[Pages S2195-S2196]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

SA 332. Mr. VITTER (for himself, Mr. Risch, Mr. Wicker, Mr. Thune,
and Mr. Blunt) submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by him to
the concurrent resolution S. Con. Res. 8, setting forth the
congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year
2014, revising the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal year 2013,
and setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years
2015 through 2023; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:

At the end of title V, add the following:

SEC. 5__. SENSE OF THE SENATE REGARDING SEX-SELECTION
ABORTIONS.

(a) Findings.--The Senate finds the following:
(1) Women are a vital part of American society and culture
and possess the same fundamental human rights and civil
rights as men.
(2) United States law prohibits the dissimilar treatment of
males and females who are similarly situated and prohibits
sex discrimination in various contexts, including the
provision of employment, education, housing, health insurance
coverage, and athletics.
(3) Sex is an immutable characteristic ascertainable at the
earliest stages of human development through existing medical
technology and procedures commonly in use, including
maternal-fetal bloodstream DNA sampling, amniocentesis,
chorionic villus sampling or ``CVS'', and obstetric
ultrasound. In addition to medically assisted sex
determination, a growing sex determination niche industry has
developed and is marketing low-cost commercial products,
widely advertised and available, that aid in the sex
determination of an unborn child without the aid of medical
professionals. Experts have demonstrated that the sex-
selection industry is on the rise and predict that it will
continue to be a growing trend in the United States. Sex
determination is always a necessary step to the procurement
of a sex-selection abortion.
(4) A ``sex-selection abortion'' is an abortion undertaken
for purposes of eliminating an unborn child based on the sex
or gender of the child. Sex-selection abortion is barbaric,
and described by scholars and civil rights advocates as an
act of sex-based or gender-based violence, predicated on sex
discrimination. Sex-selection abortions are typically late-
term abortions performed in the 2nd or 3rd trimester of
pregnancy, after the unborn child has developed sufficiently
to feel pain. Substantial medical evidence proves that an
unborn child can experience pain at 20 weeks after
conception, and perhaps substantially earlier. By definition,
sex-selection abortions do not implicate the health of the
mother of the unborn, but instead are elective procedures
motivated by sex or gender bias.
(5) The targeted victims of sex-selection abortions
performed in the United States and worldwide are
overwhelmingly female. The selective abortion of females is
female infanticide, the intentional killing of unborn
females, due to the preference for male offspring or ``son
preference''. Son preference is reinforced by the low value
associated, by some segments of the world community, with
female offspring. Those segments tend to regard female
offspring as financial burdens to a family over their
lifetime due to their perceived inability to earn or provide
financially for the family unit as can a male. In addition,
due to social and legal convention, female offspring are less
likely to carry on the family name. ``Son preference'' is one
of the most evident manifestations of sex or gender
discrimination in any society, undermining female equality,
and fueling the elimination of females' right to exist in
instances of sex-selection abortion.
(6) Sex-selection abortions are not expressly prohibited by
United States law or the laws of 47 States. Sex-selection
abortions are performed in the United States. In a March 2008
report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, Columbia University economists Douglas Almond
and Lena Edlund examined the sex ratio of United States-born
children and found ``evidence of sex selection, most likely
at the prenatal stage''. The data revealed obvious ``son
preference'' in the form of unnatural sex-ratio imbalances
within certain segments of the United States population,
primarily those segments tracing their ethnic or cultural
origins to countries where sex-selection abortion is
prevalent. The evidence strongly suggests that some Americans
are exercising sex-selection abortion practices within the
United States consistent with discriminatory practices common
to their country of origin, or the country to which they
trace their ancestry. While sex-selection abortions are more
common outside the United States, the evidence reveals that
female feticide is also occurring in the United States.
(7) The American public supports a prohibition of sex-
selection abortion. In a March 2006 Zogby International poll,
86 percent of Americans agreed that sex-selection abortion
should be illegal, yet only 3 States proscribe sex-selection
abortion.
(8) Despite the failure of the United States to proscribe
sex-selection abortion, the United States Congress has
expressed repeatedly, through Congressional resolution,
strong condemnation of policies promoting sex-selection
abortion in the ``Communist Government of China''. Likewise,
at the 2007 United Nation's Annual Meeting of the Commission
on the Status of Women, 51st Session, the United States
delegation spearheaded a resolution calling on countries to
condemn sex-selective abortion, a policy directly
contradictory to the permissiveness of current United States
law, which places no restriction on the practice of sex-
selection abortion. The United Nations Commission on the
Status of Women has urged governments of all nations ``to
take necessary measures to prevent . . . prenatal sex
selection''.
(9) A 1990 report by Harvard University economist Amartya
Sen, estimated that more than 100 million women were
``demographically missing'' from the world as early as 1990
due to sexist practices, including sex-selection abortion.
Many experts believe sex-selection abortion is the primary
cause. Current estimates of women missing from the world
range in the hundreds of millions.
(10) Countries with longstanding experience with sex-
selection abortion such as the Republic of India, the United
Kingdom, and the People's Republic of China, have enacted
restrictions on sex-selection, and have steadily continued to
strengthen prohibitions and penalties. The United States, by
contrast,

