Mr./Madam President,

Last week, the Senate had a chance to adopt measures that would protect the dignity of human life – not just unborn human life, but born human life.

And unfortunately, due to a minority of this body, we lost the opportunity to do so.

Now, those colleagues opposed these measures largely on the claims that they were “anti-women,” and “anti-healthcare.”

They claimed that these measures interfered with what should be the “personal” nature of healthcare, between women and their doctors.

Mr. President, I could not agree more that healthcare is personal.

It is about healing, preserving, and prolonging the life of a human person.

And in the case of a pregnant woman, it is about two persons.

With two beating hearts, two distinct sets of DNA, and two unique and unrepeatable souls.

Two persons, with equal dignity and worth.

And we ought to value and care for them both.

In the spirit of our founding, we ought to affirm, in our laws and through our dollars, the truth that every member of our society – every woman, and every unborn child – is entitled to the right to life, and to the full protection of that right under the law.

And our healthcare ought to heal, preserve, and protect those lives.

Unfortunately, many of our laws permit and subsidize just the opposite… in our own country, and abroad.

Congress allows and helps fund the most radical abortion policy in the Western world, enabling procedures that impose barbaric violence upon women and unborn children; and ending the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent babies in our nation each year.

And it allows our foreign aid money to go to organizations that fund and promote abortions overseas… taking the lives of thousands of innocent babies across the globe – especially baby girls.

In some of these countries, abortions happen in much higher numbers to female babies precisely because they are female.

Abortion is the knife’s edge of sexism; the exact tool they use to denigrate women’s equal dignity and worth.

And in some of these countries, women don’t even want the abortions.

In some cases, these organizations force their own so-called “enlightened” values on them, pressuring women to take their own children’s lives, whether they want to or not.

This cultural imperialism is not pro-woman. It is not pro-child. And it is not pro-healthcare.

It is pro-sexism, and pro-violence.

And we must end it.

Today we can, through the Protecting Life in Foreign Assistance Act. This bill will permanently stop the use of our foreign aid money from funding or promoting abortions overseas.

We ought to uphold the equal dignity of women – whether born or unborn – in America and across the world.

And we should treat their bodies with reverence and respect.

Today, we can choose that too – through my colleague Sen. Braun’s bill, the Dignity for Aborted Children Act.

This measure will ensure that aborted children’s bodies are not treated as medical waste, to be crudely disposed of; but that they instead receive a proper burial or cremation, just as we accord to all other human beings.

Mr. President, we ought to support, and value, women and babies everywhere.

In our laws, and through our lives, we ought to uphold the dignity of each and every human person – regardless of race, sex, appearance, abilities, or age.

The measures before us today do just that, and we should support them.

I yield the floor.