Henry Hyde passed away on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at the Rush University Medical Center at the age of 83.  He passed from this world to eternal life at 3:00 am.  Although there was no immediate cause given to the cause of his death we do know that he had an open heart surgery in July of this year so perhaps his age and the surgery may have caused it.

Henry retired from Congress at the end of their last session.  Earlier this month President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Henry Hyde was a Champion of Life issues and a defender of all human life.  Everyone in the Pro Life movement respected him.  I met him at a Right to Life of Michigan Awards Dinner five years ago and can affirm that Henry was the "real deal" when it came to defending God's gift of life. 

A devout Christian in the Roman Catholic faith, Henry Hyde was indeed a man with a calling to help save lives and come to the aid of those who were less fortunate then others as a Congressman.  It has been said that in the Congress he was able to take the edge off arguments with his opponents by using humor sandwiched with respect.  Henry Hyde was all about respecting other people even when some of them objected to his positions on Life issues.

In 1976 he created what is known today as the "Mexico City Policy" or the "Hyde Amendment" which bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. It has been implemented every year except during the Clinton Administration.  President Bush brought it back upon his election in 2000. 

His leadership in the ban on partial birth abortions is legendary .  He worked with and communicated with pro-life leaders throughout its legislation.   We of the pro-life movement salute him for all the work and inspiration he provided to us.

Michigan Christians for Life extends its condolences to the Family and Friends of Henry Hyde.  Henry once said to all of us who help defend God's Gift of Life that when we arrive in Heaven we would be received by millions of unknown Children who would thank us for trying to save their lives.  I believe that is what happened to him on Thursday morning after he met our Lord and Savior,  Jesus Christ!

In memory of Henry Hyde,  Michigan Christians for Life presents the following pro-life speech he presented to Congress:

Rep. Henry Hyde's speech to Congress on partial-birth abortion on March 20, 1997

"1 thank the Speaker and I ask unanimous consent to revise and extend my remarks, and I beg of my colleagues the courtesy of not asking me to yield. I do not intend to yield. I have much to say and little time to say it in.

"Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, when you have a theme as large and as 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 Allan 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 depart and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.'

"There's 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 human living creature is brought to the threshold, she is four-fifths born, her tiny arms and legs squirming and struggling to live. Her skull is punctured, the wound is 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 an infant a 'fetus' helps you, if calling this obscene act '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 a baby before, of course, the abortionist plunges his scissors, his assault weapon, into the baby's 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're on Hamlet, who can forget the most famous question in all of 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 defenders of partial-birth abortion claimed that the procedure was, now in the President's 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 Coalition of Abortion Providers admitted on national television that he and those in the pro-abortion camp simply and flatly lied about the incidence of partial birth abortion, that this procedure is used only reluctantly and in extremism. It is not the case that these abortions are rare. It is not the case that this procedure is used only reluctantly and in extremism. It is not the case that this procedure is used 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 told us.

"Is this House prepared to defend this 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 of 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 a life wantonly for the purpose 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's 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 civilized society when the law makes the weak, defenseless and the inconvenient expendable. There can be no real democracy if the law denies the sanctity of every human life. The founding fathers of our republic knew this. That's why they pledged their lives, their fortunes, 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 is the justice in partial-birth infanticide?

"Over more than two centuries of our national history we Americans have been a people who struggled to widen the circle of those for whom we acknowledge a common responsibility. The slaves were freed, women were enfranchised, civil rights and voting rights acts were 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've also put in risk every life which someone, some day, some how 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 can't today repair all the damage done to the fabric of our culture by Roe versus Wade. We can't 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 damage our own humanity if we fail.

"Historians tell us we live in the bloodiest century in human history. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot - a 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 20th century, we solemnly pledge not to do murder because the honor of that pledge is all that stands between us and the moral jungle.

Mr. Speaker and my distinguished colleagues, we have had enough of the killing. The Constitutional fabric has been shredded by the 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 do not wish us to learn the truth about this procedure. This Congress has been blatantly, willfully, maliciously lied to by proponents of the abortion license.