TESTIMONY ON THE HUMAN LIFE AMENDMENT

BEFORE THE

CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS SUBCOMMITTEE

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

SENATOR BIRCH BAYH, CHAIRMAN

AUGUST 21, 1974

Presented By:

RANDY ENGEL

NATIONAL DIRECTOR

UNITED STATES COALITION FOR LIFE

EXPORT, PENNSYLVANIA

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Sub-Committee:

I am Randy Engel, National Director of the United States Coalition for Life, an international research center and clearinghouse specializing in domestic federal anti-life programs within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the Agency for International Development. Thank you for your invitation to appear before the sub-committee today in order that I may express the views of the Coalition, its distinguished national and international board of advisors, some of whom have already testified at earlier Senate hearings on the Human Life Amendment, and that of thousands of grassroots people whom we have had the honor of serving on a day to day basis since the Coalition opened its offices almost two years ago.

Mr. Chairman, about four months ago, the Coalition filed with your office, the transcript of a speech made by Louise Tyrer, M.D., Family Planning Division of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, before the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians' 12th Annual Meeting, Memphis, Tennessee on Tuesday, April 16, 1974, on the status of the various Human Life Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. (Attachment A)

According to Dr. Tyrer's assessment of the Congressional scene there are two basic approaches. One a "state's rights" approach which would return the power of lawmaking in the area of abortion to the individual States. The second which would guarantee the full protection of the law to the unborn child from the moment of fertilization.

The "State's rights" approach she states, and correctly so, is unacceptable to the majority of Pro-Life people yet very attractive to the legislators because " it sought of takes the ones off their backs from making any decisions."

The remainder of her talk stresses the necessity of stalling the hearings of this sub-committee by having Planned Parenthood physicians flood the sub-committee with requests to testify. This, Dr. Tyrer suggests would be politically expedient and politically NECESSARY for you Mr. Chairman, in order to keep the amendments bottled up in sub-committee until you had gone through the election process in the Fall.

Now, Mr. Chairman, I have no desire to embarass you in any manner. Not because I fell Dr. Tyrer was incorrect in her judgment of the political realities of the Senate and House Committees dealing with the abortion issue or her assessment that stalling these subcommittee hearings by dragging them out month by month would be politically expedient for you and others who might prefer not to have a roll call vote on a Human Life Amendment before election time.

But rather, because with few exceptions, almost every Senator and Representative in Congress would like nothing better than to get rid of the abortion issue tomorrow, if not before, or at least dump the matter back into the lap of the State legislatures.

The massive slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent unborn children is not a federal matter they say.

We are not responsible for the Supreme Court decision of January 22, 1972 which is now the law of the land they say.

Well, I am here Mr. Chairman to tell you and every other Senator and Congressman that like it or not - Abortion 1S your affair. That the massive slaughter of unborn children in this country IS a proper matter of federal concern. Moreover that this Congress IS directly responsible for the almost inevitable Supreme Court decision which stripped unborn children of their inalienable right to life.

Congress IS responsible because over the last ten years it has permitted an anti-life philosophy and anti-life programs and policies to become matters of NATIONAL POLICY, promoted and supported by tax dollars.

--

The Executive Branch because it has failed to correct the anti-life abuses primarily within the bureaucracies of HEW and AID and has permitted key anti-life leaders such as Dr. Louis Hellman the Office of Population Affairs and Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, Director Population Bureau for Population and Humanitarian Affairs to remain in office.

The Legislative Branch, because it has authorized legislation and appropriated funds year after year to initiate, promote and sustain anti-life programs in virtually every conceivable federal bureaucracy including the

Office of Economic Opportunity

Office of Environmental Education

Office of Education

Department of Defense

Office of Population Affairs (HEW)

National Institutes of Health

Agriculture Department

Food and Drug Administration

Public Health Service

Social Security - MedicAID

Aid to Dependent Children

U.S. Information Agency

Population Office (AID)

Contraceptive Research Branch (NIH)

Federal Communication Commission

(See Attachment B)

The Judicial Branch whose Highest Court by a 7 to 2 decision legalized the killing of unborn children up to and including the time of birth - a decision based in part upon the impeccable historic credentials of the Playboy Foundation as well as numerous anti-life lower court decisions, brought about through the tireless efforts of federally-funded Legal Service lawyers.

Earlier in my testimony I made reference not only to federal anti-life programs and policies but also to an anti-life PHILOSOPHY which has in fact become the State religion in so far as federal taxes, personnel, offices and publications are used to support such a philosophy or way of life. This philosophy now expressed as a matter of national policy is reflected in the following quotations

CHAPTER V. "The wickedness of

creating a Large Family" from
Women and the New Race.

"The most serious evil of our time is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children...."

"Every jail, hospital for the insane, reformatory and institution for the feeble minded cries out against the evils of too prolific breeding among wage-workers."

"...The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."

"...What shall be said of us (society) who permit outworn laws and customs to persist in piling up the appalling sum of public expense, misery and spiritual degradation."

CHAPTER VII. "When Should a Woman
Avoid Having Children? from Woman
and the New Race

"No more children should be born when the parents,
though healthy themselves, find that their children
are physically or mentally defective. No matter how
much they desire children, no man and woman have a
right to bring into the world those who are to suffer
from mental or physical affliction. It condemns the

child to a life of misery and places upon community
the burden of caring for it...."

CHAPTER IV. "The Fertility of
the Feeble-Minded" from The
Pivot of Civilization

....we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of endless progeny of defec

tives, we prefer policy of immediate steri-
lization, of making sure that parenthood is
absolutely prohibited in the feeble-minded."

CHAPTER VIII. "Dangers of Cradle Competition"
from The Pivot of Civilization

"..Eugenics is chiefly valuable in its negative aspects...it shows us that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all...

These basically vicious, racist opinions could never be a matter of the foundation on which we base our national policy on the contrary! Within the next five years the federal government will spend more than one billion dollars in taxes to promote these ideas. For you see, Mr. Chairman, these quotes were taken from the works of Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League which today we know as Planned Parenthood-World Population.

Today, some fifty years later, the Sangerite revolution is complete the Sangerite philosophy or way of life has formed the basis of federal policy in the area of population control and socalled "family planning" a pleasant-sounding euphanism for birth control (including contraception, sterilization and abortion.) The Sangerite programs and policies have become federal programs and policies.

Despite a concerted effort to overhaul the public image of the Sangerite Movement between the years of 1920 to mid-1960's to tone down its original eugenics roots and hedoristic basis of sexual activity, the Movement has appeared to come full circle following the January 22nd Supreme Court decision on abortion.

It is a matter of public record that Planned Parenthood World Population and its affiliates sees abortion as a key to eliminating physically or mentally defective unborn children as a tool to reduce welfare rolls and as a most necessary and efficient method of population control, i.e. the regulation of family size by government.

Large families are an athema, as is so perfectly reflected in Planned Parenthood's brochure So you finally had a boy? which characterizes parents of large families as being immoral and selfish since their example "may kill us all in a few generations". (Attachment C)

The story of the rise of the Sangerite anti-life philosophy to that of national policy though basically a complex and lengthy one, may be said to have developed from "an idea" to "an institution" via eight plateaus, each somewhat overlapping a total time span of more than 50 years.