Rick Santorum

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to proceed for as long as I may consume under the remaining time left on the other side with the understanding that if anybody comes I will be happy to yield the floor at that point.

Mr. SANTORUM. First, I say to the Senator from Illinois that I appreciate her comments. With respect to the first letter that the Senator read, I have a question. Did you say that the baby's heart, when the abortion was done, was injected with digoxin?

Mr. SANTORUM. I thought that is what you said.

Mr. SANTORUM. Into the heart?

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I yield 15 minutes to the Senator from Michigan.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, today we begin debate on the issue of partial-birth abortion, the override of the President's veto, which he vetoed last year. I believe this is one of the most important issues, if not the most important issue, we will face in this session of Congress because it deals really at the core with who we are as a country and to what degree we respect life in this country and recognize life, recognize an individual's inclusion into our family and our society. In many cases, just as we did in voting with respect to banking laws, we have to draw lines. Part of the legislative process is, in fact, drawing lines. Sometimes those lines are not clear. Sometimes the votes are very difficult, and it is hard to understand in the area of gray where exactly you do draw the line. I have always felt, with respect to the issue of partial-birth abortion, that it was a very good place to at least draw the first line, in a very emotional and confrontational issue, because we are not really talking about abortion at that point, we are talking about infanticide. I think if you took a poll in this Senate and asked whether Members of the Senate were in favor of infanticide, I hope and pray that the answer would be 100 percent ``no,'' that they are not in favor of infanticide. Well, I believe, as many Senators have said, that this is infanticide. This is a baby that is just 3 inches from being delivered and is brutally killed. Let's do a little rundown of how we got to the point where we are today. In the last session of Congress, Congress passed a bill to ban this procedure, sent it to the President, and he vetoed it. We had a vote to override in September of 1996. We had 59 votes on the floor of the Senate. They overrode in the House. Last year, the Senate and House passed the bill. The House, in July of this year, overrode the President's veto with a vote of 296-132, I believe. So now it comes to the Senate. Earlier this year, we had 64 votes on the floor of the U.S. Senate to ban this procedure. Unfortunately, as overwhelming a vote as that is, it is three short of the votes necessary to override a Presidential veto. So that is the state of play; three votes in the U.S. Senate separate us from what I believe is a clarion call to the world that we are a civilized country that respects life which is born in this country, or nearly born in this country, and a signal to the country that we are just not quite ready to open our arms as a society and welcome every member to it. Let's first go through the particulars of what this procedure is, because I think it is important to define the procedure so everybody knows exactly what we are talking about. These charts that I am going to show you, while they are not particularly easy to look at, they do accurately describe, according to several doctors who perform them, what a partial-birth abortion is. It is performed on babies that are at 20 weeks of gestation, roughly halfway through the gestational process. Between 20, 24, 26, and longer, it can be performed. One of the reasons, in fact, that this procedure was developed was to perform it on solely late-term and very-late-term babies. So at 20 weeks, and thereafter, this procedure is used. The baby, as you see, in the mother's womb is usually in a head-down position at that age. The doctor, over a 3-day period, will begin to dilate the cervix, open up the cervix, so the doctor can reach in with forceps and grab the baby's foot and turn the baby around and pull the baby out in a breach position. I want to state that again. This is a 3-day procedure. It starts with the dilation of the cervix over a 2-day period. On the third day, when the cervix is sufficiently dilated, the doctor goes in with these forceps, grabs one of the baby's limbs --usually the foot--pulls the baby, turns the baby around into a breach position, and begins to pull the baby out of the birth canal in the breach position. As most people understand, that is a very dangerous position for a normal delivery. You try to avoid breach births because of the danger to the mother, as well as the baby. In this situation, they deliberately turn the baby around and deliver the baby in a breach position. The baby is then pulled out feet-first until all of the baby is outside of the mother, with the exception of the head. The reason for that is, the head being a hard part of the body, even at that age--certainly a harder part of the body at that age--and it is the biggest single part of the body, it is left inside of the mother. The third thing that happens is, the physician reaches in with one hand and finds the back of the baby's skull. You can't see the back of the baby's skull because the skull and neck are still inside of the mother. So they probe and find the soft part here, right at the base of the skull. Then they take what is called a Metzenbaum scissors and thrust it into the back of the baby's skull, open up a hole in the baby's skull, introduce a suction catheter, which is a high-powered suction device, and suck the baby's brains out, which causes the collapse of the skull, and then a dead baby is delivered. This is the brutal procedure that the President of the United States has said must remain legal. This is the brutal procedure that we have the opportunity here in the U.S. Senate to say has no place in a civilized society. I would think that would be enough reason--that simply its brutality, its shocking, barbaric, horrific nature would be enough reason to ban this procedure. But there is much more. There are so many reasons to ban this procedure beyond its horrific and barbaric nature. In a few minutes, I will detail exactly all of those reasons. I will detail all of the lies that have been put out by the other side to protect this rogue procedure, which is not done in any hospital, not taught in any medical school, has not been peer-reviewed and studied by others to make sure that this was a proper, safe procedure. This is a rogue procedure done only in abortion clinics, when no one else is watching. Mr. President, I will yield the floor, as I know the Senator from Missouri is here and has other time commitments. I will yield and turn it over to the Senator from Missouri, Senator Bond.