“Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution”: Logo from the Second International Eugenics Congress, 1921 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s tough to keep track of how many times nearly everyone in America believes an action to be clearly morally wrong, but Democrats’ strongly held philosophy of limited government forces them to vote on principle against that action being outlawed. No, I’m kidding, that only ever happens with abortion.  As reported by The Hill:

The House on Thursday rejected a Republican bill that would impose fines and prison terms on doctors who perform abortions for the sole purpose of controlling the gender of the child, a practice known as sex-selective abortion.

The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), H.R. 3541, was defeated in a 246-168 vote. While that’s a clear majority of the House, Republicans called up the bill under a suspension of House rules, which limits debate and requires a two-thirds majority vote to pass. In this case, it would have required more support from Democrats.

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee said of the bill:

“This bill is a direct intrusion into the relationship between patient and physician.”

Yes, the bill is an intrusion. In the same way as laws against organ harvesting are intrusive. So are any of the countless healthcare regulations guiding many of the interactions between patient and doctor or heavily influencing that interaction via “draconian” regulations on insurance companies.

Ms. Jackson Lee then states that the Democrats believe sex-selective abortions are inhumane. But in taking this position, the Democrats are a bunch of intellectual grapes caught between a rock and a hard place. As Representative Trent Franks, who put forward the legislation, observes:

“I think that it is hard for the other side to deal with this debate because, on the one hand, they realize that the country and even their own hearts tell them it is wrong to kill a little girl just because she is a little girl,” said Franks, who spoke about his own three-year-old girl in debate. “But once they make that statement, then they have tacitly recognized that what is being done here is the taking of an innocent life.”

As Mr. Miyagi once said to the Karate Kid, “Squish!”

The pro-abortion punditocracy are as confused as the pro-abortion politicians. In lieu of taking on the cognitive dissonance of the position, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post laments that Rep. Franks is driving the Asian immigrant voter bloc away from Republicans:

Republicans long ago lost African American voters. They are well on their way to losing Latinos. And if Trent Franks prevails, they may lose Asian Americans, too.

Another instance of Democrats’ disingenuous concern for the Right’s electoral prospects. I’m sure Milbank will be heartbroken if he turns out to be correct. He continues:

The Arizona Republican’s latest antiabortion salvo to be taken up by the House had a benign name — the Prenatal Non­discrimination Act — and a premise with which just about everybody agrees: that a woman shouldn’t abort a fetus simply because she wants to have a boy rather than a girl. 

The problem with Franks’s proposal is that it’s not entirely clear there is a problem. Sex-selection abortion is a huge tragedy in parts of Asia, but to the extent it’s happening in this country, it’s mostly among Asian immigrants. 

Never has liberals’ extreme racialism been so perfectly articulated. We all agree something is a moral horror, but because one racial group is committing that moral horror at a higher frequency, it would be impolitic to outlaw it.

Democrats found Franks’s ­paternalism toward minority groups to be suspect.

That’s an interesting way of pointing out that Democrats are miffed at what they perceive as Republicans trying to infringe on their monopoly of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Republicans ought to stay on their own turf and back off the street corners that Democrat race pimps have been milking for decades. Perhaps worried about losing this territory, or sensing the pending death of modern liberalism, Democrats are falling back on early 20th century Progressivism. With this recent defense of eugenics, Margaret Sanger would be proud.