Tennessee Anti-Abortion Republican Claims He Remembers His Birth

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A Tennessee Tea Partier claimed earlier this week he has a “conceptual memory of being born” – he then went into graphic detail of the apparent memory right there on the state Senate floor.

Hal Rounds, president of Tennessee’s West Fayette Republican Club and former candidate for the state House, was speaking to the state Senate as a witness to advocate for the legislature’s anti-abortion bill that aims to ban the procedure as soon as pregnancy is detected.

Rounds opened his remarks with a personal statement, noting it was the 75th anniversary of his birth. “Every birthday is a celebration of not having been aborted,” he said.

To argue that fetuses can consciously feel while in the womb (a notion science completely rejects), Rounds then described his apparent memories of his birth.

“In the womb there was a sensation of compression and advancement against one side and another,” Rounds said. “This urgent pressure to burst out.”

“I had this dream repeatedly through my youth,” he continued. “And one day I said, ‘You know, that’s kind of like being born.’ And the dreams stopped.”

“From the clip I viewed of Mr. Rounds’ testimony, he simply stated he had a ‘conceptual memory’ of being born,” Fayette County Republican Party chairman Kevin Powers told TPM. “Nowhere did he state this was scientific.”

Watch Rounds’ full video appearance here.

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