Submitted to a Candid World

Preventing prenatal discrimination based only on sex and race? That’s it? Couldn’t she at least throw religious protection in there? I would hate to see an abortion because the fetus is of Jewish faith whereas the mother is a Catholic.

first, igor … apologize to whom? let ‘er rip as far as i’m concerned.

second, as wacky as ol’ shelley is, she isn’t the original sponsor of many of these bills … she’s simply a cosponsor. the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2009” comes to us courtesy of trent franks (R-AZ) who, according to wiki …

also served four and a half years as the Executive Director of the Arizona Family Research Institute, a nonprofit organization associated with James Dobson’s Focus on the Family for the purpose of advocating public policy to protect children and families in Arizona.

acute global financial meltdown? republicans can’t be bothered. they must address the most important issues facing us as a nation …

i’m going out on a limb and suggesting that most pro-choice individuals who find “susan b. anthony and frederick douglass prenatal nondiscrimination” acts a little over the top are not ignorant of the serious ethical issues there are across cultures with sex-specific abortion and certainly with the ethical implications bound up with genetic-testing advancement.

that said, audacious bills introduced by far-right religious conservatives are not going to even begin to address these larger cultural and ethical issues. for instance, these same individuals rail against u.s. aid to countries to help increase access to education and resources (including simple access to birth control, forget abortion) by women, the single surest way to advance a society and break down the centuries-old intra-cultural inequities.

incidentally, sex-specific abortion is illegal in india; though, it is practiced underground, and would be practiced regardless of the legality of abortion in general — at least until the country sees greater gains by women outside of the major urban areas. the issue is not abortion in this case, it is patriarchy.

in the case of the current house bill, the issue **IS** abortion, period. there are dozens of bills in committee right now that are trying every conceivable angle to restrict abortion. this one bill is just one of those angles.

DM – I’m sure that’s all true, and I’m positive that Bachmann’s motivation is to establish precedent for treating fetuses as persons in the eyes of the law (and that she couldn’t actually come up with a situation in which her law would be enforceable). But I thought I detected an undercurrent of “who would worry about sex discrimination against fetuses?” in the original post and in Igor’s first comment and was offering. My post wasn’t to endorse the bill or to defend Bachmann, but was just an fyi pointing out that it’s not necessarily right-wing lunacy to suggest that fetuses should be protected from some forms of discrimination and that there are some motivations for abortion that aren’t good enough, morally speaking.

I also very much agree with ACG that a much more humane and effective way of discouraging sex-selective abortion would be to offer incentives to raise girl children.

That’s gotten me curious, actually. Do pro-lifers tend to be strong supporters of expanding child tax credits, etc? Or is the worry that this would lead to too many baby factory welfare queens?

kris — you totally captured what initially made me gag when i found the bill.

except i didn’t think of the white girl wanting an abortion because she slept with a black guy. i thought about the black woman going in and discovering she was having a black baby! (black women receive a disproportionate number of abortions nationwide.)

i certainly do not want to give the impression that i am flip about abortion. nothing could be further from the truth, and while i think first-wave feminism was a tad lacking in their characterization of the seriousness of abortion, when the “we’re-going-to-throw-everything-at-abortion-and-see-if-it-sticks” crowd wastes taxpayer dollars, committee time, and congressional effort on ABORTION rather than other, certainly more critical, issues that have more immediate, more substantial effects on the people who exist OUT of the womb, i’m going to point out the lameness.

incidentally, based on what i had the patience to look for, in the first four months of this congress bachmann has her name on 19 bills requesting different tax breaks for businesses and the weathly. (though, one of them seeks to extend adoption tax credits, which i can support.) one bill, in fact, seeks to further limit the amount of time the gov’t can go after big oil/gas/coal companies to recoup back taxes.

she has her name on ***11*** bills seeking to restrict abortion.

she has her name on seven bills dealing with the economic crisis, all of which do nothing more than seek to dismantle legislation already passed and designed to address the crisis, rather than offer any alternative ways to handle it.

there’s a priority breakdown here, and it’s not limited to bachmann, as usual it’s the entire conservative/evangelical/fundamentalist wing of the republican party.

now back to sex-selective abortion … incentives to raise females is not going to work as long as there remain long-held cultural traditions about inheritance, property ownership, schooling, and marriage. in patriarchal systems, female children offer little ROI (return on investment). work on educating and empowering girls and women who are already here, then the value of a vagina increases, beyond the single aim of delivering male babies.

in countries where sex-selective abortion exists, so too does female infanticide … these are symptoms of larger gender inequalities in the society. addressing one of these is like treating pneumonia with nasal spray.

in the u.s., the relationship is reversed. patriarchal tradition is the symptom of efforts to restrict or ban abortion.

picking the battle means successfully understanding what needs to be fought.

