The results of sex selection are already becoming evident.
Almost 5 years ago, the New York Times reported that the old dowry and caste systems (both of which have been on the wane for some time) in India were collapsing, in large part because the ratio of males to females meant males could not be so choosy when it came to brides.
According to the Times, a Brahmin family that would once have insisted on a Brahmin bride for their eldest son is now happy to settle for a girl from a “lower” caste, because there just aren’t enough girls out there. And the girls know it. Hence, an Indian girl can and will hold out for the richest men available.
Both India and China are experiencing a lopsided male/female ratio, and that’s dangerous. What could be worse for the stability of any society than tens of millions of young, poor males who have no hope whatever of finding wives?
Let’s ponder a western analogue of this situation.
An American woman is pregnant and discovers that her child-to-be, if carried to term, would be born with, say, Down Syndrome. Clearly, raising a child with Down Syndrome would be much more of a hardship than raising a child born healthy; furthermore, it isn’t the kind of parenthood she signed up for. Not to mention that it isn’t a picnic going through life with Down Syndrome. Is this woman justified in aborting this pregnancy and trying for a healthy child?
There’s no such thing as a perfect analogy, but that one is pretty flawed. (It brings to mind the Mr. Show gag with the band of disabled people. Sarah Silverman: “And I’m a woman!”) Why bother with it, though? Why not ask the same question: can a Western woman also select for gender via abortion? Being a woman is hard all over. It’s a lot harder in some places than others, and those places need our attention first, but an argument against XX can be made everywhere.
I guess you’re implying relativism, and I do grasp the reasons why women do this. I still don’t see how flooding market wouldn’t result in what seems like the ultimate goal, which is not for women to be able to be picky while they’re stuck in the whole dowry trip, but for women to be considered “worth” the same amount economically, socially, and culturally as men. Aggravating their social burdens and increasing their rarity and other-ness just doesn’t strike me as the best way to achieve this.
But what I want to establish first is that this practice is not an absolute wrong. I should be clear that I’m undecided myself, that’s why I’m here. So, if it is okay for Indian women, would it be okay for American women in the same numbers? Is any motivation acceptable?
I participated in a thread on the issue of two deaf lesbians using a deaf donor whose children they knew would probably be deaf in order to have what they wanted, a deaf child. Almost every single person in the thread disagreed with me, in varying degrees of heatedness, that if a straight couple had the right to have a baby they knew would be deaf, then so did these women. In this thread, it seems that people think not only do the couple has that right, they also have the right to abort any fetus that isn’t deaf.
So I’m a little confused about the moral compass on this one. Like I said, I’m personally undecided, though I do have some biases, so I appreciate hearing the arguments and ideas from all sides.
The analogy doesn’t work. Deafness and Down’s syndrome are both defects. Being female is not. There’s also the fact that you’re basically betraying your male children, by creating a situation where having a normal relationship is going to be difficult or impossible.
Yes, but this is assuming the women involved are willingly making the choice to abort female children, when I think it is highly likely that in many cases if it isn’t an outright matter of force then it is certainly a matter of the woman feeling such extreme societal pressure she feels she has no choice. So this could be tantamount to an ultimate violation of a woman’s reproductive rights.
Women may increase in value but that doesn’t mean their rights will increase, it could even lead to a decrease in their rights as, due to their limited nature, they are more “protected” and not allowed to do as many things as they were before.
This subject has little to do with technology or political rights. This kind of cycle has come and gone many times in human societies. When a society gets overpopulated, it, through individual action, finds a way to decrease the number of women, which is the sole factor in societal fertility. And, to me, it is much better that this happen through abortion than through infanticide. Given enough time, the value of women is going to increase quite a bit.
Hijack:
U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) doesn’t think so. At the Alito hearing yesterday, he bemoaned the loss of a generation of Down’s children.
It’s my understanding that the mothers are frequently forced into abortions (and the preceding illegal ultrasounds) by their husbands or in-laws. That doesn’t strike me as women exercising reproductive rights.
It’s just too complex and sad to really tackle on a message board, for me at any rate.
If the scarcity of girls in India is giving them more choices, then maybe someday this trend can be reversed. But I’m not hopeful for that in China, where I understand girls are often kidnapped and forced into marriage because of their scarcity. In China, it hasn’t had good effects as far as I can see, and I do worry about the overflow of young, angry men unable to find wives.
(FTR, I don’t approve of Down’s syndrome abortions either. But that’s more personal.)
Eugenic abortion replaces old-fashioned eugenics, just as sex selection abortion takes the place of female infanticide. All sorts of evil can be covered up when masked by “choice”.
I said before, the difference is only in the timing. We have no problem condemning infanticide and eugenics as objectively evil, yet when they take place in the form of an abortion, some folks get squishy on the subject.
And they can be so coerced because of their powerlessness in society. Maybe when women are scarce, they’ll be able to wield more equitable societal power and be able to institutionalise a more equal system through law.
When a lunch counter refuses to serve a customer because they are a jerk, or a college refuses to let an applicant enter because they are unqualified, most of us see no moral problems. However, if the criteria for such refusals are racially based, the story changes drastically.
