It’s pretty rare these days to read good news about the religious-right’s 40-year-old battle to negate Roe v Wade. But last night, the House rejected a bill designed to erect new barriers to legal and safe abortions under the guise of preventing gender selection.
Sponsors introduced the bill last year as “the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act”—with Ms. Anthony representing all women and Mr. Douglass all non-whites. (A provision stripped out before the vote would have outlawed racially motivated abortions.) They almost certainly knew it stood no chance in the Senate. The idea was to make Democrats who voted against the bill in the House look as though they were discriminating against women.
Republicans were shameless in using that spin in the House debate. “A vote against ending sex-selection abortion is a vote in favor of gender bias and female gendercide,” said Rep. Marsha Blackburn.
Rep. Chris Smith said, “In many countries including our own, it could be a death sentence. Today the three most dangerous words in China and India are, ‘It’s a girl.’ We can’t let that happen here.”
I think the three most dangerous words in China are “Communist party rule,” but Mr. Smith is right, we can’t let that happen here. Good thing it’s not actually happening.
The Guttmacher Institute has found [ http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/15/2/gpr150218.html ] that while there is some (limited) evidence of son preference among Chinese-, Indian- and Korean-American families when older children are daughters, “the U.S. sex ratio at birth in 2005 stood at 105 boys to 100 girls, squarely within biologically normal parameters.”
Anyway, I doubt the bill would mitigate the non-problem it sets out to correct. China and India, where aborting female fetuses is indeed an endemic issue, have sex-selection bans in place that don’t work, because they’re virtually impossible to enforce. Sonogram technology is so prevalent that a woman can easily determine the gender of her baby in one place and get an abortion in another.
So a ban wouldn’t work, but it would turn every pregnant woman’s conversations with a doctor, nurse or therapist into inquisitions. The bill imposes criminal penalties on doctors who perform abortions for sex selection, and on medical and mental-health professionals who do not report suspected violations.
Proponents of this law note that even the United Kingdom has legal restrictions on sex-selection. The governments in those countries, however, are solidly pro-choice and haven’t given their citizens a reason to fear a slippery slope. They don’t have gangs of anti-abortionists who picket clinics or kill providers, or pass legislation aimed at denying abortion access to poorer women.
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