Having milked “partial-birth abortion” dry, the Fetus People* are now whipping up scare stories about a tidal wage of gender-selection abortions being promoted and abetted by their arch-nemesis, Planned Parenthood. And they’ve tied this into a pushback against the “war on women” charge, claiming the real war on women are all those girl babies that are being aborted just for being girls.

Dana Milbank writes that legislation being pushed by Rep. Trent Franks, R-Arizona, to prohibit gender-selection abortion could alienate Asian Americans. That’s because as near as anyone can tell, the only gender selection going on in the U.S. is in ethnic Asian communities.

Whether Franks’s law would lose any Asian American votes I cannot say. People are guesstimating that gender selection must be going on in ethnic Asian communities because the ratio of boys versus girls being born among ethnic Asians skews more in favor of boys than nature normally allows. In the population as a whole, however, there is no data suggesting the male-female birth ratio is going out of whack.

There is no question that in some parts of the world, in particular India and China, healthy girl fetuses are often aborted just because they are girls, and I think that’s terribly sad. However, there is no statistical evidence that the practice is growing in the U.S.

That hasn’t stopped Live Action from ginning up hysteria about the “gendercide” being promoted by Planned Parenthood. They’ve got the obligatory, and heavily edited, sting video showing some newbie PP employee mishandling a gender-selection abortion question, which seems to be their entire “proof” that Planned Parenthood is promoting such abortions nationwide. The employee has since been fired. No word on how many “stings” Live Action attempted before they found someone who took the bait.

Amanda Peterson Beadle writes,

After Republicans opposed expanding contraception access and would not back the Violence Against Women Act until it had been watered down, Democrats accused the party of waging a war on women

But ahead of tomorrow’s vote on the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), a bill that would ban physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’ sex, anti-choice organizations have clumsily attempted to co-opt the “war on women” meme.

This is followed by some quotes. Here are a couple:

– “This is a real war on women. And it is wrong when we turn a blind eye to women being eliminated in the womb simply for being a member of the female sex.” [Americans United for Life letter]

– “Members who recently have embraced contrived political rhetoric asserting they are resisting a ‘war on women’ must reflect on whether they wish to be recorded as being defenders of the escalating war on baby girls.” [National Right to Life Committee letter]

I wrote about gender-selection abortion awhile back:

I take it that several years ago, strategists among pro-criminalizaton activists came up with Asia’s gender selection issue as a way to make western liberals uncomfortable with abortion, or to force us into a debate over whether the right to choose includes gender selection — since girls, presumably, will be the gender targeted for termination. And then, of course, if women don’t have a right to gender-select, then the right to abortion is not absolute and can be picked apart.

However,I also noted that in the U.S., girl babies actually are preferred over boy babies.

Girl babies actually are highly prized in America. Studies from all over the place show that American couples seeking to adopt a baby prefer girls over boys.

Further, when couples attempt to manipulate conception to tilt the odds in favor of one gender over another, they are more likely to try for a girl rather than a boy.

This being so, why would anyone assume that gender selection abortions would always target girls? Hmmm? But maybe we shouldn’t tell them that. The gender selection that appears to be going on among ethnic Asian Americans is a vestige of Asian culture, obviously, and not likely to spill over to non-ethnic Asians anytime soon, if ever.