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Despite there being no evidence to support state Senator Nancy Barto’s claim that “sex-selection abortions are
happening in this country,” Governor Jan Brewer signed a controversial bill into law banning race/gender-based abortions.
The new law forces any doctor who performs an abortion to sign an affidavit
confirming that the reason for the abortion wasn’t the race or gender of
the fetus.
The bill also allows the father of the fetus — as long as he’s married
to the woman who gets an abortion — to sue a doctor if he thinks an
abortion was performed based on race or sex.
A violation of the law is a class 3 felony.
Opponents of the bill say there’s no evidence to suggest that abortions being performed for either of those reasons is a problem in Arizona. They say the new law “is just to further damage the reputations of women who get an abortion.”
We sent the bill’s author, state Representative Steve Montenegro, and Barto emails asking them to produce any evidence that these types abortions are happening in Arizona.
They never got back to us.
Aside from the law tackling a problem that doesn’t actually exist —
wasting legislators’ time and taxpayers’ money — it poses several
problems.
For starters, lying on a form about why you want an abortion is pretty
easy to do, so in reality, this is simply a symbolic jab at women who
get abortions. Or, in the words of Senator Kyrsten Sinema,”this
legislation spreads myths that are untrue, and the implication
that women make decisions based on these motives in our country is
offensive.”
Not to mention another significant problem — let’s say a woman and her
significant other have a falling out after learning they’re pregnant.
What’s to stop a woman’s bitter baby-daddy from falsely reporting that
his ex is having an abortion based on race or
gender out of spite? As hard as it is to prove someone’s having an abortion for one
of those reasons, it’s equally difficult to prove that they’re not.
Like other controversial far-right-wing policies, Arizona is the first
state in the entire country to have a law like this on the books — thus
furthering the state’s
reputation as the epicenter of far-right-wing whack job-ism.
