Coburn's opening statement on Alito

The opening statement of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., as prepared for delivery at the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Samuel Alito.

Judge Alito, welcome.

I know you're tired of this and I'll try to be as brief as possible.   One of the advantages of going last is to be able to hear what everybody else has said.

And as I've listened today, we've talked about the unfortunate, the frail. The quotes have been "fair shake for those that are underprivileged." We've heard "values, strong, free and fair, progressive judiciary." We've heard "the vulnerable, the more unvulnerable (sic), the weak, those who suffer." We've heard of an Alito mold that has to be in the mold of somebody else.

And as a practicing physician, the one disheartening thing that I hear is this very common word, this "right to choose" and how we sterilize that to not talk about is wonderful right to choose to kill their unborn babies. And that's what it is: It's the right of convenience to take the life.

And the question that arises as we use all these adjectives and adverbs to describe our physicians as we approach a Supreme Court nominee is where are we in America when we decide that it's legal to kill our unborn children?

I mean, it's a real question for us. I debate honestly with those who disagree with me on this. It is a real issue, a measurement of our society, when we say it's fine to destroy unborn life who has a heartbeat at 16 days post-conception. Thirty-nine days post- conception you can measure the brain waves and there's pain felt.

The ripping and tearing of an unborn child from his mother's womb through the hands of another, and we say, "That's fine; you have a constitutional right to do that."

How is it that we have a right of privacy and due process to do that but you don't have the right, as rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court in 1997, to take your own life in assisted suicide?

You know, how is it that we have sodomy protected under that due process but prostitution unprotected? It's schizophrenic. And the reason it's schizophrenic is there's no foundation for it whatsoever other than a falsely created foundation that is in error.

I don't know if we'll ever change that. It's a measure of our society.

But the fact is that you can't claim, in this Senate hearing, to care for those that are underprivileged, to those that are at risk, to those that are vulnerable, to those that are weak, to those that suffer and, at the same time, say I don't care about that.

So, the debate, for the American public -- and the real debate here is about Roe.

We're going to go off in all sorts of directions, but the decisions that are going to be made on votes on the committee and the votes on the floor is going to be about Roe, whether or not we as a society have decided that this is an ethical process, that we have this convenient process that if we want to rationalize one moral choice with another, we just do it through abortion, this taking of the life, of life of an unborn child.

I asked Chief Justice Roberts about this definition of life -- you know, what is life? The Supreme Court can't figure it out or doesn't want us to figure it out; the fact that we know that there is no life if there's no heartbeat and brainwaves. We know that in every state and every territory. But when we have heartbeat and brain waves, we refuse to accept it as the presence of life -- this lack of logic of which we approach this issue because we like and we favor convenience over ethics. We favor convenience over the hard parts of life that actually make us grow.

Senator Brownback talked about those with disabilities that are destroyed in the womb because of a genetic test that is sometimes wrong. I would put forward that we all have disabilities.

Some of us, you just can't see it. And yet, who makes the decisions as to whether we're qualified or not?

We've gone down a road to which we don't have the answers for. That's why we have the schizophrenic decisions coming out of the Supreme Court that don't balance logically with one versus another decision.

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