In his June 5 letter, “Liberals block logical legislation,” Robert Maul accused liberals and progressives of supporting (and even practicing) “master race” eugenics, after House Democrats blocked legislation, the so-called Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, that would have criminalized gender-selection abortion, under the pretense of protecting female fetuses from gender discrimination. Doctors would be required to deny abortions to women they suspected of wanting to terminate pregnancies based on the sex of the fetus, and to report any instances of suspected sex-selective abortion performed by other doctors.
Setting aside the fact that over 90 percent of abortions occur before gender can be determined, the bill deserved to die because it was vague regarding the criteria for detecting the motives of women seeking abortions. Is the patient’s ethnicity, or even her last name, a giveaway? After all, one of PRENDA’s main supporters, Rep. Trent Frans, R-Ariz., suggested that Asian-American women are more likely to abort female fetuses based on a cultural preference for boys. Show me any culture anywhere in the world that hasn’t favored sons over daughters, please.
As written, PRENDA would have required doctors to act as forensic psychologists. And it would have added one more brick in the wall that conservatives are building to separate women from control of their own reproduction.
Debra Di Piazza
Vancouver
