Rep. Chris Smith Hails Supreme Court's Abortion Decision

NEW JERSEY — U.S. Rep. Chris Smith is praising the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as "a new opportunity to defend the weakest and most vulnerable from the violence of abortion."

Smith, who represents New Jersey's 4th District, has long advocated to ban abortion. He hailed the awaited ruling issued by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday that struck down the almost half-century-long federal protection on women's reproductive rights.

The court's 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a repudiation of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and a subsequent case on fetal liability, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, was expected. In May, Justice Samuel Alito Jr.'s majority opinion draft was leaked to Politico, setting the stage for a seismic shift in abortion rights.

Read more: Roe V. Wade Overturned: Abortion Rights Left To States To Decide

"For decades—right up to this very moment—abortion advocates have gone to extraordinary lengths to ignore, trivialize, and cover up the battered baby victim," Smith said in a statement. "They’ve aggressively fostered a culture of denial, disrespect, and bias against babies."

Smith said the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 — ‘‘We need not resolve the difficult question of when human life begins.’’ (Page 159) — sidestepped "that fundamental question" and gave "absolutely no benefit of the doubt to the innate value, dignity and humanity of an unborn child."

"Today, at long last, Justice Alito writing for the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has reversed Roe (and Casey) and has returned the power to lawmakers to significantly regulate or even prohibit abortion," Smith said.

"The hope and moral imperative to protect innocent children’s lives from extermination couldn’t come a moment too soon," he said.

Smith said that since 1973, approximately 63.5 million babies "have been brutally killed by abortion in the United States—a loss of children’s lives that equates with the entire population of Italy."

"There is nothing humane, compassionate or benign about abortion," he wrote. "Abortion is not health care, unless one construes the precious life of an unborn child to be analogous to a tumor to be excised or a disease to be vanquished."

"The 1973 Supreme Court anti-child decisions and several that followed like Casey have enabled the violent death of unborn baby girls and boys by dismemberment, decapitation, forced expulsion from the womb, deadly poisons, and other violent methods at any time and for any reason until birth," Smith said. "History—and science—are on the side of life."

"Today, thanks to ultrasound, unborn babies are more visible than ever before," Smith said. "When a woman is carrying a child, the first baby pictures she proudly shares and often displays on the refrigerator door, are ultrasound photos, of that precious little girl or boy living and thriving in the womb."

"Today, science confirms that birth is an event — albeit a very important one — but only an event in the life of a child. It is not the beginning of life," he said.

Smith said modern medicine "treats unborn children with disability or disease as a patient in need of diagnosis and treatment. There has been an explosion in interventions that have saved children’s lives and mitigated many, many problems that they would have faced if the disability had not been treated in-utero."

Smith blasted New Jersey's recently passed law that protects abortion access as a fundamental right, labeling it "extremist" an saying it allows abortion "right up to the moment of birth for any reason" and a House bill H.R. 3755 to legalize abortion until birth "an existential threat to the well-being and lives of innocent children."

"If enacted, the House-passed bill will not only permit abortion until birth, but would nullify nearly every modest pro-life restriction ever enacted by the States, including Women’s Right to Know laws in 35 States, parental involvement statute in 37 States, the pain-capable unborn child protection laws in 19 States, waiting periods in 26 States, and so much more," Smith said.

"Unborn babies are society’s youngest patients and deserve benign, life-affirming medical interventions," Smith said. "All unborn babies deserve protection not death by abortion. Unborn babies and their mothers need support; we need to love and help them both."