to me it is a no-brainer that feminists oppose sex-selective (or race-selective) abortion, but it is such a HUGE no-brainer that it ultimately is a non-issue.

interesting, anti-abortion groups like to hold china up as the inevitable result of a society that permits abortion. BUT data regarding the success of china’s one-child policy is notoriously shaky. reliability of data is better in urban areas, but grow increasingly shady as distance to urban centers increases … imagine concentric circles …

why is this? because in smaller, largely rural areas (and still, china is mostly rural) having an “in” with the party cadre in your area means a lot and can help if you want to have more than one child (or anything outside the “rules”). i’m not suggesting the one-child policy has not had an impact of millions of women and families, but it is not true that it is one-hundred percent effect, far, far, far from it.

sex-selective abortion, though, has continued almost unabated in china. why? because of long-standing patriarchal traditions … even with the major advances women in china have made since the revolution, those centuries-old norms hold strong … arguably in inverse relation to the effectiveness of one-child rules … more rural areas are going to more readily look the other way at sex-selective abortions, whereas, stricter controls and oversights make performing them trickier in urban areas.

again, in this context, the main issue is not abortion … it is patriarchy, and the chinese government is in a real demographic pickle for the next few generations, trying to balance the gender distribution.

the “english at work” bill is called … drumroll …

the “COMMON SENSE ENGLISH ACT” …

it was killed in committee in the 110th congress. it was introduced by tom price (R-GA) and sponsored, among others, by john boehner and eric cantor … the house’s minority leadership in the 111th.

the aim of the bill is to protect any employer who has an “english only” requirement at work … no matter to what degree, the employer has a right to require english … theoretically, if your employer required it, your indian coworker has to use english on the phone with her husband.

some of the rationale from the bill’s language:

Congress finds that — (1) throughout the history of the United States, English has been the common thread to unify the American people much as they are united under one flag; (2) Americans overwhelmingly believe that it is very important for people living in the United States to speak and understand English; (3) there is vast support among the American people to allow a company to require its employees to speak English while on the job; (4) the EEOC has sued the Salvation Army for implementing an `English in the Workplace’ policy which gives employees a year to learn English; and (5) when a group of employees speaks a language other than English in the workplace, it may cause misunderstandings, create dangerous circumstances, and undermine morale.

it’s (5) that stands out to me … undermining morale? how? because native english speakers feel left out or imposed upon when they hear casual conversation other languages while at work?

no one — even a liberal — wants people, if they are unable, operating machinery or performing job duties that require and understanding of english to avoid injury to themselves or others. that’s why it’s already o.k. for an employer to require english proficiency from prospective employees, enough skill to perform job duties …

this bill is unnecessary (forget about xenophobic and discriminatory), except inasmuch as it seeks to drum out non-english languages (and, collaterally, alienating non-native-english speaking workers) in all work settings, even when not job related.

From Gotchaye:

That’s gotten me curious, actually. Do pro-lifers tend to be strong supporters of expanding child tax credits, etc? Or is the worry that this would lead to too many baby factory welfare queens?

As a pro-lifer I’ll give the cynical answer first and the more realistic answer second.

The first is that while I know your question is sincere, I see a similar line of questioning from a lot of pro-choice folks that is less-than-truthful. They present the question as though their preference for abortion would disappear if only conservatives did more to help the families that choose not to abort. That is a red herring. The truth is that there is no battery of family-friendly, child-friendly, adoption-friendly laws that conservatives could suggest that would suddenly make liberals more willing to compromise on abortion. People like Kris who are okay with aborting down syndrome babies or people like DM who see abortion as a vital part of the family-planning toolkit are not going to have a change of heart because conservatives make the child tax credit bigger.

My personal answer is that yes, a lot of pro-lifers are supportive of family-friendly tax laws, etc. Ross Douthat is one example. His book Grand New Party specifically lays out a more family-friendly tax policy that would double the child tax credit, give pension or tuition credits to stay-at-home parents, etc. I’ve also heard other pro-life conservatives go so far as to suggest that married families with kids be exempt from taxes altogether for a certain number of years while raising children. I will also point out that John McCain had a fairly robust adoption incentive program in his platform last year. Unfortunately while Obama’s Blueprint for Change mentioned abortion several times the word adoption was never uttered. Liberals just don’t seem to view it as a viable alternative.

To be clear, I’m with Steve on this. I was earlier pointing out that the other position wasn’t crazy, even for pro-choicers.

Thanks Mike. Do liberals tend to vote against that kind of thing? I have something of a hard time understanding why it doesn’t get passed if there’s significant conservative support for it. I’d imagine that liberals would be generally supportive, both because they think child tax credits are good things in themselves and because, as you point out, they might hope to weaken the pro-life movement with them.