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Missouri for his excellent comments and for his strong support for this legislation. Mr. President, I think it is important to understand a little bit more about this procedure and what has been said about this procedure over time by those who defend its use. I think it is very instructive to understand the history of what has been said so we can better understand what really is the final thread that those who oppose this ban hold onto in order to justify their vote against banning this procedure. The first, I guess, almost incredible thing was when this bill was first introduced in the House--and in the Senate, by Bob Smith here in the Senate--the original response by those who were opposed to this bill was that--this is the National Abortion Federation that called the ``. . . illustrations of partial birth abortions highly imaginative, artistically designed but with little relationship to truth or to medicine.'' Myriad other reports denied that this even occurred; that there is no such thing as partial-birth abortion; or, as they like to call it, intact D&X. The truth is that Dr. Haskell, who was one of the originators of this procedure, described this procedure at a National Abortion Federation meeting in 1992--by the way, the original quote that I quoted from was in 1995--3 years later. Yet, 3 years prior, a doctor spoke before the group and described this very procedure using the very drawings that you saw earlier. Yet, 3 years later, that same federation that Dr. Haskell spoke before denied it exists and denied those pictures and depictions of the procedure had anything to do with reality. Lie No. 1. Lie No. 2: This was used by several of the people you may hear from. Those who will defend this procedure on the floor today cite several women who have come forward to say that this procedure was necessary to preserve their health and future fertility, or life. One of the women who has been used--in fact, the President called her up to the White House and brought her before the American public in testimony that she has given. She said she was told by her anesthesiologist that the fetus would endure no pain. This is because the mother is given a narcotic, analgesia, at a dose based upon her weight. The narcotic is passed via the placenta directly into the fetal bloodstream. Due to the enormous weight difference, a medical coma is induced in the fetus and there is a neurological fetal demise. There is never a live birth. The baby dies. This was the testimony of a doctor who does this procedure before the House Judiciary Committee. Obviously, lots of anesthesiologists who provide anesthesia to women who are going through labor and delivery become incensed that someone would make such a statement--that by giving a woman anesthesia, enough would pass into the baby to kill the baby. In fact, they came up here to the House and Senate pleading to testify to set the record straight, because there were women who were not taking anesthesia because of what they had heard. This is Norig Ellison, president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, 4 years ago: In my medical judgment it would be necessary--in order to achieve ``neurological demise'' of fetus in a ``partial birth'' abortion--to anesthetize the mother to such a degree as to place her own health in serious jeopardy. In other words, it wouldn't happen. Another lie. Third lie, again, about anesthesia, that: The fetus dies from an overdose of anesthesia given to the mother intravenously. Again, Planned Parenthood said the first one. Dr. Haskell, who, again, is one of the abortionists who does this procedure, said to the American Medical News: ``Let's talk about whether or not the fetus is dead beforehand. . . .'' Haskell: ``No, it's not. No, it's really not.'' Lie No. 3, being perpetrated on the American public and the Congress, in almost all cases rebuffed by their own people. Lie No. 4--this was a doozy: Partial-birth abortion is ``rare.'' Once they got past the point of accepting the fact that it happened, that they admitted that it happened, they then went out and said that this was ``rare''; it only happened a few hundred times a year: This surgical procedure is used only in ``rare'' cases, fewer than 500 per year. It is most often performed in the cases of wanted pregnancies gone tragically wrong, when a family learns late in pregnancy of severe fetal anomalies, or medical condition that threatens the pregnant woman's life or health. This was signed by a slew of abortion rights organizations: The Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood, National Organization of Women, Zero Population Growth, Population Action International, National Abortion Federation, and others. They all signed this. They all signed this letter to Congress. They testified in a letter to Congress that this was the fact, that it was only tragic cases and there were only a few. But according to the Bergen County Record--and I have to tip my cap to them because, unfortunately, the entire press corps in Washington, DC, read this letter and accepted it as fact and reported consistently that that