On Wednesday the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a number of bills centered on reproductive rights and abortion, but the centerpiece bill, the crux of the argument being played out with testimony and counter-testimony, was Representative Edie Ajello (Democrat, District 1, Providence)’s bill to codify the federal protections of Roe v Wade into Rhode Island State Law.
Under the Presidency of Donald Trump, and the possibility of a Supreme Court hostile to women’s reproductive rights, abortion could become a state issue, with each state establishing its own laws regarding the procedure. Currently, reproductive rights in Rhode island are protected at the federal level. The RI State Constitution has an amendment specifically saying that “Nothing in this section shall be construed to grant or secure any right relating to abortion or the funding thereof.”
We need legislation to ensure access to reproductive rights, and those opposed to abortion for religious reasons know this. For those opposed to reproductive rights, this may be their best opportunity to strike.
Edie Ajello introduces her bill, 5343, the Reproductive Health Care Act.
Attorney Lynette Labinger explains why Ajello’s bill is so important.
Attorney Joseph Cavenaugh said that the “hysteria” over Trump’s presidency is causing people to react unnecessarily. This was an extremely poor word choice. Women are often hit with this word to diminish their concerns.
Representative Arthur Corvese (Democrat, District 55, North Providence), introduced his bill, 5100 that would make certain abortion procedures illegal like the so-called “Dismemberment Abortion.” I should note here that representatives from the Democratic Party in Rhode Island are the primary source of attacks on abortion rights.
A speaker in favor of Corvese’s bill and opposed to reproductive rights.
A gynecologist/obstetrician who performs abortions spoke against Corvese’s bill. She was engaged in a long string of leading questions from Representative Camille Vella Wilkinson (Democrat, District 21, Warwick) which turned into a role play scenario with Vella Wilkinson playing the role of a pregnant women. Towards the end of the video Representative Jason Knight (Democrat, District 67, Warren), who supports women’s rights, has a short statement.
Representative Carol Hagan McEntee (Democrat, District 33, Narragansett, South Kingstown) said that without reproductive rights, women can never be truly equal to men under the law.
Representative Arthur Handy (Democrat, District 18, Cranston) introduced his bill H5830, which would repeal the “spousal notification” law. The law, which essentially requires a woman to get permission from her husband in order to end a pregnancy, was ruled unconstitutional years ago, but remains on the books. In the event of a change in the law on a federal level, this law may be somehow reactivated.
When he actually spoke about the bill in question rather than about his opposition to women’s reproductive rights in general, Father Nick said that men who are not consulted about their partner’s pregnancy prior to an abortion might feel emasculated. I’d like to note that Father Nick did something in his testimony that bothered me. He repeatedly used the terms “cutting edge science” and “the best science” interchangeably. The two terms do not necessarily mean the same thing.
John Wesley, from the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence (RICADV) is well aware of the way some abusive partners use pregnancy to control and abuse women. Forcing a woman to secure the permission of her husband to get an abortion, or any other kind of health care, puts women’s lives at risk.
Representative Deborah Felella (Democrat, District 43, Johnston) introduced H5158, by “request.” When asked about the specifics of the bill, Felella said she did not know and referred all such questions to Barth Bracy, of Rhode Island Right to Life. This bill would prohibit abortion as means of sex-selection, which Felella seemed to say would be aimed at certain ethnic populations in the state.
Brown University medical student Gopika Krishna minced no words about the racist intent of Falella’s bill. The bill would invade the privacy of doctor/patient privilege and violate a women’s conscience. Further, said Krishna, there’s no evidence that the bill is needed, as there is no evidence that abortion is used by parents to select a child’s sex.
Catholic lobbyist Bernard Healey did not really speak to Falella’s bill. He mostly spoke about his specific and the Catholic Church’s general opposition to women’s reproductive rights.
The last bill to be introduced was from Representative James McLaughlin (Democrat, District 57, Cumberland, Central Falls). McLaughlin wants the State of Rhode Island to legally recognize a fetus as human life starting at he existence of a heartbeat, and his bill 5399, would do that.
Sociologist Jamie Budnick spoke against McLaughlin’s bill. She also took issue with Joseph Cavenaugh’s use of the word “hysteria” earlier in the evening.
Spoke in support of McLaughlin’s bill and is opposed to women’s reproductive rights.
He read a powerful pro-choice letter to the committee from his wife.
Michelle Cretella, anti-choice
Gail Harvey, pro-choice
A group of young, anti-choice Providence College students.
Pro-choice
Barth Bracy, RI Right to Life, anti-choice.
Brown medical student, pro-choice.
Kara Russo Young, anti-choice.
