I don’t think I do — her history of policies in the state just screams racist. But she has suddenly become a concerned egalitarian, signing a law to protect minorities and women. She says. The law is actually designed to increase control of the reproductive rights of women and minorities — it criminalizes abortion if it is done for certain reasons.

Under the new Arizona statute, doctors and other medical professionals would face felony charges if they could be shown to have performed abortions for the purposes of helping parents select their offspring on the basis of gender or race.

First, is this a real problem? Are there very many white women demanding abortions because, to their great surprise, the father might have been black or brown? Are there many Hispanic women clamoring to get that pale-skinned mutant out of their uteruses?

Second, it’s a peculiar approach: abortion is legal. It is invasive and irrelevant to intrude on a woman’s personal decision in these matters, yet they plan to arrest people for their reasoning? Weird.

Third, look who’s being punished: the doctors. So a woman may be referred to a specialist ob-gyn who, with an appropriate evaluation of the patient’s health and emotional stability, carries out a legal medical procedure…and then later the doctor can be arrested if the patient makes a racist or sexist remark about the aborted fetus? That makes no sense.

This isn’t a bill to defend minorities. It’s a bill to make the position of abortion doctors even more precarious and difficult, and to give the state a pretext to lock them up in jail. It’s nothing but intimidation.