In the United States, we often hear that those who are in favor of access to abortion want to make abortions safe, legal, and rare. There are some who even try to promote it as a fundamental women’s right, despite the wide body of evidence suggesting that most abortions are coerced and that abortion itself results in great harm to women.
Yet, in some countries, there is no such attempt to justify abortion in this manner. For example, individuals in some countries outright admit that they use abortion to manage the population or skew the natural gender ratio.
Tens of millions of children, mostly girls, have been aborted only because of their gender [1]. This is especially rampant in Asian countries. However, this practice is by no means limited to Asia.
In fact, sex-selective abortion has now made its way to the United States.
American women are now able to use an ultrasound to determine the gender of their babies, and then decide whether or not to abort them.
This can be done at approximately eighteen weeks into the pregnancy.
In societies where family sizes are limited, parents are more likely to choose to keep male children who will carry on the family name and have greater capacity to make money.
Far from leading to the empowerment of women, using abortion as a means to eliminate female children is perhaps the worst form of misogyny possible.
In spite of this bad news, there are some positive developments that have been taking place. For example, India has already taken the lead in eliminating sex-selective abortions, but not before nearly ten million lives were lost to it [2].
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References
[1] Mosher, Steven. (2008). “Sex Selective Abortion Comes To America.” LifeSiteNews http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/2008/apr/08041510z
[2] BBC News. (2006). “India Loses 10m Female Births.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4592890.stm
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Image from www.baby-pictures.org
