When you have a theme as large and profound as ours is today, you need the help of great literature to describe the magnitude of the horror of partial birth abortion.

I suppose Edgar Allen Poe could describe it, but it's startling how the words of the ghost of Hamlet's father seem to anticipate our debate today:

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine . . .

There is no member of this House who doesn't know, in excruciating detail, what is done to a human being in a partial birth abortion. A living human creature is brought to the threshold of birth; she is 4/5ths born, her tiny arms and legs squirming and struggling to live; her skull is punctured, and the wound deliberately widened; her brains are sucked out; the remains of the deceased are extracted. In the words of the abortion lobby, the baby "undergoes demise." What a creative addition to the lexicon of dehumanization.

If calling this infant a fetus helps you, if calling this obscene act an intact dilation and evacuation assuages your conscience, by all means do so--anything is better than a troubling conscience. But you must know that the only thing intact in this procedure is the baby--before, of course, the abortionist plunges his scissors into her tiny neck--then she's not very intact.

Something was "rotten in the state of Denmark," in Shakespeare's great drama. Something is rotten in the United States when this barbarity is not only legally sanctioned, but declared a fundamental constitutional right.

And while we are on Hamlet, who can forget the most famous question in all literature, "To be or not to be?" Every abortion asks that question, but forbids an answer from the tiny defenseless victim, struggling to live.

When this issue was debated in the last Congress, the President and the defenders of partial birth abortion claimed that the procedure was, in the President's now-familiar euphemism, "rare," and that it was used only in times of grave medical necessity.

All of us know now--as many of us knew then--that those claims were lies. They were lies. The executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers admitted on national television that he and others in the pro-abortion camp simply, flatly lied about the incidence of partial birth abortion.

It is not the case that these abortions are rare. It is not the case that this procedure is only used reluctantly, and in extremis. It is not the case that this procedure is used only in instances of medical emergency.

Partial birth abortion--infanticide, in plain English--is business-as-usual in the abortion industry. That is what the executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers has told us.

Is this House prepared to defend the proposition that infanticide is a fundamental constitutional right?

Partial birth abortion is not about saving life. Partial birth abortion is about killing. Killing is an old story in the human drama; fratricide scarred the first human family, according to Genesis. But the moral prohibition on killing is as old as the temptation to kill. Most of the familiar translations of the Bible render the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." A more accurate translation of the Hebrew text would read, "Thou shalt not do murder."

Which is to say--thou shalt not take life wantonly, for purposes of convenience, or "problem-solving," or economic benefit, nor trade a human life for any lesser value.

The commandment in the Decalogue against "doing murder" is not sectarian dogma. Its parallel is found in every moral code in human history. Why? Because it has been understood for millennia that the prohibition against wanton killing is the foundation of civilization.

There can be no civilized life in a society that sanctions wanton killing.

There can be no civil society when the law makes the weak and the defenseless and the inconvenient expendable.

There can be no real democracy if the law denies the sanctity of every human life.

The Founders of our Republic knew this. That is why they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the proposition that every human being has an inalienable right to life.

Our Constitution promises equal protection under the law; our daily pledge is for liberty and justice for all; where is the protection, where the justice in partial birth infanticide?

Over more than two centuries of our national history, we Americans have been a people who have struggled to widen the circle of those for whom we acknowledge a common responsibility. Slaves were freed, women were enfranchised, civil rights and voting rights acts passed, our public spaces made accessible to the handicapped, social security mandated for the elderly--all in the name of widening the circle of inclusion and protection.

This great trajectory in our national experience--that of inclusion--has been shattered by Roe v. Wade and its progeny. By denying an entire class of human beings the protection of the laws, we have betrayed the best in our tradition. We have also put at risk every life which someone, someday, somehow, might find inconvenient. "No man is an island," preached the Dean of St. Paul's in Elizabethan times. He also said "Every man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind."

We cannot, today, repair all the damage done to the fabric of our culture by Roe v. Wade and its progeny. We cannot undo the injustice that has been done to 35 million tiny members of the human family who have been summarily killed since the Supreme Court, strip-mining the Constitution, discovered therein a fundamental "right to abortion." But we can stop the barbarity of partial birth abortion. We can stop it, we must stop it, and we diminish our own humanity if we fail.

Historians say that we live in the bloodiest century of human history: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot--the mountain of corpses reaches to the heavens, and hundreds of millions of innocents cry out for justice. We can't undo the horrors inflicted on the human spirit--we can't repair the wounds already sustained by civilization--We can only say, "Never again."

But in saying "Never again," we commit ourselves to defend the sanctity of life. In saying "No" to the horrors of the twentieth century slaughter, we solemnly pledge not to "do murder." Because the honoring of that pledge is all that stands between us and the moral jungle.

Mr. Speaker, distinguished colleagues of the Congress:

We have had enough of the killing . . .

The constitutional fabric has been shredded by an unenumerated abortion license, which, sad to say, includes the vicious cruelty of partial birth abortion.

The moral culture of our country is eroding when we tolerate a cruelty so great that its proponents don't even wish us to learn the truth about this "procedure."

The Congress has been blatantly, willfully, maliciously lied to by proponents of the abortion license.

Enough. Enough of lies. Enough of the cruelty. Enough of the distortion of the Constitution. There is no Constitutional right to commit this barbarity. That's what we are being asked to affirm.

In the name of humanity, let us do so, and in the words of Saint Paul: NOW is the acceptable time!