Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona
For a minute there, it appeared that the holiday recess would arrive without congressional Republicans introducing yet another bill attacking reproductive rights. But, in a year when such legislation at the state and federal level has been record high, expecting a reprieve was a vain hope.
The bill would ban abortions undertaken because of the race or gender of the fetus. It was actually first introduced in 2009 and never emerged from committee. But it got a possible boost earlier this year when Arizona became the first state to enact a version of it. The provider could be prosecuted under the law, but not the woman seeking the abortion.
Sex-selection abortions are a problem in parts of the world and, moral issues aside, have produced off-kilter male-female ratios in the population of China, parts of India and some of the old Soviet Republics. But there is no evidence that sex-selection abortions are rife in the United States. In fact all but 5 percent of abortions in the United States take place before an ultrasound can even determine the fetus's sex.
As for race, a pregnant woman usually knows the race of her fetus, and if she doesn't, no test will make that determination. The argument of the forced-birthers is, however, that providers like Planned Parenthood are engaged in "black genocide" via abortions. The statute reads: Evidence shows that minorities are targeted for abortion and that sex selection abortion is also occurring in our country. What evidence? There is evidence that minorities are targeted for pay-day loans and traffic stops and bank red-lining. So now in Arizona racial discrimination against fetuses is disallowed, but against actual people it appears mandatory.
The guy who introduced this twisted proposal in the Arizona state legislature back in January was Rep. Steve Montenegro. But, as noted, it originated in Congress two years ago with Rep. Trent Franks (AZ-02), who once called Barack Obama an "enemy of humanity." He took the GOP's notorious naming-of-bills campaign to new depths and labeled the proposal the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011. As Robin Marty at RH Reality Check says, that's not a joke.
Anthony's name was long ago hijacked by the anti-choice movement based on hotly disputed interpretations of what she had to say on the subject well over a century ago when abortions even by a doctor were dreadful, perilous affairs. So her appearance in the name of this bill is no shock even though it's impossible to know what her position on the issue would be today. But Douglass? Since he took no public stance on abortion, an anti-choicer stomped on his greatest speech to make one up for him.
Is the ultimate sick premise here that if someone who looks like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass hook up, they won't be able to abort the mixed-race fetus because it could obviously only be done for race-selection purposes? Is any of this crowd aware that Frederick Douglass's second wife was white?
Democrats should learn from this naming game. If President Obama had called his languishing jobs bill the "God bless Jesus and Unborn Americans Act," it would have passed already.