201cAnd yet it needs to be mentioned, because we need to acknowledge the reality that we are killing unborn babies in this country capable of feeling pain using a widely employed abortion procedure that involves dismembering the unborn child.\n\n\u201cAs I said, Mr. President, it\u2019s incredibly hard \u2013 in fact, heartbreaking \u2013 to even talk about.\n\n\u201cThe abortion lobby would like to draw a veil over what happens inside abortion clinics, but the truth is that abortions are brutal and inhumane \u2013 certainly to the baby, but in many respects to the mother as well.\n\n\u201cMr. President, since the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision, there have been an estimated 62 million-plus abortions in the United States.\n\n\u201cThat number is so big it\u2019s pretty much unfathomable.\n\n\u201cTo put it in some kind of perspective, 62 million is nearly three times the population of the entire state of Florida.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s how many unique, unrepeatable human beings we\u2019ve lost to abortion since Roe.\n\n\u201cMr. President, we are better than this.\n\n\u201cAnd we have to do better than this.\n\n\u201cOur country was founded to safeguard human rights.\n\n\u201cWe haven\u2019t always lived up to that promise, but we\u2019ve never stopped trying.\n\n\u201cAnd it\u2019s time for us to continue that work by standing up for the most vulnerable human beings among us \u2013 the unborn children whose human rights are not protected, and whose lives can be taken away at any time.\n\n\u201cMr. President, thanks to medical advancements, it\u2019s possible for babies born at 22 weeks to survive outside their mothers.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s also perfectly legal to kill unborn children at 22 weeks.\n\n\u201cSomething is radically wrong with that picture.\n\n\u201cHow can an unborn child of 22 weeks be regarded as a human being worthy of protection in one case, and in the other case be regarded as nothing but a clump of cells to be disposed of in an abortion clinic?\n\n\u201cThe cognitive dissonance is mindboggling.\n\n\u201cMr. President, the more we learn about unborn children, the more we see their humanity.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s impossible to look at an unborn baby kicking her feet and sucking her thumb on an ultrasound and see her as anything but the human being she is.\n\n\u201cScience, and medical advancements, and plain old common sense all point inexorably to the humanity of the unborn child.\n\n\u201cAnd human beings, Mr. President, deserve to be protected.\n\n\u201cAnd a good place to start would be with laws like Mississippi\u2019s.\n\n\u201cLaws that would bring us into the mainstream of abortion laws worldwide.\n\n\u201cAs I said, Mr. President, the United States is one of just seven countries in the world \u2013 including China and North Korea \u2013 that allow elective abortion past 20 weeks of pregnancy.\n\n\u201cI\u2019d like to think that we can do a better job of protecting unborn children\u2019s human rights than China and North Korea.\n\n\u201cSo, Mr. President, I hope that the Supreme Court will uphold Mississippi\u2019s law and open the door to greater protection for unborn children.\n\n\u201cBut win or lose, I \u2013 and many, many, many others \u2013 will continue to stand up for the human rights of unborn Americans.\n\n\u201cAnd I am confident that in the end, right and justice and life will prevail.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T20:30:49Z"]], "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://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=4468FC33-9D8E-4DE1-A519-DDDE6F105F1E"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 2.353647956624627, "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"}