Do people have a right to sex-selective abortion?

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And other things too, if the tests become more specific, like hair and eye color, various genes.

You are incorrect regarding Canada. Canada has no laws at the federal level regarding abortion, and the only relevant laws at the provincial level concern payment for abortion services. There are limitations on access (for example neither PEI nor Nunavut have any clinics that perform abortions, for example), but there is nothing that prohibits abortions for the purposes of sex selection.

I take the view that if we truly believe that a woman has the right to exercise control over her reproductive system, then it is hypocritical to inquire into her motivation for the exercise of that right. It is one of those uncomfortable realities of living in a pluralistic society with Rule of Law--sometimes people are going to do things that you don't approve of.

Maybe we just have to be grown up enough to accept that.

Why would somebody abort over race? If you don't want to have a baby with someone from a certain race, don't have sex with anyone from that race.

One can just as easily say if you don't want to be pregnant then don't have unprotected sex.

Fair point.




Maybe we played with fire. The whole idea was this was supposed to empower women but in the a significant proportion of the world, it has let to an attack on their gender.

the right to abortion has not 'led to' an attack on the female gender; sex-selective abortion is just one more example of a long-standing prejudice.

So the left has not been promoting the carte blanche expansion of access to abortion throughout the world?

two different topics: one, has abortion caused an attack on females? two, has abortion access been expanding? The answer to the first is no; the answer to the second is yes.

Not really. The left has been advocating for access to abortion at a full throttle pace. The idea that this is not somehow connected with increased aborting of girls in the developing world is nonsense. I am open to arguments that treat negative effects seriously (you could even argue that on balance they are positive) but not to those that say there has been no downside or that they are not connected.

Of course the availability of abortion is connected to the abortion of female fetuses. That's not what I'm arguing against. I'm arguing agains the claim that abortion has caused a war against females.

Its obviously a causal variable in the gender divides we see in China, India and the Caucasus. Without such a massive expansion of accessibility of those services then it would not have occurred. Liberals poured in the services as if they were an independent variable for change but then they were assimilated into existing cultural attitudes in a way that was not expected. When an institutional program fails, the only answer offered by insiders is always, more of the same. Those who urged caution were shouted down, called stupid and patriarchal, now the very thing that liberals hoped to change has been made stronger by the effort. Its ok, you obviously knew better then and still know better now.

What she's saying is that while the availability of abortion may have allowed them to make sex-selective abortions, it is not abortion itself that is responsible them. Rather, it's the culture in response to the population control policies and availability of abortion that's the problem here. Therefore, it is the culture that must be changed to solve the problem, not making abortion illegal.

I don't see that as a tenable answer. It is access to abortion in these areas, combined with those attitudes that has allowed this to happen. We know that abortion has made the matter worse, because we can see the population statistics. Those attitudes existed before abortion was introduced and while women suffered in many of those cultures, they were allowed to be born and were raised. Now we have seen a technology digested by those attitudes and promoted by a culture that sees access to abortion synonymous with women's rights turned into demographic nightmare for women. We are now looking down the barrel of a massive increase in human trafficking as these places becomes black holes that will drag, women who live today into them because the men who live there will want wives. The independent variable is abortion, not the attitudes, therefor it stands to reason that we should be considering restrictions so as to lessen the impact.

For myself, I do not accept that action will accomplish nothing. That being said, we can now see that the idea that access to abortion would lead to a feminist nirvana in the third world has turned out to be totally bunk. So far, nobody who has posted here in defence of the status-quo legal framework has acknowledged that that argument has failed. The immediate reaction has been to circle the wagons in fear of losing ground elsewhere, a textbook case of adverse selection, from people who get to chose to be silent and have the most to benefit from not having motive enter into the equation. But those who have been shouted down on this subject previously, who warned of danger and urged caution. Who were told to shut up and called misogynists for even having an opinion, have not forgotten. The same tactics won't work here. What does it say for your side when it is the one's you insulted who are the only ones making the argument that women have the right to life? The silence of the left on this issue is deafening, it is the conversation they don't want to have, but make no mistake, its coming. Look at the polls, in Canada upwards of 90% of people support a ban. As this issue gets going, when the conservative professors do their research (because lets face it, the left wing ones won't) and it turns out that the cultural trend does not stop at our borders, you won't hold. This is an issue we are going to win on.

But of the two, I believe that it is the lesser harm.

I disagree. Abortion hasn't made the problem worse, it's brought the full extent of the problem to light. It might actually, over time, make the problem better if people are forced by simple supply and demand to value women a little more.


And they suffered so much that many of them kill themselves. I don't see abortion as a greater evil when the lives involved are that miserable.

It's a demographic nightmare for men more than it is for women. Women all over the area are finding themselves more able to pick and choose their husbands because men from outside their native countries are also looking for brides, which means that they can marry up and help to support their families in ways that they never could before. There is some human trafficking, yes, but I think it's far out-weighed by the mobility of the women themselves.


"feminist nirvana"? Who ever said that?
And the reason that we don't acknowledge that claim is because we don't agree with it.


Where did anyone insult you?
Also, zefs are neither men nor women. They're not even boys or girls.


*shrug*
It's not statistically an issue in the US, at least, so it's not going to negatively impact more than a handful of people here.

what about chromosomial abnormalities and genetic deseases that are gender specific and carried on the Y chromosome. Should these parents not be able to have their child tested to wipe out the disease?