was the fact. I asked many of the press corps did they bother to check, did they bother to check to see whether, in fact, the number and the circumstances were accurate? Did anyone bother to call a local abortion clinic in their city and ask? The answer was a resounding--that's right--nothing. The Bergen County Record was one newspaper that did. September 15, 1996, just 10 days before the vote to override the President's veto in 1996: But interviews with physicians who use the method reveal that in New Jersey alone, at least 1500 partial-birth abortions are performed each year--three times the supposed national rate. Several months later we find out what really was going on. Ron Fitzsimmons has suggested that between 3,000 and 5,000 partial-birth abortions could be performed annually. Now, how do we know that he is right? We have absolutely no way of knowing he is right. I will quote from the American Medical Association, Journal of the American Medical Association just last month with respect to how we know how many of these are done. First of all, States do not provide abortion-related information to the CDC. Second, data gathered varies widely from State to State with some States lacking information on as many as 40 to 50 percent of abortions performed within their jurisdiction. Third, the category the CDC uses to report the method of abortion does not differentiate between what is called dilation and evacuation, D&E, and intact D&X, or partial birth abortion. We have no way of knowing, and even if they accurately reported it, some States don't collect the data and those that do, don't report 40 to 50 percent of the data. So how do we know? Those of us who are here trying to argue that this procedure should be banned have to rely upon Ron Fitzsimmons for the information. And who is Ron Fitzsimmons? He is the chief lobbyist for all the abortion clinics in this country that oppose this bill. So we have to use the information given to us by those who, by the way, have consistently lied, who also don't want the procedure to be banned. We have to accept their numbers as fact because there is no other way to independently check them. So I would just allow you to use your imagination as to what the number really is in this country. If they admit to 3,000 to 5,000, what is the real number? Lie No. 5. ``Partial-birth abortion is only used to save a woman's life or health or when the fetus is deformed.'' This is Ron Fitzsimmons 2 years previous. Let's rewind 2 years back to 1995. The procedure was used rarely or only on women whose lives were in danger or whose fetuses were damaged. And I can give you lots of other quotes, by the way, from the Senate floor and from the House floor that maintained this position, as well as all the other organizations that you just saw on the last chart, that that was the reason this procedure was created for those who it is used on, and that is why it needs to remain legal. The truth: New York Times February 26, 1997: Ron Fitzsimmons admitted he ``lied through my teeth'' when he said the procedure was used rarely and only on women whose lives were in danger or whose fetuses were damaged. Ron Fitzsimmons, again quoted in the American Medical News March 3, 1997: What the abortion rights supporters failed to acknowledge, Fitzsimmons said, is that the vast majority of these abortions are performed in the 20-plus week range on healthy fetuses and healthy mothers. ``The abortion rights folks know it, the antiabortion folks know it and so probably does everyone else,'' he said. Well, of course, we knew it. We knew it because Dr. James T. McMahon, who is now deceased, about 6 years ago said that he performed most of the abortions, partial-birth abortions on healthy mothers with healthy babies late in pregnancy, in his case up to the eighth and ninth month of pregnancy. He classified only 9 percent of that total of the 2,000 partial-birth abortion procedures he alone did, he classified only 9 percent of that total as involving maternal health indications of which the most common maternal health indication that he gave as a reason for doing the abortion was depression; 56 percent were for ``fetal flaws,'' and those are his words, that included many nonlethal disorders, a sizable number as minor as cleft palate. Yes, we knew. We came to the floor and we said here are the facts. And the other side stood behind the lies. They parroted them knowing that they weren't true. They parroted them either knowing they weren't true or praying that they could hide behind others who would try to fool the American public. The sixth untruth and the final one, at least to date the final one. This is the last untruth that those who continue to oppose banning this procedure hold on to, this last thread of deception. And that is that ``partial-birth abortion protects women's health.'' President Clinton, in his veto message, April 10, 1996, when he vetoed the first ban: I understand the desire to eliminate the use of a procedure that appears inhumane. But to eliminate it without taking into consideration the rare and tragic circumstances in which its use may be necessary would be even more inhumane. Fast forward to October 10, 1997, a year ago, when he vetoed this bill. H.R. 1122 does not contain an exception to the measure's ban that will adequately protect the lives and health of the small group of women in tragic circumstances who need a an abortion performed at a late stage of pregnancy to avert death or serious injury. One comment first. This bill clearly has a life-of-the-mother provision. If this procedure is in any way necessary to prevent the death of the mother, it can be used. The President says ``to avert the death or serious injury.'' To try to convince the American public that we do not have a life-of-the- mother exception, again, is disingenuous at best. ``Serious Injury,'' let's go to the American Medical Association. Who is the American Medical Association? Most people know it is the largest association of doctors in this country. What is the American Medical