Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) joined several of his Republican colleagues today in touting proposed legislation that would ban physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’s race or sex. Like most of the bill’s white male sponsors, Pence has suddenly developed a sense of outrage at discrimination against minorities — but only if those minorities are fetuses.

During the Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the bill, Pence claimed, “I say with a heavy heart that abortion is now the leading cause of death in the black community,” and equated abortion with slavery and the legislation with the struggle for civil rights and women’s equality:

Watch it:

The loftily-named Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) purports to somehow protect the “civil rights” of fetuses. In reality, it’s an opportunity for Republicans to denigrate the “family values” and character of communities of color that typically have higher abortion rates because of inadequate health insurance and poor sex education, among other reasons.

Pretending that terminated pregnancies cause more death and suffering than illness or violence is to be willfully ignorant of those ravages on the black community. The actual leading causes of death among African Americans include heart disease, cancer, stroke, homicide, and HIV/AIDS. According to the CDC, there are striking health disparities between blacks and other racial groups because of discrimination and lack of access to health care.

Because of inadequate health care, the AIDS rate among African Americans rivals that of some African countries. Homicide — often related to gang violence — is the leading cause of black males ages 12 to 19 years old.

If Republicans really wanted to do something to curb unnecessary deaths in the black community, they should improve access to health care, take on inner-city gang violence and provide more mentoring and education opportunities for young blacks — initiatives they have shown no interest in and have sought to defund.

As ThinkProgress has been reporting for some time, the corporate front group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been colluding with the billionaire Koch brothers to privatize government and eliminate environmental regulations that interfere with profits.

GOP legislators in many states have given ALEC free reign to write anti-health care reform and anti-environment legislation. Now, ALEC is fighting to kill Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules limiting the sale of rat poisons that pose a serious health threat to children and the ecosystem.

A top representative for the ultra-conservative group said kids eating rat poison is an “acceptable risk” that does not justify government intervention:

“There are certain levels of acceptable risk in society,” says Todd M. Wynn, director of the ALEC Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force, in an interview about the EPA rules with the Heartland Institute’s Heartlander website. “And parents play an important role by weighing the potential risks and benefits of using a product.”

“Unfortunately, EPA expands its reach into the American economy more and more each and every year,” Wynn said. “This year it will be d-Con, but next year another useful product will be burdened by additional regulations or banned outright from the market.” [...]

Aaron Colangelo, an attorney for the NRDC…told the Center for Media and Democracy that “there is not an undue economic burden associated with reformulating these products,” pointing out that the rest of the industry had complied with the new rules without adverse economic impact. Additionally, he said, “the health care costs for treating these kids certainly outweigh the economic costs of reformulation.”

Wynn’s startling admission illustrates the extent to which ALEC is willing to sacrifice the health of Americans to advance their radical agenda. For decades, at least 12,000-15,000 children a year have become ill after accidentally touching or ingesting rat poison that’s spread in pellet form. Poisoned children experience internal bleeding, bloody urine, bleeding gums, and blood coming from their ears. Poor and minority children are disproportionately affected.

Exposure often occurs in settings outside parents’ control, and giving companies the option of voluntary adopting changes has done nothing to help. After thirteen years of studies, hearings, reports and legal battles, “the EPA announced in 2008 rodenticide manufacturers would have three years to adopt limits on the sale of the products.”

For years, ALEC has successfully killed these kind of regulations on environmental toxins and pollutants on behalf of corporations. At their annual conference in New Orleans this year, ALEC distributed a pamphlet titled “The Many Benefits Of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment,” complete with pictures depicting happy wildlife and a healthy environment. Companies like Koch Industries, BP, WalMart, and others join forces to fund this little-known organization that works behind the scenes to fight the dirty battles that no corporation would want to be publicly associated with.

Former Fox News host Glenn Beck invited Republican presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich on his radio program this morning and then bludgeoned the former Speaker of the House with this quote from 2011, in which Gingrich proclaimed his support for a federal requirement for people to purchase health insurance coverage — a mandate that is similar to the one included in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act:

GLENN: All right. Well, and I think this is where we fundamentally differ is it seems to me ‑‑ and let me just play the audio here ‑‑ that you are for the individual mandate for healthcare and you have been for quite some time. Let’s play the audio.

