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If you favor abortions, then you favor sex-selection abortions

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Unborn baby scheming about banning sex-selection abortions
Unborn baby scheming about banning sex-selection abortions

This article from the Wall Street Journal discusses the unintended consequencs of sex-selection abortions. (H/T Joy McCann)

Excerpt:

Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In “Unnatural Selection,” Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl’s counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world. Moral horror aside, this is likely to be of very large consequence.

In the mid-1970s, amniocentesis, which reveals the sex of a baby in utero, became available in developing countries. Originally meant to test for fetal abnormalities, by the 1980s it was known as the “sex test” in India and other places where parents put a premium on sons. When amnio was replaced by the cheaper and less invasive ultrasound, it meant that most couples who wanted a baby boy could know ahead of time if they were going to have one and, if they were not, do something about it. “Better 500 rupees now than 5,000 later,” reads one ad put out by an Indian clinic, a reference to the price of a sex test versus the cost of a dowry.

[…]Ms. Hvistendahl argues that such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. “Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live,” she writes. “Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent.”

[…]There is indeed compelling evidence of a link between sex ratios and violence. High sex ratios mean that a society is going to have “surplus men”—that is, men with no hope of marrying because there are not enough women. Such men accumulate in the lower classes, where risks of violence are already elevated. And unmarried men with limited incomes tend to make trouble. In Chinese provinces where the sex ratio has spiked, a crime wave has followed. Today in India, the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area is not income but sex ratio.

I think that it is a good idea, when talking to someone who is female and pro-abortion, to them about sex-selection abortions. It seems to me that it is impossible for someone who is pro-abortion to make a principled argument against aborting unborn children just because they are women. If abortion is morally permissible, then sex-selection abortions are morally permissible. After all, it’s the born woman’s body – it’s her choice. Right? Well, maybe not right. Maybe we need to think about this some more.

Note that the Republicans have been trying to ban sex-selection abortions in some states – but the Democrats are opposing them. Democrats favor sex-selection abortions – and in very liberal countries, they are openly permitted.

Learn about the pro-life case

Commentary

MUST-READ: Melanie Phillips blames single mothers for family breakdown

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Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips takes UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron to task in the UK Daily Mail. Sent to me by Dina! I love this article!

Excerpt:

Singling out ‘runaway dads’ for censure, [David Cameron] said that such individuals should be treated like drunk drivers — people who are beyond the pale and upon whom should be heaped ‘the full force of shame’.

Now, excoriating ‘runaway’ or ‘deadbeat’ dads is a familiar refrain. We all know the scenario: feckless youths getting one girl pregnant after another and abandoning each one in turn, playing next to no part in the upbringing of the children they have serially fathered.

This is, indeed, reckless and reprehensible behaviour. But it is only part of a much more complex and deeply rooted problem.

Most pertinently, it totally ignores the fact that there is another feckless actor in this dysfunctional family drama — the mother, who may be having children by a series of different men.

In line with politically correct thinking, Mr Cameron presents such girls or women as the hapless victims of predatory males. But that is just plain wrong. For at the most fundamental level, this whole process is driven by women and girls.

In those far-off days before the sexual revolution, relations between the sexes were based on a kind of unspoken bargain.

Women needed the father of their children to stick around while they grew up, in return for which a woman gave a solemn undertaking to be faithful to this one man.

For his part, the father’s interests were served by being offered not just a permanent sexual relationship but a guarantee from the trust placed in his wife that the children were, indeed, his.

With the combination of the sexual revolution, the Pill and the welfare state, however, women’s interests changed. Suddenly they were being told sex outside marriage was fine, unmarried motherhood was fine — and crucially, that the welfare state would provide them with the means to live without male support.

Among upper-middle-class trendies, marriage became an irksome anachronism and ‘living together’ became fashionable.

At the bottom of the social scale, however, these permissive signals from above combined disastrously with widespread unemployment among young men, whose lack of income made them an unattractive marriage prospect.

As a result, girls decided that, while they wanted a baby, the available fathers were usually a waste of space and so they didn’t want them to remain a part of their lives.

These young men then treated the message that they weren’t wanted as a licence for irresponsibility. And so the ‘runaway dad’ was born.

To single out these boys for censure — while calling lone mothers ‘heroic’, as Mr Cameron did — is not only unfair and perverse, but will fail to get to grips with the problem.

If it is to be remedied, women and girls have to come to a different conclusion about where their interests lie.

That means the welfare state has to stop playing the role of surrogate husband through the benefits it gives single mothers.

