I read a disturbing set of essays in the March 6th-12th 2010 issue of The Economist titled Gendercide: What happened to 100 million baby girls and it got me thinking. The articles were about the heartbreaking and soul rending trend in certain cultures to abort the fetuses of girls or to resort to infanticide in preference for sons, and the cultural consequences. I'm not offering criticism on the essays. These are just some of the things I thought about after reading them.
One interesting fact is that the highest ratio of boys to girls is among those groups best able to use and pay for modern technology such as ultrasound. This group of educated and well-off partners also tends to have fewer children, and therefore they are less likely to off-set a one time sex selection abortion with subsequent births.
Here is birth control at its purest. The groups most likely to abort a girl are also the groups best able to raise one, and subsequent children. We can't rationalize away their moral choice due to unbelievable poverty and societal pressures. They are making a true choice. Is it morally wrong? Many feminists and their supporters who otherwise defend abortion think so. Laws, to little effect, are passed to prevent such selections. But how can one decide one type of abortion is morally wrong while maintaining other abortions are morally right? On what do they place their moral meter stick?
Pro-choice advocates use arguments that make it difficult to logically argue against abortions for sex-selection. One of the tenets of legal abortion is that it is the mother's choice because it is her body. She wants a boy. How is that any different from she wants a career? How can we tell a woman which sex to carry for ten months if we don't have the right to make her carry a pregnancy to the end. And if privacy works as a pro-abortion argument, a woman doesn't have much of a right to privacy if we can legally stop her from aborting a girl.
The deleterious long term effects culturally of aborting girl fetuses are rather obvious and are one of the best arguments for outlawing sex-selection. But to the individuals involved, having a son could be personally the best of choices. Pro-lifers also make cultural arguments against abortion, arguing they degrade our society in numerous ways. What takes precedence, the individual or society? Argue society and you may have to rethink abortion if the facts demand it. Argue individual, then legal abortion can't be circumscribed.
Make sure you go into the doctor's office mouthing the right slogans. I find it revealing to read the arguments of pro-choice people explaining why women shouldn't be allowed to decide the sex of their children yet should be allowed to choose whether or not to bear children. Something doesn't add up.
Comments