Wednesday on WVNN’s “The Dale Jackson Show,” U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Hoover) defended his decision to present a photograph showing an unborn infant grasping the hand of a physician during an in-utero surgery during a recent hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
Palmer said the Democrats did not want want to see the photo because “it’s an example of personhood.”
“What I wanted to do,” Palmer outlined, “was show that tiny hand grasping that finger because I’m the father of three children, and one of my fondest memories is having my kids hold my finger. Their little hands weren’t big enough to hold my hand, but they would hold my finger as I would walk them somewhere, and that’s what I think of when I see that photo. That was a person.”
About the claim that he didn’t get prior approval before presenting the photo, Palmer said he “wasn’t aware” it had to be approved by the majority beforehand.
“I wasn’t aware that I needed to get a photo cleared,” he said. “I know that if you want to enter something into the record you’re supposed to get that cleared. I wasn’t going to do that.”
The congressman argued showing the famous picture shouldn’t have been seen as controversial.
“It’s one of the most celebrated photos ever,” he asserted. “It was celebrated because it was representative of modern medicine, of literally the ability to do surgery in-utero and save the baby’s life. It appeared millions of times around the world in medical journals and other publications. It was not a controversial photo.”
Palmer said he couldn’t believe some of the testimony he listened to during the hearing, which was about the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“I wish you could be in one of these hearings,” Palmer said, “and see these people and hear these people and you walk out of there thinking they have lost their minds.”
He also reiterated some of the pro-life arguments he made to the rest of the committee during the hearing.
“If you recall, I opened talking about what the Declaration of Independence said,” he explained, “that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights, and the first right that the founders had listed was life, and there’s a reason for that…Without life, there is no liberty. Without life, there’s pursuit of happiness or a right to privacy or anything else that the left claims is a right.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” Weekdays 9-11am on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