Len Katzman, pro-choice.
Anti-choice.
Her name is Susan. She is named after her grandmother, who died in the 1920s due to an abortion gone wrong. Susan’s grandmother left behind young children.
Anti-choice.
Pro-choice.
Anti-choice.
Mary Chace of the RI League of Women Voters is pro-choice
Pro-choice.
Anti-Choice.
Pro-choice.
Anti-choice.
Jennifer Boylan, pro-choice.
Anti-choice.
Anti-choice.
Pro-choice.
Tyler Rawley, anti-choice.
Pro-choice.
Pro-choice.
Anti-choice.
Pro-choice.
Anti-choice.
Pro-choice.
Anti-choice.
Pro-choice
Anti-choice
Gus Uht, pro-choice.
Pro-choice.
Pro-choice.
Anti-choice.
Pro-choice.
Pro-choice.
Pro-choice.
Pro-choice.
Rep. Felella’s bill against sex-selection abortion has feminist support and isn’t racist as you claim. Internationally, feminists have been working to stop sex-selection abortion. Abortion aimed at sex selection often reflects a preference for sons over daughters, so it can have further sexist effects. At a 1994 UN conference, nearly 200 countries, including the United States, adopted an action plan that noted how selective abortion of female fetuses “compounded” sexism, and concluded by saying “Governments are urged to take the necessary measures to prevent infanticide, prenatal sex selection, trafficking in girl children and use of girls in prostitution and pornography.” I’m not saying we should accept that just because the governments at the UN conference said so. But it illustrates how international feminist activists have been pushing to ban sex-selection abortion worldwide.
Rep. Felella’s bill, H5158, says that doctors are not allowed to carry out abortions if they know that the fetus’s sex is the only reason for the abortion. I’ve seen studies showing that sex-selective abortions do happen in America, though not all that often. The bill is careful not to direct its penalties toward women. It might impede pregnant women, and their family members, from being able to use abortion solely for sex selection, but on the other hand it’s a move to stop a form of gender discrimination. So it’s the kind of bill that some feminists support and other feminists oppose. RI Future should not have falsely spoken of “the racist intent of Felella’s bill”. There are many forms of sexism, and the preference for sons over daughters that leads to aborting female fetuses is a kind of sexism that may be more common in some cultures than others. But trying to ban one form of sexism doesn’t become racist just because it’s a form of sexism that some cultures encourage more than others.
I think RI Future’s coverage of this bill was written too hastily – the article has a number of errors, including linking to the wrong bill number. I’ve tried to correct these errors here. I don’t know whether I would support the bill or not, but I’d like to see the pros and cons discussed more fairly. The bill, if it passed, would rarely need to be enforced and certainly wouldn’t lead to a “dystopia”. I realize that Felella’s bill wasn’t the main focus of this article, so I guess that makes it more understandable that you missed some things, but when an article is so hostile to a bill that arguably does some good, it’s better to be more careful. I appreciate the work that RI Future does in covering these things.
Sources:
The RI bill, H5158 by Rep. Felella:
http://webserver.rilin.state.ri.us/BillText/BillText17/HouseText17/H5158.pdf
A study interviewing women in America who have tried abortion to avoid having daughters:
http://coe.ucsf.edu/coe/news/sex_selection.html
The UN conference document (key part is in page numbers 33-36 which are pages 47-50 of the PDF):
http://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/programme_of_action_Web%20ENGLISH.pdf
A pro-life view with links to more studies:
http://thefederalist.com/2014/09/18/the-united-states-has-a-femicide-problem/
A pro-choice view points out that if you really want to keep parents from choosing their children’s sex, it’s best to have laws that cover more technologies for doing that instead of just restricting abortion:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/06/03/sex_selective_abortion_new_study_debunks_the_myth_that_it_is_widespread.html
Thanks for this Randall. Did you watch the video directly after, where Gopika Krishna makes her case for why the bill is racist? Also, what about privacy issues? Should the government be forcing women to have children they do not want, for any reason?
Gopika Krishnan’s points don’t convince me, I thought she jumped to conclusions without enough evidence. But thanks for encouraging me to listen to her testimony, which I didn’t do before. I’m still uncertain whether this bill is good or bad, but I think it’s being unfairly criticized.
