Tag Archives: Sex-Selection

News

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

News

Republicans respond to pro-lifers desire to cut UN abortion funding

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From Life News.

Excerpt:

Earlier this month, LifeNews.com reported on a public vote House Republicans were taking, seeing input from American voters on which one of three ideas for saving taxpayer dollars was the most attractive and should become the next bill pushed in Congress. With thousands of pro-life advocates encouraged to vote, legislation cutting UNFPA funding won out and will now become the next piece of legislation Republicans will advance.

The vote at the popular YouCut web site makes it so the public will be able to track the progressof the legislation as it moves through the legislative process.

Rep. Renee Ellmers, of North Carolina, will be introducing legislation soon.

“This is going to save American taxpayers $400 million dollars over a 10 year period and it’s just another part of what we’re doing here in Washington to cut wasteful spending that we see happening,” she said in a new video introducing the bill. “And I am very excited to be part of this program and each week we will have more cuts coming forward.”

The legislation would result in cutting the funding President Barack Obama put in place for the UNFPA, an agency that promotes abortion and works hand-in-hand with family planning officials in China enforcing the one-child, forced-abortion policy.

[…]Steve Mosher, the head of the Population Research Institute and the leading campaigner exposing China and the one-child policy, says the UNFPA is the UN population control agency that is complicit in China’s brutal one-child policy, which is carried out through a program of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization. He hopes the YouCut program receives enough votes to move the pro-life bill forward.

“With just a click of your mouse, you can cut funding to the United Nations Population Fund,’ he said in an email to LifeNews. “Defunding UNFPA could be considered by the House soon, but only if this option gets the most votes on the YouCut website. That’s where you come in. If you think the United States House of Representatives should cut funding to the UNFPA, then vote for that option on the YouCut web site, and urge everyone you know to do the same.”

Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek also encouraged people to vote in it.

“How many times have you been forwarded an email to vote on a meaningless opinion poll?” she asked. “Well, for once, here’s a poll that can really save the lives of preborn children. If you have friends who are solely fiscal conservatives, tell them that at $400 million, this choice will save taxpayers the most money of any of this week’s 3 options.

The YouCut web site talks about the history of UNFPA funding.

“In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan withheld all U.S. contributions to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) after determining that UNFPA participated in the support and co-management of China’s population control program,” it explains. “Under the Bush administration, the U.S. withheld funds for the UNFPA from America’s annual contributions to the United Nations due to UNFPA’s complicity in China’s one-child policy enforced through coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization, but the Obama administration and the 111th Congress resumed contributions to UNFPA.”

The budget House Republicans wanted sought to terminate UNFPA funding, which stood at $55 million in FY 2010. UNFPA funding was cut by $15 million, to $40 million in the final agreement over FY 2011 spending, but the remainder is sent to the pro-abortion agency.

After Obama restored the funding, Rep. Chris Smith tried to offer an amendment to revert the language back to the original ban on such funding, but House Democrats blocked him from doing so. Then, pro-life Sen. Roger Wicker offered a similar amendment but the Senate defeated it.

Republicans are opposed to funding coerced and sex-selection abortions in China. If Republicans can cut off the money to the United Nations, then maybe the coerced and sex-selection abortions in China will decrease. Regardless of that, we taxpayers can certainly use the money better on our own projects than the government of China can. For example, if I get my money back from the United Nations, I could give it to a crisis pregnancy center. Let me decide – it’s my money. I earned it.

Commentary

Sex-selection abortions and defending the unborn

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An article from the National Post.

Excerpt:

Plenty of studies show that many parents will choose abortion to avoid having a baby of the “wrong” sex. Most often, they preferentially abort girls, especially within cultures in which men are seen as more valuable.

[…]In order to support “a woman’s right to choose,” you have to believe that a fetus is not human in the moral sense. This judgment — or lack thereof — is encoded in Canadian law, which permits abortion for any reason, or no reason at all.

If you believe a fetus is not a human life, the fetus becomes no different from any other unwanted appendage on a woman’s body. There is no moral difference to removing it than there is to removing an unwanted mole, or an unsightly wart. It’s just a bunch of flesh, with no human soul or spirit to it, so what’s the difference?

Why, then, would abortion proponents object to women having abortions because they don’t like the sex of the fetus? If a fetus is not human, a woman has the right to abort it for whatever reason she chooses: because she doesn’t feel like going through the process; because it might interfere with her career plans; because she doesn’t like children in general; or because she loves Starbucks and someone told her she’d have to give up caffeine during the pregnancy. What, no latte?

Read the whole thing. When it comes to debating abortion, it never hurts to take your opponent off of their moral pedestal. They think that pro-lifers are anti-woman. It’s your job to show them how abortion hurts women the most. Bringing up the psychological effects of abortion on women doesn’t hurt either.