A Terrible Name For The Ban On Sex And Race Selective Abortions

Last week, a pro-life congressman introduced legislation designed to combat race and sex selective abortions in the US. Two problems: sex and race-selective abortion is a problem rampant only in its rampant nonexistence. Second, the proposed legislation has the most snicker worthy name an anti abortion law could have, short of “Captain Jesus’s Babysaving Homunculus Rights Act.”

The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, otherwise known as the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011” promises to invoke the names of a lady and a black guy to remind abortion doctors that some baby ladies and black guys grow up to be Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. The bill was introduced by Trent Franks of Arizona. In a letter to his colleagues, Rep. Franks wrote,

[T]he Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, or “PRENDA,” … restricts sex-selection abortion and race-selection abortion, and the coercion of a woman to obtain either. The woman seeking an abortion is exempted from prosecution, while abortion providers are held to account.

The notion that abortion rights should be restricted because some children grow up to be Frederick Douglass is just as ridiculous as encouraging abortions based on the fact that some women grow up to be Elizabeth Báthory and some black men grow up to be John Allen Muhammad. But that’s beside the point! It appears we have a rampant coast to coast targeted fetal genocide going on.

Except not really. In fact, since abortion became legal, we’ve seen an uptick in baby girls born. While most American parents say they’d prefer to have a son, the ones who actually take measures beyond expressed preference to ensure the gender of their unborn child are trying to have a girl. Further, only 5% of abortions take place beyond week 16, the point at which doctors can glean a fetus’s sex based on ultrasound images.

Representative Franks, a white man, has claimed that his desire to disallow “race-selective abortions” is based on his concern that the black community is having so many abortions. He doesn’t say how, exactly, doctors are supposed to determine that a black woman seeking an abortion is doing so because her fetus would be black or whether she’s just doing it because she doesn’t want to be pregnant. Further, how would one determine that a white woman wasn’t having an abortion because she was struck with a bout of self-loathing after reading a book about early Americans’ treatment of native tribes they found living here? Maybe Representative Franks thinks that no one would ever abort a white baby because of its race.

And, let’s be honest here: this isn’t really about saving girls and minorities; it’s about eventually making abortion illegal. From an opinion piece on Life Site News entitled “Is a ban on sex-selective abortion the best way to fight Roe v Wade?”—

A sex-selection ban would indeed present the Supreme Court with a dilemma. To strike down such a law-in essence, to embrace a constitutional right to sex-selection abortion-would expose just how extreme and immoral the Court’s present abortion doctrine really is. To read such a result in the name of “gender equality” would be monstrous and absurd. Such a ruling would undermine support both for Roe and for the Court as an institution as never before. (Concern for the Court’s own prestige and public support was, in fact, part of the reasoning in Casey for reaffirming Roe.) A sex-selection ban dares the pro-abortion justices to embrace an abortion right to kill girls for being girls. Such a ruling would expose the illegitimacy of the Court’s abortion decisions.

Well, there you go. It’s not really about protecting any specific disenfranchised group, it’s about outlawing abortion outright.

Franks first introduced a bill that aimed to ban sex selective abortion in 2009, but it never got out of committee. Maybe because he didn’t call it the Mia Hamm and Michael Jordan Everyone Must Have All Babies Act of 2009. Better luck this time.