House rejects sex-selection abortion ban

JIM ABRAMS

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — The House on Thurs­day fell short in an effort to ban abor­tions based on the sex of the fetus as Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats made an election-year appeal for women’s votes.

The leg­is­la­tion would have made it a fed­eral crime to per­form or force a woman to undergo a sex-based abor­tion, a prac­tice most com­mon in some Asian coun­tries where fam­i­lies want­ing sons abort female fetuses.

It was a rare social issue to reach the House floor in a year when the econ­omy has dom­i­nated the polit­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion, and Repub­li­cans, besieged by Demo­c­ra­tic claims that they are wag­ing a war on women, struck back by try­ing to depict the vote as a women’s rights issue.

“It is vio­lence against women,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., of abor­tions of female fetuses. “This is the real war on women.”

The White House, most Democ­rats, abor­tion rights groups and some Asian-American orga­ni­za­tions opposed the bill, say­ing it could lead to racial pro­fil­ing of Asian-American women and sub­ject doc­tors who do not report sus­pected sex-selection abor­tions to crim­i­nal charges.

“The admin­is­tra­tion opposes gen­der dis­crim­i­na­tion in all forms, but the end result of this leg­is­la­tion would be to sub­ject doc­tors to crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion if they fail to deter­mine the moti­va­tions behind a very per­sonal and pri­vate deci­sion,” White House spokes­woman Jamie Smith said in a state­ment. “The gov­ern­ment should not intrude in med­ical deci­sions or pri­vate fam­ily mat­ters in this way.”

The bill had lit­tle chance of becom­ing law. The Democratic-controlled Sen­ate would likely have ignored it, and the House brought it up under a pro­ce­dure requir­ing a two-thirds major­ity for pas­sage. The vote was 246–168 — 30 votes short of that major­ity. Twenty Democ­rats voted for it, while seven Repub­li­cans opposed it.

The bill’s author, Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said before the vote that regard­less of the out­come, the point would be made. “When peo­ple vote on this, the world will know where they really stand.”

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Mary­land, the House’s No. 2 Demo­c­rat, said he thought the bill was intro­duced because “some­body decided polit­i­cally that this was a dif­fi­cult place to put peo­ple in.”

The leg­is­la­tion would have made it a fed­eral offense, sub­ject to up to five years in prison, to per­form, solicit funds for or coerce a woman into hav­ing a sex-selection abor­tion. Bring­ing a woman into the coun­try to obtain such an abor­tion would also be pun­ish­able by up to five years in prison. While doc­tors would not have an affir­ma­tive respon­si­bil­ity to ask a woman her moti­va­tions for an abor­tion, health work­ers could be impris­oned for up to a year for not report­ing known or sus­pected vio­la­tions of the ban on sex-based abortions.

An ear­lier ver­sion of the bill also made it ille­gal to abort a fetus based on race.

“We are the only advanced coun­try left in the world that still doesn’t restrict sex-selection abor­tion in any way,” said Franks, who has also col­lided with abortion-rights groups recently over a bill he sup­ports to ban abor­tions in the Dis­trict of Colum­bia after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Franks and oth­ers say there is evi­dence of sex-selection abor­tions in the United States among cer­tain eth­nic groups from coun­tries where there is a tra­di­tional pref­er­ence for sons. The bill notes that while the United States has no fed­eral law against such abor­tions, coun­tries such as India and China, where the prac­tice has con­tributed to lop­sided boy-girl ratios, have enacted bans on the practice.

Law­mak­ers “who recently have embraced con­trived polit­i­cal rhetoric assert­ing that they are resist­ing a ‘war on women’ must reflect on whether they now wish to be recorded as being defend­ers of the esca­lat­ing war on baby girls,” said National Right to Life Com­mit­tee leg­isla­tive direc­tor Dou­glas Johnson.

His group, in a let­ter to law­mak­ers, said there are cred­i­ble esti­mates that 160 mil­lion women and girls are miss­ing from the world due to sex selection.

But the Guttmacher Insti­tute, an orga­ni­za­tion that favors abor­tion rights, said evi­dence of sex selec­tion in the United States is lim­ited and incon­clu­sive. It said that while there is cen­sus data show­ing some evi­dence of son pref­er­ence among Chinese-, Indian– and Korean-American fam­i­lies when older chil­dren are daugh­ters, the over­all U.S. sex ratio at birth in 2005 was 105 boys to 100 girls, “squarely within bio­log­i­cally nor­mal parameters.”

NARAL Pro-Choice Amer­ica pres­i­dent Nancy Keenan said that while her group has long opposed repro­duc­tive coer­cion, “the Franks bill exploits the very real prob­lem of sex dis­crim­i­na­tion and gen­der inequity while fail­ing to offer any gen­uine solu­tions that would elim­i­nate dis­par­i­ties in health care access and information.”

Mar­cia Green­berger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Cen­ter, said the bill fos­ters dis­crim­i­na­tion by “sub­ject­ing women from cer­tain racial and eth­nic back­grounds to addi­tional scrutiny about their deci­sion to ter­mi­nate a pregnancy.”

“Doc­tors would be forced to police their patients, read their minds and con­ceal infor­ma­tion from them,” said Rep. Jer­rold Nadler, D-N.Y.

Repub­li­cans also used the bill to con­tinue their ongo­ing crit­i­cism of Planned Par­ent­hood, cit­ing a video taken by the group Live Action pur­port­ing to show a Planned Par­ent­hood social worker advis­ing a woman on how to deter­mine if her fetus was female before she ter­mi­nated the pregnancy.

Posted by AP News on May 31 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.