Abortion staff agree to gender based abortion

Published June 6, 2012 4:00am EST | Updated November 3, 2023 12:50am EST



Staffers at two National Abortion Federation clinics in Arizona agreed to help a woman get a sex-selective abortion, which is a felony in the state, according to video taken by pro-life activists at Live Action.

“Don’t tell us that, because we don’t want to know,” the worker at a NAF clinic in Phoenix told a woman who said she wanted to get an abortion because she didn’t want to carry a girl to full term. The NAF aide explained that “state law says we cannot do a termination on somebody just because of race or gender.” The woman told the NAF aide that she wanted to try to have a boy.

The NAF aide then told the woman she could feel comfortable telling the abortion doctor that she wanted to get an abortion due to the gender. “You can tell her, she’s gonna tell you the same thing, just: Don’t let it be known! She’s really good about that,” the Phoenix staffer said, adding that she had dealt with other cases of women who wanted an abortion due to gender-selection.

President Obama opposed a federal ban on gender-based abortions that thwarted in the House last week. “This piece of legislation would have the hopefully unintended consequence of criminalizing a failure by a doctor,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters, “if he or she were somehow to fail to intuit the motivations of a patient.”

An aide at another NAF clinic in Tucson initially resisted when told the woman wanted a gender-based abortion. “We cannot terminate an aborton based on sex. We could lose our license,” he said, citing the Arizona law. “Arizona is just crazy about abortions.”

He agreed to the abortion moments later. “I’ll just forget about it,” he said when the woman promised not to mention it to the abortion doctor.