Krishnan claims that bans on sex-selective abortion rely on false, racist stereotypes about Asian-Americans — specifically, assuming that Asian-Americans “are more likely to have sex-selective abortions based on a preference for male children.” I see several problems with her argument:
First, I’m not convinced that the bill actually relies on seeing Asian-Americans that way. It seems more plausible to me that those who want to ban sex-selective abortions would still oppose them even if sex-selective abortion was something that all ethnic groups were equally likely to do. The dislike that some people have for abortion, and/or the desire to prevent sex discrimination, would likely lead many to back bills like this regardless. It’s not clear to me that Rep. Felella’s statement shows any desire to target particular immigrant groups in Rhode Island. She just cited statistics saying that there are many cases, worldwide, where fetuses are aborted because they’re female, and she gave specific statistics about how often it happens in India and China. She didn’t discuss anything about how common it is here or about whether it was more likely to happen in some ethnic groups. It may be worth looking further into whether the bill is aimed at particular ethnic groups, but Felella’s and Krishnan’s statements don’t yet convince me that it is.
Krishnan also tried to argue that Asian-Americans aren’t any more likely to selectively abort female fetuses. I’m unsure if it’s really relevant whether that’s true or not, but if it is relevant, I don’t think she proved her point — she used the wrong kind of statistics and ignored some statistics that might point in the opposite direction.
I’m open to the possibility that there may be issues of racial justice here — it’s just that so far, nothing I’ve heard is enough to discredit the bill on racial-justice grounds.
Also, if you look at the pro-life link I included earlier, it mentions the University of Chicago study that Krishnan cited, and gives evidence that people like Krishnan have ignored what the study’s details show.
I just see this issue as complex. It’s clear to me that sex-selection abortion can sometimes be a form of sex discrimination, and the UN document I mentioned seems right in saying that sex-selection abortion can sometimes make sexism worse. And I think that when parents get to choose to have a baby of a certain type, that can in some cases be harmful to the children they do have, who are made part of their parents’ plan, and is also harmful to the children’s peers who can be made to feel that maybe they shouldn’t exist.
I learned something from reading Sunita Puri’s work. She’s interviewed many people who seek services to choose the sex of their child — Indian-Americans, actually. She writes that “the technological choices available to women in the name of reproductive freedom actually left many women feeling less able to resist pressure to pursue multiple available routes of sex determination and sex selection.” In some cases, women went to abort a female fetus because of abusive pressure from their husbands or in-laws who wanted a son. The pressure could include violence, shaming, threats to divorce the woman, and threats to send her back to her Indian parents as an unworthy wife. Sometimes a woman, who herself would be willing to have a girl, was still pressured to abort a female fetus. Sunita Puri’s full article is behind a paywall, but you can find a summary of it in one of the links in my last post — the ucsf.edu link. So it’s clear that in some cases, the legal availability of sex-selection abortion actually plays a part in reducing some women’s reproductive freedom. And banning sex-selective abortion, while allowing other kinds of abortion, might actually have a positive effect on gender equality. Because sex-selective abortion is more or less a form of sex discrimination, it raises more troubling issues than other kinds of abortion, and I don’t want to jump to conclusions.
The issue of sex selection is way more complicated than what is presented here. Also, abortion does not have to occur for pre-natal sex manipulation to occur.
A blog post from Our Bodies Ourselves illustrates some of the problems involved:
http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/health-info/prenatal-dexamethasone-for-congenital-adrenal-hyperplasia-first-do-no-harm/
Unfortunately, the subject is Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia and the language used is pathologizing. Another unfortunate fact is that one of the lead critics of Dr. Maria New’s practices is the wife of Dr. Aron Souza and is an apologist for such pathologization. Both were advocates for a new nomenclature that would characterize intersex variations in healthy people as “disorders”, which I think is relevant to the question of fetal selection, particularly as it relates to sex, and I am referring to “sex” in all its various manifestations.
Understanding CAH would take some time. Understanding the sexist attitudes towards those who karyotype as XX and masculinize, to various degrees, without having a salt wasting condition, would take time but to begin to understand, and I mean just to begin to understand, but here are a few facts from an Our Bodies Ourselves blog post:
“Virilization in a female with CAH can range from mild enlargement of the clitoris to the formation of a urogenital sinus, a condition in which the vagina and urethra are joined together in a common channel. . . .
“A woman at risk of having a child with CAH may be offered prenatal dexamethasone, a synthetic steroid, in an attempt to ensure normal genital development. The intervention is described as both highly effective and “safe for mother and child” by its leading proponent, Dr. Maria New . . . ”
In extreme cases of classical CAH a child’s genitalia can become extremely masculinized and an androgenized clitoris can track toward male development even w/out androgen producing testes. What New’s treatments do is redirect that masculine development in what, endocrinologically speaking, is a sex changing treatment.
