A bill to curtail reproductive rights of Asian women advances in Missouri

A bill presented in legislature of Missouri will curtail the reproductive rights some women including Asians, a report in Rewire.News, a nonprofit daily online publication, reported.

The HB 1867, sponsored by state Rep. Shamed Dogan (R-Ballwin), bans abortion for certain women based on their reason for ending the pregnancy, including for women who end a pregnancy due to sex preference.

This legislation has nothing to do with the health or well-being of women and girls; instead, it’s a smokescreen to hide an extreme anti-choice agenda, the report said. Already, eight states ban abortion for reason of sex selection, and the introduction and passage of these bills have been accompanied by a flood of anti-Asian and anti-immigrant rhetoric intended to shame and blame Asian and pacific Islander women for decisions about pregnancy, it noted

In 2017 alone, politicians in 19 states adopted 63 new restrictions on abortion rights and access, according to the Guttmacher Institute. This trend has continued in 2018, as legislators have passed bills that not only made it harder for a woman to have an abortion, but also to receive pertinent information that she needs to make decisions about her pregnancy and reproductive health.

The report noted that ‘sex-selective abortion bans operate on the racist assumption that Asian immigrants will exhibit the same sex preferences for male children that may have existed in their countries of origin. The impetus behind this legislation is that Asian American women—in particular, immigrant Chinese and Indian women—will prefer sons over daughters and make reproductive care decisions based on the sex of their child.
‘Not only is this an outdated and dangerously xenophobic belief, it is downright false. In fact, analysis from the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum has shown that foreign-born Chinese American, Korean American, and Indian American women are having more daughters than white American women, on average,’ the report said.