Gender-selection abortion ban fails
Critics say the measure could lead to profiling of Asian-american women.
The House on WASHINGTON — Thursday fell short in an effort to ban abortions based on the sex of the fetus as Republicans and Democrats made an election-year appeal for women’s votes.
The legislation would have made it a federal crime to perform or force a woman to undergo a sex-based abortion, a practice common in some Asian countries where families wanting sons abort female fetuses.
It was a rare social issue to reach the House floor in a year when the economy has dominated the political conversation, and Republicans, besieged by Democratic claims that they are waging a war on women, struck back by trying to depict the vote as a women’s rights issue.
“It is violence against women,” said Rep. Chris Smith, RN.J., of abortions of female fetuses. “This is the real war on women.”
The White House, most Democrats, abortion rights groups and some Asian-American organizations opposed the bill, saying it could lead to racial profiling of Asian-American women and subject doctors who do not report suspected sex-selection abortions to criminal charges.
“The administration opposes gender discrimination in all forms, but the end result of this legislation would be to subject doctors to criminal prosecution if they fail to determine the motivations behind a very personal and private decision,” White House spokeswoman Jamie Smith said in a statement. “The government should not intrude in medical decisions or private family matters in this way.”
The bill had little chance of becoming law. The Democraticcontrolled Senate would likely have ignored it, and the House brought it up under a procedure requiring a two-thirds majority for passage. The vote was 246168 — 30 votes short of that majority. WASHINGTON —
Top congressional Republicans made a new offer to President Barack Obama on Thursday in their fight over heading off a doubling of interest rates on federal college loans for 7.4 million students, proposing fresh ways to cover the effort’s $6 billion cost.
The GOP ideas were modeled on savings that Obama himself had included in his budget for this year, suggesting that negotiations over ending the election-year impasse could take a serious turn.
Until now, both sides have favored extending today’s 3.4 percent interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans for another year but clashed over how to pay for it.
House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans made their proposals in a letter to Obama.
They included savings from making it harder for states to collect some federal Medicaid reimbursements.
“There is no reason we cannot quickly and in a bipartisan manner enact fiscally responsible legislation,” the letter said.
The leaders sent the letter on the same day that Boehner, R-Ohio, used a barnyard vulgarity in a meeting with GOP lawmakers to describe Democrats’ efforts to use issues like the student loan fight to distract voters from the country’s economic woes, said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.
According to Steel, the representative from West Chester Twp. in Butler County, told his colleagues that it would be the Democratic-led Senate’s fault if Congress and the White House stalemate and don’t act before July 1, the day interest rates would automatically double to 6.8 percent. He also told them that even if there is a deadlock that day, Congress could retroactively reduce the interest rates later, making July 1 a phony deadline, said Steel.
The House approved a GOPwritten bill paying for the extension by abolishing a preventive health program, but that measure has drawn a White House veto threat.