Redefining Chutzpah: More Bad Ideas to Burden Women

Written by On The Issues Magazine for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Originally written by Aram A. Schvey for On The Issues Magazine.

What’s chutzpah? Until December 2011, I would have deferred to the classic definition in Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish: chutzpah is a man who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court as a lonely orphan. But at the end of the year, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) introduced a bill to teach the world the real meaning of chutzpah: the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011.”

The bill’s sanctimonious name belies its content: the bill invokes a feminist icon while attacking women’s reproductive rights, and a civil-rights hero while requiring doctors to engage in racial profiling of their clients.

This bill would make it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion which a patient seeks “based on” the sex or race of the fetus or parent. Representative Franks claims his intention is to protect women who belong to communities of color and immigrant communities. In light of Franks’s voting record of consistently opposing legislation to combat sex- and race-based discrimination, that’s a tough sell. But, of course, Franks isn’t really interested in eliminating sex- or race-based discrimination. Rather, he is interested in eliminating abortion — a fact that’s made even more obvious by knowing that Franks has sponsored or supported every major piece of anti-choice legislation this Congress.

Franks is cynically cloaking himself in the garb of feminism and racial equality in an effort to chip away at Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that recognized a constitutional right to abortion.

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