Even if some people support abortion, I don’t think there’s any question that that action can be put to evil purposes, just as neutral actions like those above can be similarly twisted.
Yet some who support it support it all of the time, apparantly.
Women should not be forced to bear children they do not want. It doesn’t matter to me why they don’t want the child, they shouldn’t be forced to bear it. There’s nothing squishy about that.
Infanticide can’t take place in the form of an abortion. There’s nothing squishy about that, either.
Just to be clear, I think it’s wrong to abort based merely on its sex. The question is how do you go about stopping such a practice? I think it’s fine that ultrasounds are illegal in India; that seems to me to be a reasonable step to take. What other steps do you take?
What can you ultimately do when in fact abortion is not the root problem, but rather the the problem is the inequitable position of women in society? How do you force that to change? If nothing else, it seems to me a fortunate probability that the solution to this problem might be self-actuated.
And to put my two cents in on the other question, I don’t think it’s wrong to abort upon a finding of Down’s syndrome or some other serious developmental disorder. I don’t know what I would do if I were in such a situation, but I wouldn’t consider it immoral or evil for someone else to do it.
Can we stop talking about “value”? It all sounds very much like “life is cheap in Mexico.” Women have different societal roles in India, and get the short end of the stick in a lot of cases. But India doesn’t assign “worth” to people and if they did they wouldn’t assign less to women. We are making this in to a case of “the inscrutiable orientals” when so often in fact city life in India most strongly resembles life in the 1950’s US.
Women are forced in to abortions no more and no less then they are here. Theres no women crying “my baaaaybbbbbyyyyyy.” Theres no “not without my daughter” scenerios. There is an unfortunate decision to be made about the economic health of the whole family. Having a girl is like getting yourself in to a mortgage. It’s something not everyone can do once and almost nobody can do twice. Women know this as well as men.
Infant/fetus sex selection is as old as time itself. So is an imbalanced sex ratio- when sex selection didn’t do it, polygymy did. As acsenray said, it is one of a societies best ways to control the birth rate. Which is something that desperately needs to happen.
Things change, imbalances will even out. The Indian population is in no danger any time soon. The huge percentage of Indian men working overseas (not just in America) helps things. In Rajasthan, not a place anyone would ever call “progressive” therea are villages where couples are cohabitating because tey can’t afford the expense of marriage. A wider selection of men may help ease the “feminization of poverty” (something I’ll point out happens here, too) as women struggle to raise kids while their husbands spend their nights in feni joints. When resources free up and old attitudes (dowries) become unsustainable, things will even out.
Ah, but there is the rub. I think this is arguably the situation for many women who have abortions, everywhere in the world. Their own desire to have a baby is so heavily affected by things like social pressures and financial realities that a true “choice” (in the sense of being a choice between reasonably equivalent options) is impossible.
Exercising a “choice” to have a baby at 15 probably means dropping out of school to look after it, enduring society’s disapproval as a teenage mom/welfare queen/what have you, bringing the kid up in poverty, profoundly re-evaluating your own life goals, etc. Even if she really wants a baby, her “choice” is kind of forced because in her situation (whether as a teenage mum in America, or a mother of a girl in India) to go through with it would be intolerable.
Germaine Greer (with whom I disagree about many things, but she’s spot-on with this one) argued that this is not much of a choice at all.
Rights are tested at the extremes. Do I like it that women are choosing to abort fetuses with Downs Syndrome, or with two X chromosomes? No, not at all, and we should definitely work to make their circumstances such that they might make different choices. But since I hold women’s rights to choose abortion to be absolute, then it’s something I have to accept.
(Just as Rousseau may not like what we have to say, but will defend our right to say it. Same idea.)
Why do you hold it to be an absolute right? It is a safe bet that you don’t regard other rights as absolutes. Freedom of speech necessarily has some restrictions, as does freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to keep arms, the right to a home secure from unreasonable search, and so on.
I’d like you to justify why this right must necessarily be unrestricted, especially in light of these apparant abuses of it.
Well I think we’re talking about something different, here. And I didn’t exactly clarify.
When I say “force” or “societal pressure” I mean that I think it’s highly possible or even probable that there are women who are aborting female fetuses under extreme duress. As in if she says “no” the man in her life will “change her mind” by beating her until she says yes.
That’s like saying a woman’s right to have sexual relationships means that it’s okay for someone to beat her to coerce her into having sex.
I guess the ultimate point I’m trying to make is that it isn’t the exercise of a freedom if you’re only doing it because you’re under extreme duress (threat of violence, threat of being thrown out on the streets and starving, threat of losing your curren children et cetera.)
Well abortion, luckily, is not an absolute right in the United States. The State can step in at viability because at that point the woman’s right to privacy and ability to make medical decisions doesn’t innately giver her the right to destroy something that could be removed from her and survive on its own. That’s the reasoning put forth in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Agreed. And if the state can do this, then what about other circumstances where the state sees an action unduly harming a group that receives protection in other areas of the law?
I think it has been shown that, while a legal definition of personhood does not attach to the unborn, they neverless have some legal protections due them under the decisions you mentioned. And if abortions are directed at a certain class of the unborn because of certain traits they hold, doesn’t this raise issues of discrimination we find otherwise repugnant in society?