When a bill outlawing sex-selection abortion was brought up in the House last week, ABC's Jake Tapper asked White House spokesman Jay Carney if the President had a position on the issue. Carney didn't have an immediate answer but later a deputy press secretary sent Tapper a statement which read:

The Administration opposes gender discrimination in all forms, but the end result of this legislation would be to subject doctors to criminal prosecution if they fail to determine the motivations behind a very personal and private decision. The government should not intrude in medical decisions or private family matters in this way.

It was no surprise that Obama was against the bill, but the phrasing of the statement was striking. There is a vague reference to opposing "gender discrimination," but missing entirely is a forthright condemnation of the practice of sex-selection abortion. Indeed, the statement concludes by saying the government should not intrude in "private family matters" which could be read as inclusive of the decision to abort based on gender.

The White House statement is even more striking when compared to the one Planned Parenthood issued to the Washington Post yesterday. The entire point of this letter from the "director of global advocacy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America" is to rebut the claim that PP supports sex-selection abortions:

In his op-ed regarding the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act [“The real war on women,” June 1], Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) claimed that Planned Parenthood is “okay with exterminating a child . . . simply because she’s a girl” and referred to a coordinated hoax patient campaign that used highly unusual patient scenarios in an effort to discredit Planned Parenthood’s services, mission and values.

Putting aside the fact that the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act would have imposed harmful restrictions on women’s health care and would have interfered with the doctor-patient relationship, Mr. Smith asserted that Planned Parenthood supports sex-selection abortions. This is simply untrue. Planned Parenthood opposes sex-selection abortion.

The willingness of the largest abortion provider in the U.S. to publicly oppose any abortion practice, even in this ultimately toothless way, is noteworthy. It tells us something about how extreme this practice really is that Planned Parenthood is concerned about being associated with it.

So why didn't the White House come out and say what even the most progressives abortion rights activists said last week, i.e. that it opposes sex-selection abortion on principle (even if only in theory)? Based on the tepid statement  the White House issued last week, it appears the President is staking out a position to the left of Planned Parenthood on the issue of sex-selection abortion. If that's not the definition of abortion extremism, it should be.