Association position on abortion? They are in favor of abortion rights; very strongly in favor of abortion rights. What is the American Medical Association's position on banning medical procedures? They abhor banning medical procedures. They believe that medical procedures should be left to physicians to determine what is good medicine and bad medicine. So, on two counts we should have a tough time getting the American Medical Association to endorse a ban on a medical procedure having to do with abortion. But the American Medical Association last year endorsed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. They stated that it was ``not medically indicated.'' Let me quote from a group of obstetricians, several hundred across the country, most of them board certified: The partial-birth abortion procedure, as described by Dr. Martin Haskell, the Nation's leading practitioner of the procedure, and defined in the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, is never medically indicated and can itself pose serious risks to the health and future fertility of women. Four female OB/GYNs were here today to have a press conference, here on Capitol Hill, to talk about partial-birth abortion, and all of them indicated that not only is this not medically necessary, but this procedure, this rogue procedure, is incredibly dangerous to women and to women's health. So, I go back to the point that I made before. There is enough grounds on its sheer barbarism and the fact that it is an affront to our sensibilities and to our culture that we would allow this kind of horrific procedure to occur. When you compound that with the fact that it is not medically necessary, ever, to protect a woman's health, when you compound that with the fact that it is medically dangerous to women to have this procedure done, and it is always done at an abortion clinic, where there are inadequate facilities to deal with these circumstances promptly if something should go wrong, if you combine just those facts it appears obvious that this procedure should be banned. So, what I ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to do is to do something that is very, very difficult to do here on the issue of abortion. When you mention the word ``abortion'' on the floor of the U.S. Senate or the U.S. House of Representatives, people dive into their trenches. They dive into their trenches that they feel comfortable with because the last thing you want to do is, during this battle, jump from trench to trench, to try to get to both sides. That is because you end up getting shot at a lot, if you go from what would be considered the pro-life side and try to run the battlefield over to the pro-choice side, or vice versa. So what all the political consultants say is, ``Stay in your trenches when you hear the word `abortion'.'' That is both sides. ``Do not lift your head up because you either get shot by those who you are trying to join or your folks will shoot you in the back.'' So let me say, first, to the Members of the Congress, the House and the Senate, for those Members who are ``traditionally on the other side of this issue,'' who are in the other trench, for them to climb out of that trench to face the fire and to stand with us, as they will tomorrow and vote for what they know in their heart is morally, ethically, and medically right, I salute them and I thank them. That is political courage. You hear a lot of talk these days about political courage. Will we have the political courage to do the right thing with respect to the President? Just let me suggest that there are many Members of this Senate who tomorrow will show political courage and do the right thing. It is political courage to follow your heart, to follow what you know inside you is right, not just right for the children or for the mothers, but what is right for our society and the message we send to all the people listening and watching what goes on here. For those who have yet to climb out of the trench, I will tell you a couple of things. No. 1, the fire is not that intense once you climb out. The American public overwhelmingly supports banning this procedure. All of the medical evidence that has been out there to support keeping this procedure legal has been debunked and discarded. There is nothing left except zealotry, except this concept that we cannot infringe on this right of abortion--even if, as I would argue, this is not even abortion, as others have argued this is not even abortion once the baby is outside the mother's womb. But we cannot even touch limiting that right. I would say there is not a right in America that does not have a limit on it. There is not one. Certainly, when it comes to taking the life of a little baby, we in Congress should be able to muster the courage to put some limit, to draw some line that says ``enough.'' I would also say that for those to whom I have talked, who have run that gauntlet and come over and voted on this issue to support this ban, there has been communicated to me a great sense of relief and satisfaction that they could break those chains and stand up and do what in their heart they knew was right; what in their conscience they knew was right. So I appeal to your conscience, I appeal to your heart. And I appeal to your reason--I appeal to facts. On every score, on every score, we must override the President's veto. I see the Senator from New Hampshire is here--I am sorry, I turned my back and he is gone. Let me just say something about the Senator from New Hampshire. The Senator from New Hampshire, Senator Smith, was the first person to introduce this bill in the last session of Congress. He did so when there was not a whole lot of popular support in the polls for this because the knowledge of the American public was minimal at best. He stood here when the votes were a lot closer than they were today and the public was a lot less informed, and all these lies that I showed to you were all out there being accepted by the press as truth. But the Senator from New Hampshire stood here in