[[Page S2196]]

has no law in place to restrict sex-selection abortion,
establishing the United States as affording less protection
from sex-based feticide than the Republic of India or the
People's Republic of China, whose recent practices of sex-
selection abortion were vehemently and repeatedly condemned
by United States congressional resolutions and by the United
States Ambassador to the Commission on the Status of Women.
Public statements from within the medical community reveal
that citizens of other countries come to the United States
for sex-selection procedures that would be criminal in their
country of origin. Because the United States permits abortion
on the basis of sex, the United States may effectively
function as a ``safe haven'' for those who seek to have
American physicians do what would otherwise be criminal in
their home countries--a sex-selection abortion, most likely
late-term.
(11) The American medical community opposes sex-selection.
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists,
commonly known as ``ACOG'', stated in its 2007 Ethics
Committee Opinion, Number 360, that sex-selection is
inappropriate because it ``ultimately supports sexist
practices''. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine
(commonly known as ``ASRM'') 2004 Ethics Committee Opinion on
sex-selection notes that central to the controversy of sex-
selection is the potential for ``inherent gender
discrimination, . . . the risk of psychological harm to sex-
selected offspring (i.e., by placing on them expectations
that are too high), . . . and reinforcement of gender bias in
society as a whole''. Embryo sex-selection, ASRM notes,
remains ``vulnerable to the judgment that no matter what its
basis, [the method] identifies gender as a reason to value
one person over another, and it supports socially constructed
stereotypes of what gender means''. In doing so, it not only
``reinforces possibilities of unfair discrimination, but may
trivialize human reproduction by making it depend on the
selection of nonessential features of offspring''. The ASRM
ethics opinion continues, ``ongoing problems with the status
of women in the United States make it necessary to take
account of concerns for the impact of sex-selection on goals
of gender equality''. The American Association of Pro-Life
Obstetricians and Gynecologists, an organization with
hundreds of members--many of whom are former abortionists--
makes the following declaration: ``Sex selection abortions
are more graphic examples of the damage that abortion
inflicts on women. In addition to increasing premature labor
in subsequent pregnancies, increasing suicide and major
depression, and increasing the risk of breast cancer in teens
who abort their first pregnancy and delay childbearing, sex
selection abortions are often targeted at fetuses simply
because the fetus is female. As physicians who care for both
the mother and her unborn child, the American Association of
Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists vigorously opposes
aborting fetuses because of their gender.''. The President's
Council on Bioethics published a Working Paper stating the
council's belief that society's respect for reproductive
freedom does not prohibit the regulation or prohibition of
``sex control'', defined as the use of various medical
technologies to choose the sex of one's child. The
publication expresses concern that ``sex control might lead
to . . . dehumanization and a new eugenics''.
(12) Sex-selection abortion results in an unnatural sex-
ratio imbalance. An unnatural sex-ratio imbalance is
undesirable, due to the inability of the numerically
predominant sex to find mates. Experts worldwide document
that a significant sex-ratio imbalance in which males
numerically predominate can be a cause of increased violence
and militancy within a society. Likewise, an unnatural sex-
ratio imbalance gives rise to the commoditization of humans
in the form of human trafficking, and a consequent increase
in kidnapping and other violent crime.
(13) Sex-selection abortions have the effect of diminishing
the representation of women in the American population, and
therefore, the American electorate.
(14) Sex-selection abortion reinforces sex discrimination
and has no place in a civilized society.
(15) The history of the United States includes examples of
sex discrimination. The people of the United States
ultimately responded in the strongest possible legal terms by
enacting a constitutional amendment correcting elements of
such discrimination. Women, once subjected to sex
discrimination that denied them the right to vote, now have
suffrage guaranteed by the 19th amendment to the Constitution
of the United States. The elimination of discriminatory
practices has been and is among the highest priorities and
greatest achievements of American history.
(16) Implicitly approving the discriminatory practice of
sex-selection abortion by choosing not to prohibit them will
reinforce these inherently discriminatory practices, and
evidence a failure to protect a segment of certain unborn
americans because those unborn are of a sex that is
disfavored. Sex-selection abortions trivialize the value of
the unborn on the basis of sex, reinforcing sex
discrimination, and coarsening society to the humanity of all
vulnerable and innocent human life, making it increasingly
difficult to protect such life. Thus, Congress has a
compelling interest in acting--indeed it must act--to
prohibit sex-selection abortion.
(b) Sense of the Senate.--It is the sense of the Senate
that--
(1) Congress has power to prohibit sex selection abortions
under the Commerce Clause; section 5 of the 14th amendment,
including the power to enforce the prohibition on Government
action denying equal protection of the laws; and section 8 of
article I; and
(2) Congress should enact S. 138, the Prenatal
Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), to amend chapter 13 of title
18, United States Code, to provide that whoever knowingly
performs an abortion knowing that such abortion is sought
based on the sex or gender of the child; uses force or the
threat of force to intentionally injure or intimidate any
person for the purpose of coercing a sex-selection abortion;
solicits or accepts funds for the performance of a sex-
selection abortion; or transports a woman into the United
States or across a State line for the purpose of obtaining a
sex-selection abortion; or who attempts to do any of these
things, may be fine or imprisoned up to five years under this
title; and to allow for civil action by a woman on whom such
an abortion was performed; provided, however, that nothing in
such Act shall be construed to require that a healthcare
provider has an affirmative duty to inquire as to the
motivation for the abortion, absent the healthcare provider
having knowledge or information that the abortion is being
sought based on the sex or gender of the child.
______