Do people have a right to sex-selective abortion?

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http://newint.org/features/2013/10/01/g ... YCiRD.dpuf

It seems kind of ironic that feminists are so unilaterally in favor of abortion when so many females are missing because of it.

A living human is more important than a zygote. That's all there is to it.

The way to end sex-selective abortion isn't to prohibit it, but to make parents feel less like giving birth to a girl is the social and financial equivalent of giving birth to a child with some horrible birth defect: shameful for the parents, and nothing but a financial drag. When women are valued as human beings, and not as a punishment on the parents, and when they don't have to pay dowries to have their daughters married off, when their children will not suffer for their entire lives merely for having been born girls, and when daughters are allowed to remain part of their parents' families as well as their inlaws' families, then there will be less sex-selective abortion.

It's practically unheard of in Western countries, but very common in very patriarchal ones.

I think we should ban abortion for sex and race selection. Canada, the UK, France and Germany have done so.

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2ch ... _blog.html)

@LKL

Even if we accept that the two lives are not equal, it is not a question of lives but clearly one of personal preference and prejudice, which, at least in my view, should never be grounds for termination.

@91 - personally, I think it's foul too. But I don't think that I have a right to tell any woman whether she should, or should not, give up her body for 9 months to any given zef. Furthermore, I think that I probably can't quite comprehend the suffering and stress that women in these countries must go through to make them choose such a thing relatively late in a pregnancy (gender can't be determined for a while).

Perhaps you need to reason outside your view to find the solution to the problem? I understand why you hold to the values you do and can respect that. However, those states where sex-selective abortion is illegal are far better places for women to live than where it is legal and practiced. The amount of pressure on a women to abort could be taken off of the table or minimalized through legislation. This could be one area where our two sets of values overlap rather than collide.

Huh? Western countries aren't "very patriarchal?"

That would make for an interesting Supreme Court case, if it got that far. I think that our laws do not recognize a fetus as a person, and the Supremes would shoot it down.

The "right" to abortion in the US was made up in 1973 by activist judges.

Yes; and as long as women have the right to abortions on demand, they will be aborting their unborn babies for whatever reasons they choose (by definition), and this includes the child being of the "wrong" gender.

I was gonna say yes but now I am thinking maybe not. They should not be allowed to abort based on gender alone. That's just messing with stuff too much. It would be effective birth control though if many female embryos were aborted, men would have no one to reproduce with.

Most men wanna have a female to copulate with so it would be disastrous if abortions were allowed on gender alone especially for the men.

So how exactly would that work? Like Fnord said, a woman can simply give another reason than sex selection.

I assume they are talking about China, they should outlaw sex abortions IMO. There are fewer and fewer girls being born and that is going to make it harder for guys to get a girl to mate and pass their family on. Families will die off due to lack of females.

There are other methods of gender selection

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_selection

but maybe aborting or abandoning the unwanted gender is more cost-effective.

They are moderately patriarchal to minimaly patriarchal to matriarchal (Sweeden), depending on the country. While I do have problems with a lot of things in the US, I am well aware that my life is far better here than it would have been if I had been born in India or China.

Sex-selective abortion is technically illegal in India, to the degree that ultrasound techs aren't permitted to tell parents the gender of their fetus - but they often slip hints ('Oh, you're going to have to buy lots of little saris,') or leave the room and let the parents see the display screens. The women in these countries often don't need external pressure to abort female fetuses - they look at the suffering in their own lives, and would rather not inflict it on their offspring. Some of these women literally feel that they would have been better off dead - I've read interviews where they say this - and that being female amounts to a horrible birth defect that only causes suffering in the child.
http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/so ... heir-names
In some parts of the world, female infanticide or abandonment is the alternative to female abortions.
http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE-U_Pq8 ... C3&index=1