A House subcommittee heard a report by pro-life group Charlotte Lozier Institute on Thursday to evaluate the relevance of a bill meant to ban the practice of sex-selective abortion prevalent in many parts of the world, and among the immigrant communities within US.
The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), which aims to ban abortion based on sex of the baby, was brought to the House Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice on Thursday, and the practice of discriminating against unborn babies on the basis of their sex was discussed.
Ahead of the hearing, the Charlotte Lozier Institute had released a paper titled "Sex-Selection Abortion: The Real War on Women," authored by Anna Higgins, an associate scholar at the institute.
Higgins, who also testified before the subcommittee, wrote in the report that most developed nations agree that discrimination on the basis of sex alone was "inherently unjust, a very real and pervasive form of sex discrimination is still permitted and practiced in the world today. Prenatal sex discrimination crosses cultural, ethnic, and national lines. It is practiced in many countries, including the U.S., via sex-selective abortion - choosing to abort a preborn child based solely on the child's sex."
"Prenatal discrimination can also be practiced pre-implantation by destroying embryos based on a pre-implantation sex determination. Undoubtedly, such practices constitute discrimination against a unique human individual based on sex alone, and thus constitute sex discrimination."
She notes in her research that this was a "global" practice during the last two decades, and now it has become pervasive even in US and UK. Higgins points out that "the sex ratio at birth of certain sub-populations in the U.S. and U.K. has climbed sharply, resulting in highly unbalanced ratios in favor of males. Such a noticeable change in recent decades implicates the increased use of sex-selective abortion and the failure of abortion providers to uniformly reject abortion on these grounds."
Apart from Higgins, the three other members of the panel who testified before the committee were Miriam Yeung of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, Catherine Davis of the National Black Prolife Coalition, and Reverend Derek McCoy of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.
Her research says that female feticide is practiced in huge proportions in China and India owing to cultural preference for males. She said that over 20 years ago, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen reported that 100 million girls were either never born, or died because of abandonment and deliberate neglect.
Steven W. Mosher, President at Population Research Institute, also cited multiple studies, including a 2008 study by Columbia University economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund, which pointed out that sex-selective abortions were carried out in large numbers in US, particularly in the immigrant communities. Their study showed that among the Chinese, Indians, and Korean families living in US, those who had two first daughters displayed a ratio of 151 boys to 100 girls for third child - which is an extreme ratio.
Mosher said that given the population size of the immigrants at the time (3.9 million Chinese-Americans, 2.8 million Asian-Indians, and 1.6 million Korean-Americans) the number of sex-selective abortions is estimated to be high in the country.
