Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa-
tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, 
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. 
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Prenatal Non-
discrimination Act (PRENDA) of 2012’’. 
SEC. 2. FINDINGS AND CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY. 
(a) FINDINGS.—The Congress makes the following 
findings: 
(1) SEX DISCRIMINATION FINDINGS.— 
(A) Women are a vital part of American so-
ciety and culture and possess the same funda-
mental human rights and civil rights as men. 
(B) United States law prohibits the dis-
similar treatment of males and females who are 
similarly situated and prohibits sex discrimina-
tion in various contexts, including the provision 
of employment, education, housing, health insur-
ance coverage, and athletics. 
(C) Sex is an immutable characteristic as-
certainable at the earliest stages of human devel-
opment through existing medical technology and 
procedures commonly in use, including mater-
nal-fetal 
bloodstream 
DNA 
sampling, 
amniocentesis, chorionic villus sampling or 
‘‘CVS’’, and obstetric ultrasound. In addition to 
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medically assisted sex-determination, a growing 
sex-determination niche industry has developed 
and is marketing low-cost commercial products, 
widely advertised and available, that aid in the 
sex determination of an unborn child without the 
aid of medical professionals. Experts have dem-
onstrated that the sex-selection industry is on the 
rise and predict that it will continue to be a 
growing trend in the United States. Sex deter-
mination is always a necessary step to the pro-
curement of a sex-selection abortion. 
(D) A ‘‘sex-selection abortion’’ is an abor-
tion undertaken for purposes of eliminating an 
unborn child of an undesired sex. Sex-selection 
abortion is barbaric, and described by scholars 
and civil rights advocates as an act of sex-based 
or gender-based violence, predicated on sex dis-
crimination. Sex-selection abortions are typi-
cally late-term abortions performed in the 2nd or 
3rd trimester of pregnancy, after the unborn 
child has developed sufficiently to feel pain. Sub-
stantial medical evidence proves that an unborn 
child can experience pain at 20 weeks after con-
ception, and perhaps substantially earlier. By 
definition, sex-selection abortions do not impli-
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cate the health of the mother of the unborn, but 
instead are elective procedures motivated by sex 
or gender bias. 
(E) The targeted victims of sex-selection 
abortions performed in the United States and 
worldwide are overwhelmingly female. The selec-
tive abortion of females is female infanticide, the 
intentional killing of unborn females, due to the 
preference for male offspring or ‘‘son preference’’. 
Son preference is reinforced by the low value as-
sociated, by some segments of the world commu-
nity, with female offspring. Those segments tend 
to regard female offspring as financial burdens 
to a family over their lifetime due to their per-
ceived inability to earn or provide financially 
for the family unit as can a male. In addition, 
due to social and legal convention, female off-
spring are less likely to carry on the family 
name. ‘‘Son preference’’ is one of the most evi-
dent manifestations of sex or gender discrimina-
tion in any society, undermining female equal-
ity, and fueling the elimination of females’ right 
to exist in instances of sex-selection abortion. 
(F) Sex-selection abortions are not expressly 
prohibited by United States law or the laws of 
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47 States. Sex-selection abortions are performed 
in the United States. In a March 2008 report 
published in the Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences, Columbia University 
economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund 
examined the sex ratio of United States-born 
children and found ‘‘evidence of sex selection, 
most likely at the prenatal stage’’. The data re-
vealed obvious ‘‘son preference’’ in the form of 
unnatural sex-ratio imbalances within certain 
segments of the United States population, pri-
marily those segments tracing their ethnic or 
cultural origins to countries where sex-selection 
abortion is prevalent. The evidence strongly sug-
gests that some Americans are exercising sex-se-
lection abortion practices within the United 
States consistent with discriminatory practices 
common to their country of origin, or the coun-
try to which they trace their ancestry. While sex- 
selection abortions are more common outside the 
United States, the evidence reveals that female 
feticide is also occurring in the United States. 
(G) The American public supports a prohi-
bition of sex-selection abortion. In a March 2006 
Zogby International poll, 86 percent of Ameri-
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cans agreed that sex-selection abortion should be 
illegal, yet only 3 States proscribe sex-selection 
abortion. 
(H) Despite the failure of the United States 
to proscribe sex-selection abortion, the United 
States Congress has expressed repeatedly, through 
Congressional resolution, strong condemnation of 
policies promoting sex-selection abortion in the 
‘‘Communist Government of China’’. Likewise, at 
the 2007 United Nation’s Annual Meeting of the 
Commission on the Status of Women, 51st Ses-
sion, the United States delegation spearheaded a 
resolution calling on countries to condemn sex-se-
lective abortion, a policy directly contradictory 
to the permissiveness of current United States 
law, which places no restriction on the practice 
of sex-selection abortion. The United Nations 
Commission on the Status of Women has urged 
governments of all nations ‘‘to take necessary 
measures to prevent . . . prenatal sex selection’’. 
(I) A 1990 report by Harvard University 
economist Amartya Sen, estimated that more 
than 100 million women were ‘‘demographically 
missing’’ from the world as early as 1990 due to 
sexist practices, including sex-selection abortion. 
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