Morning Roundup: Arizona Seeks to Ban Race and Sex Selection

Beth Saunders

Arizona looks at banning race and sex selection abortions, despite the fact that it makes no sense, young women infected with HIV are more likely to become pregnant and have complications, hearings scheduled on the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," and women are a separate species - an unexplainable one at that.

Arizona looks at banning race and sex selection abortions, despite the fact that it makes no sense, young women infected with HIV are more likely to become pregnant and have complications, hearings scheduled on the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” and women are a separate species – an unexplainable one at that.

  • An Arizona lawmaker has proposed a requirement that women seeking an abortion verify that they are not doing so based on the race or sex of the fetus. A policy manager at Planned Parenthood said, “This idea that minority women are having abortions at higher rates than white women speaks more to rates of poverty, access to contraception and a lack of sex education,” she said. “This is not racial genocide for God’s sake; this is a real problem that we’re not addressing.” The article points out that the vast majority – 92% – of abortions are performed in the first trimester, a period when a woman very rarely knows the sex of the fetus. (Only if she had an amniocentesis, a procedure done if something appears to be wrong with the fetus, would she know the sex, and the earliest that procedure is performed is 11 weeks.)
  • A study by Johns Hopkins shows that young women infected with HIV are more likely to become pregnant and have pregnancy complications than women who do not have the virus. The study also shows that

    HIV-infected teens and young adults continue to have unsafe sex and that pregnancies place these already vulnerable young women and their fetuses in serious danger for complications.
    The findings also “suggest that teens who were infected with HIV later in life may engage in different sexual behaviors than those infected at birth,” Dr. Kelly Gebo, an infectious disease specialist and the study’s senior investigator.

  • Despite his refusal to talk to the media about the redefinition of rape in Rep. Chris Smith’s abortion funding ban plan, House Speaker John Boehner is allowing that “priority” legislation to move forward with hearings in the House Judiciary Committee scheduled for next Tuesday, February 8.
  • The Washington, DC, affiliate of NBC news has an article posted on their website called “Females, the Unexplainable Species,” with a list of random somewhat-health-related facts below. Some examples are, “Women are twice as likely as men to go blind. Women love going to restrooms in groups.  Rumor is, they tell secrets and gossip while applying lipstick. The breasts of females of the human species are proportionately bigger than those of female mammals.” Uh, ok. What is it about those “facts” that makes women “unexplainable?” And a species? I’m pretty sure that most animals have males and females – and they are not counted as separate species.

Feb 2

Feb 1