READ THE WHOLE THING. As with Canada’s Barbara Kay, I am not in full agreement with Melanie on every topic. But she is awesome on this topic!

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Commentary

What is the meaning and purpose of Father’s Day?

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Father’s Day is the day that children and wives are supposed to honor fathers by giving them respect for being providers, protectors and moral/spiritual leaders. One of the best ways to motivate this duty is by studying research to find out the difference that fathers make.

Some statistics on the importance of biological fathers from Fathers.com.

Excerpt:

Some fathering advocates would say that almost every social ill faced by America’s children is related to fatherlessness. Six are noted here. As supported by the data below, children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems. Boys are more likely to become involved in crime, and girls are more likely to become pregnant as teens.

For a summary, I’ll just list one fact from each of the six categories they listed.

1. Poverty

Fact:

– Children in father-absent homes are five times more likely to be poor. In 2002, 7.8% of children in married-couple families were living in poverty, compared to 38.4% of children in female-householder families.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Children’s Living Arrangements and Characteristics: March 2002, P20-547, Table C8. Washington, D.C.: GPO 2003.

2. Drug and Alcohol Abuse

Fact:

– The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states, “Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.”

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics. Survey on Child Health. Washington, DC, 1993.

3. Physical and Emotional Health

Fact:

– Unmarried mothers are less likely to obtain prenatal care and more likely to have a low birthweight baby. Researchers find that these negative effects persist even when they take into account factors, such as parental education, that often distinguish single-parent from two-parent families.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Public Health Service. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. National Center for Health Statistics. Report to Congress on Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing. Hyattsville, MD (Sept. 1995): 12.

– Children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems.Source: Stanton, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics.”National Health Interview Survey.” Hyattsville, MD, 1988.

4. Educational Achievement

Fact:

– After taking into account race, socioeconomic status, sex, age, and ability, high school students from single-parent households were 1.7 times more likely to drop out than were their corresponding counterparts living with both biological parents.Source: McNeal, Ralph B. Jr.”Extracurricular Activities and High School Dropouts.” Sociology of Education 68(1995): 62-81.

5. Crime

Fact:

– Children in single parent families are more likely to be in trouble with the law than their peers who grow up with two parents.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics. National Health Interview Survey. Hyattsville, MD, 1988.

6. Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy

Fact:

– A white teenage girl from an advantaged background is five times more likely to become a teen mother if she grows up in a single-mother household than if she grows up in a household with both biological parents.Source: Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe. “Facing the Challenges of Fragmented Families.” The Philanthropy Roundtable 9.1 (1995): 21.

Now take a look at this Wall Street Journal article that explains some of the ways that fathers have beneficial effects on children.

Excerpt:

As an estimated 70.1 million fathers prepare to celebrate Father’s Day in the U.S., recent research shows that their distinct style of parenting is particularly worth recognition: The way dads tend to interact has long-term benefits for kids, independent of those linked to good mothering.

[…]The benefits of involved fathering are known: improved cognitive skills, fewer behavioral problems among school-age children, less delinquency among teenage boys and fewer psychological problems in young women, based on an analysis of 16 long-term studies of father involvement, published in 2008 in the scholarly journal Acta Paediatrica.

Some of dads’ behavior may spring from their roles as family breadwinners. Although mothers play a significant role in the workforce, men are still the primary breadwinners in more than three-fourths of married-couple households.

And 48% of working fathers spend less than six hours a day with their children, compared with 31% of working mothers, according to a recent poll of 459 working adults by Workplace Options, a provider of employee-assistance and work-life programs in Raleigh, N.C.

As a result, fathers may be less familiar with their children’s nonverbal cues. Such dads tend to challenge children more to express themselves in words, helping foster the better cognitive skills researchers have found in 2-year-olds with involved fathers.

Parenting patterns may be rooted in neurological differences. Under stress, research shows, men’s brains are wired to respond to challenges physically, leaping into action. Women are more likely to withdraw or shut down.

Because fathers have had to learn to manage their own impulses to strike out or react physically to frustration, they may be better equipped than mothers to help children manage their own urges to behave badly, Dr. Pruett says.

Indeed, fathers typically aren’t as upset as mothers by kids’ tantrums or bad behavior, based on a 2009 survey of 1,615 parents by Zero to Three, a nonprofit child-development research and policy organization. Only half as many fathers as mothers say their children’s temper tantrums are one of their biggest challenges.

Fathers matter, so women need to choose men who will be good fathers. And that means having an idea of what fathers do, and knowing how to evaluate a man to see if he can do what fathers do. There’s more to fathers than handsomeness and fun!

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