The article says the treatment can begin at the 7th week of gestation:
“Since the virilizing effects of CAH can begin as early as seven weeks post-conception, dexamethasone is started as soon as an at-risk woman learns she is pregnant. Fetal gender cant reliably be determined until chorionic villus sampling (CVS) is performed at 10-12 weeks of gestation, however, which means that 50 percent of the exposed fetuses–the males, whose genital development is unaffected by CAH–will receive no benefit at all while still being exposed to potentially serious side effects.”
Wikipedia says fetal sex determination can be done w/ 98% accuracy at the 8th week of pregnancy but many are aware of the fact that actual fetal sex development doesn’t begin until the 2nd trimester.
from:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4037720/
“CAH is diagnosed prenatally by chorionic villus sampling (CVS) at approximately 14 weeks of gestation, or later, at approximately 20 weeks, by amniocentesis (Figure 1). However, genital organogenesis begins at approximately 9 weeks of gestation, and excess fetal androgen production causes genital virilization in female fetuses (Figure 1). To prevent genital ambiguity in female fetuses affected with classical CAH, dexamethasone is administered to the mother starting before 9 weeks of gestation (5). Current invasive prenatal diagnosis does not yield genetic results until later (Figure 1).”
So, it is possible to know at 14 weeks that a child might develop with an adrenal gland that produces so much testosterone it will cause a child to develop more towards the male end of the sex spectrum. This is where a parent might choose not to carry a child to term if it were worried that an otherwise healthy child’s difference might cause a parent, or both, to choose to terminate the pregnancy.
How many further implications does this single scenario involve? Again, from the Our Bodies Ourselves blog post:
“overall only 1 in 8 exposed fetuses (12.5 percent) are at risk for genital virilization and thus stand to benefit from the intervention. . . . ”
Academic papers have been written on the issue of parental rights, which involve more than simply “a woman’s right to choose”. I don’t believe the implications involved have really been considered in this discussion. This is a very well known paper on the issue of sexual orientation selection:
“As we learn more about the causes of sexual orientation, the likelihood increases that parents will one day be able to select the orientation of their children. This possibility (at least that of selecting for heterosexuality) . . .”
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Bailey/Greenberg-Bailey/Homosexual%20Eugenics.pdf
If one carefully reads the Our Bodies Ourselves blog one should be able to understand that the Bailey/Greenberg paper involves a lot more than hypotheticals:
“New’s secondary treatment goal–the prevention of “behavioral masculinization” that can accompany CAH. In a 2001 lecture to a CAH parent support group, New declared her intention to “restore this baby to the normal female appearance–with her eventually becoming somebody’s wife, and having normal sexual development, and becoming a mother.” . . .
and:
“Rather than a legitimate treatment goal, Dreger, Feder, and Tamar-Mattis instead saw this as a problematic attempt to medically “prevent” lesbianism. And indeed, while not overtly declaring lesbianism as a target, Dr. New does describe prenatal dexamethasone treatment of CAH-induced behavioral masculinization as a “paradigm for prenatal diagnosis and treatment.””
So, in light of all this, Bailey/Greenberg’s hypothetical is far from hypothetical. At 14 weeks the likeliness of a sexual orientation, disregarding any sex identity issues such a potential person may have, can be determined if there is concern that a child may be born with CAH.
I only used the example involving congenital adrenal hyperplasia because there has been so much written about the kind of things New York doctors, Maria New and Dix Poppas have been doing. CAH presents only one possible scenario, involving not only sex selection but sex determination where sex development and resulting sex traits come into play.
Claudia Astorino, I don’t believe, has the intersex variation known among those who karyotype as XX as CAH. In fact, I believe she possesses a Y chromosome but also a gene, carried on an autosome that caused her to be resistant to testosterone which aromatizes into estrogen and causes typical external female development in a fetus and at puberty, if no medical interventions are imposed. She is an intersex activist, however, who also sounds the alarm over pre-natal screenings for intersex traits, which is definitely a form of “sex selection”, even if it exists beneath the radar of most:
“As an avid proponent of reproductive rights, I strongly feel that safe, legal abortion must be accessible for everyone, including trans* people, gender-nonconforming people, and intersex folks like me. That being said, I’m concerned—disturbed, really—by an increasingly common feature of prenatal care that’s affecting my community: screening for intersex traits in utero, and making reproductive decisions based on that screening.
And I can’t help but feel that this simply isn’t OK.”
https://rewire.news/article/2015/03/11/im-disturbed-screening-intersex-traits-utero/
There is so much polarity involved on the issue of bodily self determination that really prevents a thoughtful discussion. It always takes place in an illusory either/or binary world where people dig in, take sides and a “my side right or wrong” kind of position that only leaves a trail of winners and losers as if life is some sort of a football game. The right to choose and issues involving consent and bodily self determination can get complicated, to say the least.