As Christians prepare to celebrate the birth of the most
important child in history, pro-life Americans would be wise to
renew their emphasis on an element of the abortion debate that
strongly favors their side: banning abortions based on the sex or
race of the unborn child.
U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, a Republican from Arizona, has
filed a bill that would accomplish those ends. The
Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act would criminalize sex-selection
abortion in the United States, subjecting physicians who perform
such abortions to fines and imprisonment for up to five years.
Organizations that perform sex-selection abortions would forfeit
federal funding under the proposal. Women who seek the abortions
would be exempt from prosecution.
The sad irony is that the same technological advances that
have bolstered the pro-life cause — ultrasound images — have
promulgated sex-selection abortion. Parents may now more easily
determine the gender of their unborn child, and opt for an abortion
accordingly.
Sex-selection abortion is more prevalent among Americans
who originate from countries where the practice is legal. H.R. 3541
outlines the problem:
In a March 2008 report published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, Columbia University economists
Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund examined the sex ratio of United
States-born children and found `evidence of sex selection, most
likely at the prenatal stage’. The data revealed obvious `son
preference’ in the form of unnatural sex-ratio imbalances within
certain segments of the United States population, primarily those
segments tracing their ethnic or cultural origins to countries
where sex-selection abortion is prevalent. The evidence strongly
suggests that some Americans are exercising sex-selection abortion
practices within the United States consistent with discriminatory
practices common to their country of origin, or the country to
which they trace their ancestry. While sex-selection abortions are
more common outside the United States, the evidence reveals that
female feticide is also occurring in the United States.
The opportunity for the pro-life cause lies in liberals’
vehement opposition to the sex-selection ban. To maintain a
logically coherent argument, pro-choicers must defend sex-selection
or race-based abortion. Pro-abortion ideology is rooted in the
belief that parents’ wishes — specifically, the mother’s — are
the preeminent factor. Equally important is the creed that a fetus
isn’t an unborn child, but merely a collection of pre-human matter
no more worthy of human dignity than afterbirth.
Based on those assumptions, pro-choicers must regard
sex-selection abortion as both legal and morally permissible. Using
their own rationale, how is deciding to terminate a pregnancy
because the parents believe they have too many children different
from terminating a pregnancy because the unborn child is female? If
a woman’s choice is most important, and the fetus is not a human
being, there is no moral distinction between the two.
That being the case, pro-abortion forces have their hands
tied on this issue because an overwhelming majority of Americans
oppose sex-selection abortion. A Zogby poll from 2006 put
opposition at 86 percent. Just 10 percent of Americans said the
practice should be legal.
Most Americans — Vice President Joe Biden
being a high-profile exception — have a visceral negative
reaction to China’s one-child policy. It’s rare to find a public
policy matter today that has so lop-sided a divide.
Yet leftist groups, including
Planned Parenthood and NARAL, have blitzed Franks’ bill,
calling it an attempt to circumvent access to abortion. “This bill
is a cynical and offensive attempt to evoke race and sex
discrimination when actually it’s about taking women’s rights
away,”
said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive
Rights.
That argument carries weight with the far-left spectrum of
the pro-choice cause, but it won’t fly with the general American
public that decidedly supports restrictions on abortion. The logic
isn’t even coherent: How is ensuring that more females are born
discriminate against women? On the flipside, how does aiding the
termination of unborn females help women’s liberation?
Banning sex-selection abortion is an important plank of
the pro-life cause that has widespread appeal. Along with
state-level laws that mandate parental consent for a minor’s
abortion, or require that women be fully informed about their
options prior to the procedure, a sex-selection abortion ban
carries the support of a majority of Americans.
Pro-choice extremists will continue to oppose a ban — and
continue to hurt their cause.