the well, armed with what he knew was truth. He stood here and argued and tried to focus the American public's attention for the first time on this gruesome, gristly procedure. He is one of the heroes in trying to bring the consciousness of the people to this Chamber. So I salute him for that. I suspect he will be back in a minute. It gives me the opportunity to talk about a couple of other things. I want to get back to the moral issue at hand. What we are talking about are babies who are in the 20th week of gestation and later. Now, for most Americans, they have a hard time understanding, ``Well, what's the 20th week? What does the baby look like? What are its chances of survival? What are we talking about here?'' At 20 weeks gestation, a normal baby, ``healthy'' baby, most normal healthy babies delivered at 20 weeks of gestation will be born alive. That doesn't necessarily mean that they will survive. In fact, very few, if any, babies born at 20 weeks will survive. But they will be born alive. Let me give you some of the statistics we have, if we can get that chart, about survival rates of babies who are subject to partial-birth abortion. When the Supreme Court came down with the decision on Roe v. Wade, back in the--actually early seventies, but in the late seventies, the information I have, the viability, the time of viability was considered to be around 28 weeks. Babies born before 28 weeks gestation were not considered to be able to be saved. They were not considered to be viable. So much has happened with medical science since that time, and the numbers have changed and changed dramatically. Let me share with you some numbers from The Journal of American Medical Association. It is an article I referred to earlier, and I will give the citation. It is called ``Rationale for Banning Abortions Late in Pregnancy,'' by Leroy Sprang, M.D., and Mark Neerhof, D.O., Northwestern University Medical School, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare. Here are some of the numbers that we have used in past debates. According to a 1987-1988 NIH study of seven hospitals, you can see at 23 weeks, about a quarter of the babies survive; 24 weeks, 34 percent; 25 weeks, 54 percent. From 1986 to 1994 at Minneapolis Children's Medical Center, 45 percent at 23 weeks; 53 percent at 24 weeks; 77 percent at 25 weeks; and 83 percent at 26 weeks. Remember, these weeks gestation during Roe v. Wade when the decision was decided, all of these were considered zero. In a Michigan study from 1994 to 1996, you see the numbers--27, 57, 77 and 82 percent. Let me give you some updated numbers from this report that was published last month: Recent data from our institution [at Northwest]. . . indicate a survival rate at 24 weeks-- The second line. A survival rate of 24 weeks of 83 percent--83 percent and at 25 weeks at 89 percent. Remember, these are all children born at that hospital, some of whom had abnormalities, some of whom had severe problems. They are not all healthy babies being born, and even at that, the survival rate is in the eighties. If you filtered out those who had fetal anomalies who would have died irrespective of when they were born, I suspect this number is substantially higher. So we are performing partial-birth abortions most commonly on babies who would be almost certain to be able to live. Some people suggest I shouldn't draw that distinction. A baby at 20 weeks, whether the baby can survive or not, is still a baby. I happen to subscribe to that. We draw lines that don't exist in our society about what is life and what isn't. There is no doubt in my mind that when my wife became pregnant with a child, I knew that was going to be a little boy or little girl and there wasn't much doubt that it was going to be a dog or a cat. But we draw lines here as to what is life and what isn't. Some people feel comfortable drawing lines here. It comes to viability, whether they can live outside the womb. The Supreme Court was one of those entities that did decide that was the place they had to draw the lines, where the rights of the child would increase and the rights of a woman to kill her child would diminish. By not banning this procedure, we allow little children--imagine, most of them, the vast majority, according to the people who perform it, healthy babies, healthy mothers, with very high probability of surviving, who for just one small period of time in the life of that child it is unwanted. For but a moment in the life of a child, that baby is temporarily unwanted by the one person who has absolute control over its destiny. We read in the paper so much about parents who are seeking to adopt children. There probably isn't a person here in the room who doesn't know someone who has gone to extraordinary lengths, who has waited an extraordinary long period of time to adopt a baby, to love a baby, to accept it, that little gift from God as their own. And yet because for just a moment in time of what could be a long and beautiful life, that baby is unwanted, and because it is not wanted at that very moment in time, its life is taken away. We are talking about if the mother didn't want to carry the pregnancy to term, if the feeling was, ``Well, I just don't want to be burdened with this pregnancy anymore,'' deliver the baby, give the baby a chance. There is no medical need to kill the baby. There may be medical needs to terminate pregnancy. The doctors today talked about that at their press conference. There may be the need for the health or life of the mother to terminate a pregnancy, but there is never a need to kill a baby in the process of terminating the pregnancy. There is never a need to drag this baby out--a baby that feels pain. In fact, in Great Britain right now the Parliament is considering requiring doctors who perform abortions after 19 weeks to anesthetize the baby because of conclusive research that shows that these babies feel pain. In fact, there are articles that have been written by physicians who say they feel pain more intensely than we do. I quote again from this Northwestern study that says: When infants of similar gestational ages are delivered, pain management is an important part of the care rendered to them in the intensive care nursery. However, with intact

