By JIM ABRAMS / May 31, 2012
http://www.charlotte-sun.com/sunnews/portcharlotte/3893189-455/sunnewspapershouserejectssex-selectionabortionban.html.csp
WASHINGTON
(AP) — 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.
