It’s All About Jobs

Posted on May 31, 2012 at 4:10 pm by JM Ashby

At least that’s what they tell me.

The House of Boehner was focused on abortion today, not jobs, and even in the most radical House the country has ever seen, the bill failed to pass.

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. [...]

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 government should not intrude in medical decisions or private family matters in this way.”

In a different time most Republicans would agree with that statement, but we’re talking about abortion in 2012. The irony is delicious.

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  • mrbrink

    See. We can stop accusing the Republican party of attacking the rights and protection of women, now. They’re trying to save women from being aborted!

    So, to sum up. Send in a fictitious journalist to make fictitious claims and the Republican party will hold a vote to put and end to a fictitious problem.

    Great use of time.

  • muselet

    According to Ed Kilgore, Trent Franks’s bill originally was intended to deal with the oh-so-terrible problem of abortion among African-Americans, but it was rewritten to deal with the oh-so-terrible problem of Asian-Americans’ sex-selection abortions.

    How much of a problem is sex-selection abortion in the US? TPM:

    Data suggests that gender-based abortions, while a huge problem in countries like China and India, are not prevalent in the United States. The U.S. has a male-to-female ratio of 1.05-to-1, according to the CIA World Factbook, which the National Academy of Sciences calls the “biological norm.”

    Oh, noes! The biological norm! There must be something terribly wrong!

    *sigh*

    –alopecia

    • mrbrink

      Biological norm sounds evil, but how does it work?

      Great question, Sally. Biological norm is when a man and a woman fall in love and try to kill you!!!

    • D_C_Wilson

      I remember seeing an article a few weeks ago about this. One of the proponents of the ban said that about 50% of all abortions are of females.

      Yikes!

  • D_C_Wilson

    Sounds like a worthless law to begin with. If the doctor asks a woman if she’s having an abortion for gender selection, all she has to do is say no. How are they going to prove otherwise?

    • http://drangedinaz.wordpress.com/ IrishGrrrl

      Exactly! No matter where you stand on this issue, from a pragmatic view it’s completely unenforceable because the charge is virtually unprovable.