‘Scarce and more valuable’ doesn’t necessarily equate to ‘better treated’. It would equate to ‘better treated’ if we lived in a society where female mating choices were free and unfettered, but unfortunately that’s not always the case everywhere in the world. Male competition over women could take the form of competing to be a better provider, etc. or it could take the form of trying to control women’s sexual behavior even more tightly.
It was 936 women per 1000 in Muslims and 931 per 1000 in Hindus in the 2001 census. (cite- http://censusindia.gov.in/Ad_Campaign/drop_in_articles/04-Distribution_by_Religion.pdf)
936 seems to me to be as much of a problem as 931. The 2011 census results based on religion are not yet available as far as I know. If you’re aware of anything different, let me know. The National sample survey, which is less reliable in terms of levels of population estimates, but is reasonable in terms of trends, had this to say though
And if I’d been talking about better treatment, that would have been a valid point, but better treatment is a separate problem from sex ratio. Scarce and valuable will fix the sex ratio. I freely admit that better treatment will/may require more work that Indian society needs to be doing, and IMO, is doing.
In the UK I suspect the problem will correct by a mix of brides brought out from South Asia and single South Asian men marrying into the rest of the population. Of course the former just exports the problem back to South Asia. There may be problems caused by a surfeit of single young men but treatment of women in some South Asian cultures is already a problem. It’s not as if gender selective abortion is creating a problem in an otherwise good situation and if such abortion changes attitudes the fact that a few eggs get broken on the way to creating an omelette isn’t the end of the world.
But I think we have to reflect on the role the law plays in reinforcing or changing social attitudes. If we want to change attitudes to women, such that the desire to abort female children disappears, then an abortion law which permits sex-selective abortion is sending the wrong signal, no?
A law which does not permit sex-selective abortion might be difficult to enforce in practice, but it may still have a role to play in shaping community attitudes.
The signal that a woman has bodily autonomy and cannot be forced to continue a pregnancy just because other people don’t like her reasons?
I’m suggesting, Manda, that the mere fact that the criminal law does not restrict abortions does not mean that every abortion is the result of an autonomous choice. At the most it means that it could be the result of an autonomous choice; it certainly doesn’t mean that it is.
And, while there’s undoubtedly a value in preserving a space in which autonomous choice is possible, honesty compels us to recognise that doing so also preserves a space in which choice may be constrained. That creates an ethical tension which makes absolutist positions look simplistic.
We should also acknowledge that, by and large, we don’t accord women absolute freedom of choice in this matter. Even those who identify as pro-choice don’t, typically, favour free choice in late pregnancy. Look at John Mace, for example, in post #31. Or look at the UK law under discussion; the certificate-based abortion is only available up to 24 weeks. Thus it’s simply not true that a woman’s right to choose trumps all other considerations; there are clearly other considerations at work here, trumping her right to choose.
Realistically, a woman’s choice about abortion does have implications not just for her and (contentiously) for the child she is carrying, but also for society at large. And sex-selective abortion strikes me in particular as a practice which does have implications for the status and treatment of women in society - women other than the woman who is faced with the abortion decision. There’s a difficult tension there, but at the very least it’s not obvious that the woman’s right to choose must trump all countervailing considerations - especially when it remains to be demonstrated that the woman’s decision will in fact be an autonomous and unconstrained choice. An abortion regime which seeks to reconcile both a woman’s right to privacy and autonomy and society’s interest in protecting the status and treatment of woman looks to me like a more reasonable proposition than a dogmatic one which treats one of these values as absolute and ignores the other entirely.
I have so reflected and my conclusion is that the law plays little role in reinforcing or changing social attitudes. The more so in sub-cultures that don’t necessarily see themselves as being part of the greater culture that imposes the laws.
Further, it’s not apparent you have thought your position through, based on logic and history: for hundreds if not thousands of years South Asians have had the attitudes they have had towards the relative prestige and worth of boys and girls. During essentially all that time they were unable to affect whether they had male or female babies.
Making sex-selective abortion illegal just sends the message that it is wrong to affect whether you have a male or female baby. It doesn’t send any message about the underlying attitude.
Further, such a law - if effectively enforced - would simply put South Asians who would prefer to have a male rather than a female baby in exactly the same position they were in before it was medically possible to affect the issue. That is, they would be in exactly the same position as they were in when the cultural attitude they have towards female babies developed and flourished. So why would that law change anything?
Well, I think there’s a difference between not being able to abort your female child because you don’t know she’s female, and not being able to abort your female child because you live in a society which considers this unconscionable. The latter experience may cause you to reevaluate your attitudes and values in a way that the former won’t.
As for “sub-cultures that don’t necessarily see themselves as being part of the greater culture” you have a point, of course. But there is long experience of such sub-cultures being absorbed into mainstream culture, and there may still be a value in mainstream culture signalling that sex-selective abortion is viewed as abhorrent (assuming, of course, that mainstream culture does view it as abhorrent).
I, for one, am fully supportive of a woman’s right to choose, but I feel uncomfortable at the thought of sex selected abortion not because of any life-terminating superstition, but because it allows backwards misogyny to proliferate unopposed. I care about actual, living human beings. Having a world where there gender ratio is skewed because people view them as more valuable harms these human beings, so that’s the gist of my opposition for it. However, I’m not uncomfortable enough to put any restrictions on abortion as I feel legal abortion has the moral high ground
bldysabba: thanks for the correction re: Muslims.
How about we focus on integrating South Asian immigrants into English society, and ensuring they assimilate to English values, so that practices like this stop?
South Asian immigrants in England exist surrounded by a larger culture, so the problem seems like it would be ‘fixable’ to a greater degree than it would be in, say, Punjab.
Dunno about that. Immigrant pools quite often tend to be more rigid in some aspects of culture than their home country. They sort of get fixed in the time that they immigrated, while the home culture continues to evolve. In Punjabis at least, I know this for a fact. Punjabis in the UK, where the bulk of immigration happened in the 60’s and 70’s speak in dialects that can only really be understood well by older Punjabis back home, where Punjabi and Hindi have mixed more. They often tend to be more conservative than urban Indian Punjabis, because they’re trying to hew to the cultural standards that existed when they immigrated, while the home culture is modernising fast. Both Punjab and Haryana(in India) for instance have demonstrated improvements in the child sex ratio in the last 10 years. It’s still really bad, but at least it’s getting better.
So the immigrant issue would only be ‘fixable’ by the larger culture if there is something about the larger culture that is causing this rigidity. If the problem springs from the immigrant groups themselves, then attempts to address it from the outside may be ineffective or end up causing other problems while solving nothing.
Sure, but integrating immigrants is a process that happens slowly and organically and attempts to force it usually don’t work or backfire. People cleave to their cultural values very tightly. You sound like a person with very strongly held values. Would your values quickly change to, say, pro-abortion values if you moved to a culture where those attitudes were commonplace and the laws encouraged the use of abortion where convenient? No, I didn’t think so.
And to echo what bldysabba said, immigrant enclaves can be very resistant to change. I had a South Asian girlfriend a very long time ago. She always used to complain that her parents imposed sexual mores on her that were way tighter than those imposed by her aunts and uncles on her cousins back in her parents’ home country. She used to say that her parents sexual morality was not reflective of her parents’ home country morality, it was reflective of her parents’ home country morality of the fifties, when they left.