What's wrong with sex selection?
From today's Chicago Tribune:
BADHOCHHI KALAN, India -- This is the land of the vanishing girl, where 14 boys and seven girls attend 1st grade, where educational plays warn of a future with no women. A nearby midwife delivers one girl for every five boys.
Villagers do not talk openly about why the number of girls is so low here--how couples use ultrasound tests illegally and then abort female fetuses. But everyone knows the reason....
The village is a typical one in Fatehgarh Sahib district, a focus in India's fight to stop couples from aborting female fetuses, largely a phenomenon of the elite and educated. In the 2001 census, this district in the northwest state of Punjab had the most skewed sex ratio in the country. For every 1,000 boys younger than 6, there were 754 girls. That was a precipitous drop from 1991, when the census showed 874 girls for every 1,000 boys.
In Badhochhi Kalan in 2001, the ratio was even more disparate, 651 girls for every 1,000 boys. A nearby village had only 440 girls for 1,000 boys, the worst in India....
Sex selection abortions are also epidemic in China. They're causing quite a few problems for adult women, such as sex-trafficking, rape, and wife sharing.It's logical to presume sex selection abortions are committed here - yes, Illinois - even if only among sexist immigrants.
The sex-selection phenomenon presents many interesting questions....
11 comments:
It does seem that the questions should be addressing why sex-selection abortions are being utilized.
In India, the typical assumption is the burden of dowry on the parents of girls.
In China, the typical assumption is the caretaker status assumed by male children coupled with China's one-child policy.
The United States typically does not suffer either of these problems. Would that seem to indicate we do not also have an endemic problem with sex-selection abortion?
This line of sex-selection abortion questioning in the framework of the larger abortion debate is about as relevant as discussing the stoning of adulterous women in the framework of the United States death penalty debate.
One can support the US version while not supporting al its applications in the rest of the world.
Sex selective abortion is secondary to Hepatitis B as a cause for the Gender Disparity in India and China. Not that these abortions don't happen of course, and when they do happen, they are tragedies like all abortions are. However, the problem is not as big as it would seem (that is, in the sense that 1 million abortions is not as big a problem as 2 million abortions, which is a pretty faulty way to look at the issue.)
NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU LOGICALLY TWIST THIS, THIS HAS ABSOLUTELY NO CONNECTION TO ILLINOIS.
ABSOLUTELY NONE!
PLEASE STICK TO TALKING ABOUT JUDY V ROD V MEEKS OR THE EC EXECUTIVE ORDER OR SOMETHING WE ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT.
Hey maybe we could do that to lawyers or politicans
why is the market not correcting this situation?
Because it takes too long to notice.
And culture CAN and often DOES trump economics as a motivating factor.
Jill-
I don't believe I am in any position to determine right or wrong in sex selective abortions. I personally find the concept of them sad but I support the choice of aborting a fetus with disabilities that would be a burden. I guess it is not a stretch to extend that out to sex selection in a society where the culture treats daughters as burdensome. I find that to be their choice, pathetic as it may be.
My point along with others that you are really stretching for relevancy here. Illinois, specifically, and the United States more broadly does not likely experience sex-selective abortions. The disagreement with one application of abortion in another society does not imply something inherently wrong with abortion as a whole.
Here is an Illinois angle to this post...
If we follow the logic of the econotarians above, we ought to be using some of Blago's $tem $ell money to find a way to aggressively clone girls.
This promises to be a lucrative export market. It has the added benefit of creating a great excuse for allowing our elected officials to go on an extended Chinese "Trade Missions."
Oh oh oh...see how he did that...with the dollar signs replacing the S in Stem and the C in Cell...your sardonic wit - it slays me...clever clever clever...AND EXTREME!
In the US and Europe, it is actually much more common to abort a fetus because it is male than because it is female. Males are at higher risk for a large assortment of disorders, and some carriers for those disorders choose to abort any male fetuses that they carry.
In the US, sex selected abortions is more likely to give us more women, more feminists, not less.
I would like to select to have sex. Jill, are you single?
Lairdude managed to evade the question twice: Should Illinois outlaw sex selection abortion? Saying it's objectionable is not equivalent to urging that it be prohibited.
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