Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Members of the House, I want to thank the leadership on the other side for requiring that the chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, the gentleman from Arizona, drop ``race'' from this Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, so-called. So it's now just sex selection.

This is the latest in a long series of measures intended to chip away at a woman's right to seek safe and legal medical care. It tramples the rights of women under the guise of nondiscrimination while doing absolutely nothing to provide women with the needed resources so that their babies--female and male--can come into the world healthy, and so that both mother and child can thrive.

I am grateful that the proponents of this bill have stopped making the ridiculous charge that I used to hear, that reproductive freedom is worse than slavery, and invoking at the same time the name of the great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass in the service of their cause. It was deeply offensive, and I'm glad that we won't have to listen to that anymore.

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Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would just like to remind my colleagues that from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, we have this warning:

We oppose this bill because it does not in any way adjust discrimination on the basis of sex or race. Rather, it is a veiled attempt to restrict health care for women of color under the guise of civil rights.

This is the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

This bill tramples the rights of women under the guise of nondiscrimination while doing absolutely nothing to provide women with needed resources for their babies, female and male, so they can come into this world healthy and so both the mother and the child can thrive.

This measure before us does absolutely nothing to empower women to make important life choices free from any family or community pressures they now face either to have an abortion, or to carry the pregnancy to term. In fact, it fails to employ the tested solutions that will reduce the pressures brought to bear on women to have sons. Experience around the world has shown that supporting women, providing them with tools to become independent and to be safe from violence, rather than criminal prohibitions, helps them resist the pressures of son preference. International organizations such as the United Nations Population Fund, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations Children's Fund, United Nations Women, and the World Health Organization have all said that abortion restrictions are not the solution because they put women's health and lives at risk and violate their human and reproductive rights.

Please, join us and these organizations who are familiar with the phenomenon of son preference and oppose H.R. 3541.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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