GOP Lawmaker: We Need to Ban Sex-Selective Abortions Because of Asian Immigrants

Supporters of a South Dakota bill say Asian Americans don’t value girls as much as boys.

The South Dakota state capitol in Pierre<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/82538566@N00/3796389581/in/photolist-6MtumM-6Mtu1H-dYmWZK-b3mdK6-93vs7G-93vEpj-93vvU1-93s5R2-bGpRw2-5NWiCM-4qLDm-93vFjb-8nDGPC-8nAv4n-8nDDsL-8nAvk4-8nDETf-8nAyLi-8nAvZv-8nAxuV-8nDEvQ-8nDEaW-8nAysc-8nDFV5-8nAxMz-93smiz-59mKUk-6yqQBf-6yqRrG-6ymGkz-6yqQ9U-5Kv7bF-5Kv7dH-5KzmM7-5Kv7tR-eM4Cp">Jim Bowen</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Update 03/27/2014: The sex-selective abortion ban passed the South Dakota Senate on March 10. On March 26, Republican South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard signed the ban into law.

South Dakota already has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. But last week, Republican legislators there moved to make it even harder for women to have abortions—with a law they argue is necessary to stop an influx of Asian immigrants from aborting their female children.

On Wednesday, by a vote of 60 to 10, the South Dakota House passed a bill that would ban abortions based on the sex of the fetus, or “sex-selective” abortions. Speaking in favor of the bill, Stace Nelson, a Republican state representative running for the US Senate, hearkened back to his time living in Asia as a Marine. “Many of you know I spent 18 years in Asia,” Nelson said. “And sadly, I can tell you that the rest of the world does not value the lives of women as much as I value the lives of my daughters.”

Don Haggar, another Republican state representative, warned that the values Nelson observed in Asia had already taken root in South Dakota. “Let me tell you, our population in South Dakota is a lot more diverse than it ever was,” Haggar said. “There are cultures that look at a sex-selection abortion as being culturally okay. And I will suggest to you that we are embracing individuals from some of those cultures in this country, or in this state. And I think that’s a good thing that we invite them to come, but I think it’s also important that we send a message that this is a state that values life, regardless of its sex.”

Seven states already prohibit sex-selective abortions. In five states, the bans passed after the 2010 elections that swept Republicans into a record number of statehouses. South Dakota’s ban, which is now before the state Senate, would require physicians to ask women seeking abortions whether they are doing so because of the sex of the fetus. If a woman responds yes, her physician must refuse to perform the abortion, or else risk prison and fines.

Legislators who push these measures often tout them as feminist bills. But anti-abortion rights activists in South Dakota have been unusually explicit in arguing that it is necessary to ban sex-selective abortions because of the state’s burgeoning Asian population.

In early February, Spencer Cody, the vice president of South Dakota Right to Life, testified before the House judiciary committee that due to the state’s changing demographics, sex-selective abortion has become “a South Dakota problem.”

In a PowerPoint presentation he showed to the judiciary committee, Cody referred to studies that found Asian American families tend to have more male female than female children. He then wrote, “1.1% or approximately 9,200 South Dakotans come from ethnic backgrounds that are known to practice sex selection,” and linked to US Census data estimating that in 2012, 1.1 percent of South Dakotans were of Asian descent.

Another slide read, “Ethnic backgrounds that are known to practice sex selection account for up to 3.9% of all abortions in South Dakota.” It referred to South Dakota Department of Health statistics showing that 3.9 percent of abortion patients in 2011 reported their race as “other,” that is, not white, black, or Native American. “It’s possible that this could be affecting as many as 24 abortions a year,” Cody concluded—assuming every woman who reported her race as “other” was Asian, and every one of them was seeking an abortion only because of the fetus’s sex.

“We’ve been saying that these bills are wolves in sheep’s clothing. But in this case, I think the wolf has left off the sheep’s clothing.”

“The racism and the stereotypes and the stigma is laid so bare here,” says Miriam Yeung, the director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. The group has long argued that that sex-selective abortion bans perpetuate negative stereotypes about Asian American women. “We’ve been saying that these bills are wolves in sheep’s clothing. But in this case, I think the wolf has left off the sheep’s clothing.”

Haggar tells Mother Jones that he was not singling out any one ethnic group—although he specifically called out Nelson’s Asian travels in his remarks Wednesday.

Cody, asked why he dwelt on the number of Asians living in South Dakota, tells Mother Jones that he is confident that Americans of many backgrounds practice sex-selective abortions, but the only studies available focus on Asian Americans.

“We don’t have any hard data that says, ‘This number of sex-selection abortions are taking place in South Dakota,'” Cody says. “So we just used some demographic data. That’s really the only data we have to go on…The question, if this [ban] would actually affect any South Dakotans, is one we can’t answer yet.”

But Sneha Barot, a senior public policy associate with the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights think tank, argues that studies linking Asian American women to sex-selective abortions are “limited and inconclusive.” For example, two studies Cody cites found that in some Asian American groups, couples are more likely to have a son as their third child if their first two children are female. But neither study concluded this pattern was the result of sex-selective abortions.

Americans United for Life, the legal arm of the anti-abortion movement, cites these studies, too, in suggesting that Asian American women seek abortions because they prefer boys over girls. As a solution, the group promotes model legislation for sex-selective abortion bans. But anti-abortion rights activists generally avoid references to such stereotypes about Asian women. Instead they characterize these bans as victories for feminism. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) called one proposed ban a measure “to protect little girls from the violence of sex-selection abortion.” National Right to Life, in a letter to House members preparing to vote on a similar bill in 2012, asked legislators to think of the bill as a way to combat “a war on baby girls.”

Peggy Gibson, a Democratic state representative who voted against the South Dakota bill, said the right-to-lifers are pushing a phony issue. “I did not hear the sponsor of the bill give one iota of evidence that a [sex-selective] abortion has taken place in South Dakota. This bill…is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate