It’s not news that immigrants from misogynous societies bring their retro attitudes and customs with them to America. In 2001, the New York Times reported on sex-selection abortion among Indians and Chinese immigrants: Clinics’ Pitch to Indian Émigrés: It’s a Boy.

Sex-selection abortions are used to dispose of unwanted girls, a common practice in Asia, where females are despised, even in the 21st century. A recent estimate of the accumulation is stunning: Asia’s 163 Million Missing Girls (Daily Beast, June 21).

Rep. Trent Franks has picked up on the issue as a thinly veiled way to stop all abortions. As reported by Fox News (Abortion Battle Heats Up on the Hill), he made an illogical argument:

He points to a finding by the Guttmacher Institute: “…the abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women.” Franks also believes that sex-selection abortions are on the rise in the U.S. and notes a Zogby International poll that found 86 percent of those surveyed believed gender-based abortion choices should be illegal.

Black women are not choosing to abort girls, so what they are doing is NOT sex-selection abortion. The Fox report did not mention the immigration cause at all, and was very misleading. The AP article at least discussed the extreme Asian cultural preference for boys, although without the dreaded “I” word.

If Trent Franks objected to just sex-selection abortion (rather than all abortion), he should have proposed legislation to end immigration from China and India, the two biggest practitioners. They are the tribes that have brought this barbarity to America, where women fought for 70 years just to get the vote and now have equal opportunity under the law. Importing millions who regard women as lesser beings does not bode well for women’s rights and safety in the diverse future.

Here’s another account of misogynous immigrants, which adopts the Franks logic midway through:

Sex-Selective Abortions Come Home, By Steven W. Mosher, National Review, December 6, 2011

“There is such a thing as too many daughters, but not too many sons,” Dr. Sunita Puri was told by the Asian-Indian women she was interviewing.

The physician, who practices in the Bay Area, wanted to find out why so many immigrant Indian women in the United States were so eager to find out the sex of their unborn children, and why so many of them choose abortion when they found out they were carrying a girl.

What she discovered over the course of 65 interviews conducted over several years profoundly shocked her. Fully 89 percent of the women carrying girls opted for an abortion, and nearly half had previously aborted girls.

Puri’s report, published in Social Science and Medicine this last April, makes for grim reading. Women told Puri of their guilt over their sex-selection abortions, how they felt that they were unable to “save” their daughters. Even the women who turned out to be carrying boys this time around could not shake their remorse over having earlier aborted daughters in this deadly game of reproductive roulette.

They also made clear that they were not free actors when it came to reproductive “choice.” Many, when it was learned that they were carrying girls, became the victims of family violence. Some — in an effort to make them miscarry — had been slapped and shoved around by angry husbands and in-laws, or even kicked in the stomach. Others were denied food, water, and rest in order to coerce them into aborting their unwanted girl babies.

Whether such brutality is common is an open question. That sex-selective abortion is widely practiced among certain Asian-American communities is not.

Jason Abrevaya of the University of Texas analyzed U.S. birth data and found unusually high boy-birth percentages after 1980 among later children (most notably third and fourth children) born to Chinese and Asian-Indian mothers.

Moreover, using maternally linked data from California, he found that Asian-Indian mothers are significantly more likely both to have a terminated pregnancy and to give birth to a son when they have previously only given birth to girls.

Columbia University economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund also found clear evidence of sex-selective abortions in what they called “son-biased sex ratios,” that is, a higher ratio of boys to girls than would occur in nature. Looking at the sex ratio at birth among U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian-Indian parents, they found that first-borns showed normal sex ratios at birth. But if the first child was a girl, the sex ratio jumped to 117, and if the first two children were girls, then the sex ratio jumped to 151. That is to say, for every 151 boys, there were only 100 hundred surviving girls. The rest had been eliminated.

This is not just misogyny; it is misogyny that kills. 

Racism kills as well, to judge from the fact that the abortion rate among blacks is about five times higher than the American average. Blacks are only 12 percent of the population but have 37 percent of the abortions. This suggests that their abortions, too, are more than just a matter of personal choice.

We have been told by the self-described “pro-choice” movement that women who go in for abortions do so because they (not their husbands, in-laws, or kinship group) have decided not to continue their pregnancies. If this turns out not to be true, and others bend you to their prejudices where gender and race are concerned, then the pro-choice argument evaporates.

What we are then left with is discrimination, pure and blatant, on the basis of sex and race. If the child is male or white, it will likely live. If the child is female or black, it may die.

The obvious solution, according to Arizona congressman Trent Franks (Ariz.) is to ban sex- and race-selective abortion. This week he introduced a bill, called the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, or PreNDA for short, to do just that.

The bill declares that an abortion done for reasons of sex or race selection is a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and prohibits doctors from carrying out such abortions. Those who coerce women into a sex- or race-based abortion can be sued by their victims, and organizations that solicit or accept funds to perform such abortions will be in violation of the law.

This reasonable effort to reign in discriminatory abortions has been mischaracterized by the National Organization of Women as an “attempt to restrict healthcare for women of color.”

What it is really about is allowing Indian, Chinese, Korean, and other women the freedom to have the babies of their choosing. Isn’t that what “reproductive choice” is supposed to be all about?