Late last week, the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee held a hearing on PRENDA, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act. But instead of talking about the real, solid issue involved in the proposed law – banning the targeted killing of a child because of gender or race – abortion advocates preferred to put up smokescreens.
For instance, the minority witness opposed to PRENDA, Miriam Yeung, Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, argued that more important issues face women and girls. (Apparently being targeted for death, based on your gender, at your most helpless stage of life isn’t quite important enough.)
Yeung suggested a better policy to pursue would be a $15 minimum wage for minority women.
Rep. Steve Cohen thought we should be concerned with discrimination in voting rights instead of discrimination in abortion.
And Rep. John Conyers astonishingly defended a parent’s right to end the life of their child for any reason – including gender and race. He argued that such discrimination could not defeat a woman’s “constitutional right” to an abortion. (Perhaps Rep. Conyers has not heard the recorded tape of Planned Parenthood happily receiving a donation to target Black children for abortion. One wonders if he would object to that instance of discriminatory behavior.)
Miriam Yeung’s written testimony stated:
This bill represents a duplicitous attempt to address racial and gender discrimination, while actually intending to chip away at abortion rights. Not only does this legislation call into question a woman’s motives for seeking abortion care, it is especially punishing in the precedent it would set: forcing doctors to scrutinize a woman because of her race or ethnicity.
At least two outrageous conclusions rise from Ms. Yeung’s assertions in that paragraph. First, is abortion such a sacred cow that it cannot even be restrained by basic humanity and simple logic? In what other area of society, in what other “right,” do we allow racial and gender discrimination in the U.S.? One of the Congressmen pointed out how we attempt to purge discrimination from almost every area of society, but somehow, abortion advocates believe their prized procedure should be exempt.
Secondly, as Live Action’s Danny David pointed out in this article, the race card played by Ms. Yeung is misleadingly false. PRENDA does not even hint that doctors ought to “scrutinize a woman because of her race or ethnicity.” Ms. Yeung and other abortion advocates like to read into PRENDA, claiming that Asian-American women and other minorities will be held in suspicion of discrimination, and yet, the law says nothing of the sort. No single group of women would be targeted by PRENDA. The only people “targeted” at all by the law would be those who seek to abort their children because of their gender or race.
Do abortion advocates realize how chilling and elitist it is for them to argue that killing a child on the basis of her gender or his race is perfectly acceptable and none of society’s business? Do they realize how their insistence on talking about voting rights and minimum wage in the face of the discriminatory killing of innocent children escapes any sense of reality?
Every issue has its place and its time for discussion, but deflecting to voting rights and employment is absurd when the real conversation should be centered on the intentional, targeted killing of children – some of whom can feel pain and some of whom could survive outside the womb.
As Rep. Trent Franks, Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee, stated, if we can’t even say that killing a baby girl for being a girl is wrong, what is wrong anymore?
