NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri Responds to Special Committee on Immigration Reform
PRESS STATEMENT OF NARAL PRO-CHOICE MISSOURI IN RESPONSE TO REPORT OF THE MISSOURI HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES’ SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON IMMIGRATION REFORM (Rep. Ed Emery, Chair)
On November 13, 2006, the House Special Committee on Immigration Reform released an incendiary, conclusory, and ignorant legislative report so embarrassing to the citizens of Missouri, and reflecting such discredit on the committee, that six committee members refused to sign off on it. In April 2000, the Special Committee was charged with “making recommendations for Missouri’s future immigration policy by taking into consideration reforms that would promote the state’s economy, ensure opportunities for legal residents, and offer a course of action in dealing with illegal immigration into Missouri.”
NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri is disturbed and dismayed that the Special Committee on Immigration Reform exceeded its charge and arrogated unto itself and its chairman a mandate to issue gratuitous, inaccurate, and odious opinions about a variety of subjects having no relationship to illegal aliens. The entire document is a tissue of illogic knitted together only by the thread of reactionary prejudice. We leave it to other groups to address whether it is appropriate for a legislative body in our pluralistic society to engage in the wholesale defamation of all Muslim cultures, to display the shrill religious intolerance incumbent in the report’s “Christian nation” rhetoric, to disparage poor people as invariably lazy, and to proudly wave the banner of general xenophobia buttressed by amateurish eugenics theories reminiscent of early 1900s anthropology texts. We wish to respond to the Special Committee’s comments pertaining to abortion’s alleged connection to federal and state immigration policy.
The Committee Report purports to find that “social policies” related to welfare and legal abortion have created a deficit of American citizens to work in the low-wage “labor intensive” jobs that persons in our country illegally wind up doing. According to the report, 80,000 potential Missourians have been aborted since 1973, and “[m]any of those aborted would be in their 20s and 30s today, a highly productive age group for workers.” We question the actuarial certitude of the Special Committee, but more than that, must express our entire contempt for the implicit assumption that women’s reproductive capacity is to be tethered to the creation of “employable workers in labor-intensive trades such as agricultural, food and hospitality services, and certain areas of construction.” This sort of thinking is the province of dystopian fiction, not the province of a legislative body that theoretically represents women.
The Special Committee lamented the lack of a “work ethic” and “welfare dependency” and concluded that “30 years of abortion and the expanding liberal social welfare policies have produced a shortage of workers. . .” Apparently, the Special Committee has concluded that poor people on public assistance who were not aborted (possibly because there is no federal or state funding for poor women’s abortions) are too lazy to work. Presumably, the aborted fetuses would all have been industrious engines of commerce. The Special Committee and its pro-life contingent need reminding that women’s function is not to create drones for the state and that all children have a right to be wanted by their parents.
We call on Speaker Jetton and Chairman Ed Emery to retract the committee report that has made the “Show Me State” the “What’s That? State” to the rest of the thinking world, and to apologize to the women of Missouri for demeaning them as brood mares for the state.
For further information contact: Pamela Sumners, Executive Director, 314-531-8616
To read the entire text of the report please click here.
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