GINGRICH: I am for people, individuals, exactly like automobile insurance, individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance, and I am prepared to vote for a voucher system which will give individuals on a sliding scale a government subsidy so it will ensure that everyone as individuals have health insurance.

GLENN: Okay. That’s 1993. Here is May 2011.

GINGRICH: All of a sudden responsibility to help pay for healthcare. And I think that there are ways to do it that make most libertarians relatively happy. I’ve said consistently we ought to have some requirement to either have health insurance or you post a bond or in some way you indicate you are going to be held accountable.

VOICE: That is the individual mandate, is it not?

GINGRICH: It’s a variation on it.

Fellow GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and the conservative Heritage Foundation have also advocated the idea that individuals who did not purchase coverage should be required to spend some pre-determined amount — $10,000 in Romney’s case — in the form of a bond that could be used to pay for hospital care down the road. Before Obama embraced the mandate, conservatives argued that this policy would ensure that funds are directed back into health care rather to government revenue. But charging a flat fee regardless of income means different things to different economic demographics and would significantly disadvantaged middle class families — who would have to set aside a huge amount of money for a rainy day. The mandate penalty in the Affordable Care Act takes some of these affordability concerns into account and requires those without coverage to pay a tax penalty of the greater of $695 per year or 2.5 percent of household income.

But these policy specifics aside, Gingrich has previously advocated for many of the provisions that are now part of Obama’s health care law and even praised the president for increasing Medicaid funding and investing in health information technology.

The United Health Foundation has released its 2011 America’s Heath Rankings report, which finds that overall, the country’s health did not improve between 2010 and 2011. Here are the top lines: annual improvement in health has declined by 69 percent over the last decade, 27.5 percent of Americans are obese, 17.3 percent smoke, and 8.7 percent have diabetes.

The bad news for 2011:

– 2.2 percent increase in obesity.
– 4.8 percent increase in diabetes.
– 3.9 percent increase in child poverty.

The good news for 2011:

– 3.4 percent decline in smoking.
– 3.4 percent decline in preventable hospitalizations.
– 2.8 percent decline in cardiovascular deaths.

Vermont is still the healthiest state, with New York and New Jersey showing the most improvement, particularly in smoking cessation. “Idaho and Alaska showed the most downward movement. Idaho dropped 10 spots, from number nine to 19,” the report finds:

Of all the GOP presidential candidates, Rick Santorum is arguably responsible for the most outrageous claims about health care policy. The former Pennsylvania senator has told people who can’t afford health care to stop whining about the high costs of medical treatments and medications and spend less on non essentials like cable and cell phone bills and even suggested that insurers should deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

Yesterday, during a campaign event in Dordt College, in Sioux Center, Iowa, Santorum seemed taken a back when a student asked him “about health care and the Christian responsibility of caring for the poor” and took exception to the suggestion that the uninsured die at a higher rate than the insured population. ABC News’ Shushannah Walshe has this report:

The student said he didn’t “think God appreciates the fact that we have 50 to 100,000 uninsured Americans dying due to a lack of healthcare every year,” citing a 2009 study out of Harvard University.

“Dying?” Santorum answered before going back and forth about the validity of the study.

“The answer is not what can we do to prevent deaths because of a lack of health insurance. There’s — I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance,” Santorum said to a crowd of 100.

“People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to,” he said. “And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit.”

While the number of people dying due to lack of health insurance may be in some dispute — one recent 2009 study found that 45,000 die in the United States each year because they don’t have access to care, a 2002 study put the number at 18,000 a year, and a 1993 analysis concluded that the uninsured had a 25 percent greater risk of death — it’s hard to deny that forgoing needed treatments or putting off expensive could lead to death. Unfortunately, rather than addressing that problem and expanding coverage, Santorum would rather blame the individuals for their own demise.