Mr. SANTORUM. I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Missouri.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, if I can take a moment to specifically respond to a couple of things from the Senator from Illinois. I commend him for coming forward and expressing his views. We don't agree, but as is appropriate here in the U.S. Senate, we can disagree without being disagreeable. I respect his right to articulate his viewpoints. With respect to the letter from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that the Senator from Illinois read, they did say they: . . . could identify no circumstances under which this procedure would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of a woman. And they do go on to say: . . . however, [it] may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of the woman. However, no specific examples or circumstances under which an intact D&X would be the most appropriate procedure are given. In fact, they have never been given. They have never put forward any procedure, any circumstance in which they say it may be, but they have never given any hypothetical where it says it would be. That is somewhat troubling, to sort of hang your hat on a possibility when the very organization you are hanging your hat on refuses to give a possibility of whether it meets their definition. With respect to the constituent in the Senator's State, I can't tell you how sorry I feel for her and for what she had to go through. But, unfortunately, many people in this country do not get the best medical information. One of the things I hope we can accomplish with this discussion--and I think to some degree we have--is to improve the quality of information women get in this country with respect to decisions about pregnancy, particularly late-term, and particularly when it comes to disabled children or children who maybe just aren't perfect. I just know from all of the information we have been provided from the AMA, from the physicians--and Senator Frist is going to talk about it from the point of view of a physician --in every case the President cited, including the case the Senator referred to in Illinois, there were other, better alternatives available to her that would have been safer for her to have as opposed to this. It doesn't mean her doctor didn't want to perform this. The doctor may well have. But the fact is, we don't always get the best doctors who give us the best advice. We went to the experts, and what the experts have told us is that this procedure is not the safest. With that, I yield to the Senator from Tennessee, the only physician in the U.S. Senate, to talk about that very subject.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Tennessee for his expert witness testimony here on the floor of the U.S. Senate. We are fortunate to have an expert in the area of medicine to provide us with this kind of information. I, very much, appreciate his willingness to come forward and speak so intelligently and forcefully on this issue. I also thank the Senator from New Hampshire, who has been very patient letting the Senator from Tennessee and now the Senator from North Carolina, Senator Faircloth, be recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, the Senator from California is here, and she said she is not quite ready so we will proceed with another speaker. The Senator from New Hampshire has been very patient. I yield to him such time as he needs.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that amendment No. 3595, previously agreed to, be modified with the change that I now send to the desk.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized on Thursday, September 17, 1998, at 9:30 a.m. on China Technology Transfer.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary, be authorized to hold an executive business meeting during the session of the Senate on Thursday, September 17, 1998, at 10:00, in room SD226, of the Senate Dirksen Office Building.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Labor and Human Resources be authorized to meet for a hearing on Professional Development: Incorporating Advances in Teaching during the session of the Senate on Thursday, September 17, 1998, at 10:00 a.m.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem be permitted to meet on September 17, 1998 at 9:30 a.m. for the purpose of conducting a hearing.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, as amended; that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; and that any statements relating to the bill appear at the appropriate place in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 500, S. Con. Res. 103.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the committee amendment be agreed to.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution, as amended, be agreed to; that the preamble be agreed to; that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; and that any statements relating to the concurrent resolution be placed at the appropriate place in the Record.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 280, submitted earlier today by Senators Lugar and Harkin.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to and that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 462, S. 2286.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all after the enacting clause be stricken, and the text of S. 2037, as passed, be inserted in lieu thereof; that H.R. 2231, as amended, be read a third time and passed; that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; that the Senate insist on its amendment, request a conference with the House and the Chair be authorized to appoint conferees on the part of the Senate.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the passage of the Senate bill be vitiated, and the bill be indefinitely postponed.