(2014-06-30) — Rep. Nancy Pelosi, during a visit to a Texas holding facility for immigrant children — among the 52,000 who have flooded across the U.S. southern border illegally since October — told reporters, “It’s a shame that all of these beautiful boys and girls couldn’t have been spared this hardship through timely abortions at reasonable prices.”

If not for previous elective surgery, Rep. Nancy Pelosi said she would have blinked back tears upon seeing immigrant children from Central America in a Border Patrol holding facility in Brownsville, Texas. Pelosi got emotional “as a grandmother and a Catholic” when she considered that “these refugees could have been prevented through timely abortions.”

“This is a humanitarian crisis that was entirely avoidable through parental choice,” Pelosi said. “We have a moral responsibility to address this in a dignified way, and for Democrats, that means going upstream to prevent this river of refugees by cutting off the source.”

The House Minority Leader said her “heart goes out” to all of the parents, back in their home countries, whose “hope for their children’s future is tainted by the knowledge that the devastating choice of sending them unaccompanied across the border could have been prevented if only they could have aborted that mass of cells in the first place.”

An unnamed Pelosi aide said she would introduce legislation in the coming days that would allow undocumented pregnant immigrants, without regard to gender, to have free abortions in the U.S., and then to apply for legal status using the aborted child as a “sponsor.” The so-called “Anchor Fetus Act” already has enough votes to pass the Senate.