Using Abortion for Gender-Selection.

In a post this past Wednesday, [Raising Some Questions Pro-Aborts Don't Want to Face ] blogger Al Troupe linked to an opinion piece from Canadian National Post.com concerning the ethical problem of using ultrasound technology and abortion-on-demand to determine who is chosen to live or die based strictly upon gender.

Wanting to know more on the subject, I searched the Internet and found an article on economist.com entitled Gendercide: The worldwide war on baby girls, which documents the practice in China, India and other Asian countries, of families aborting female fetuses in order to have the culturally preferred male offspring.

The article says that the natural ratio (at birth) is between 103 and 106 boys born for every 100 girls. A wikipedia article gives the ratio as 105 boys for every 100 girls. The reason for this ratio (as given by the writer) is that boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls and the ratio is "nature's" way of compensating for the difference.

The article goes on to say that, in China,
"According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention."
In Beijing municipality the ratio is 275 boys per 100 girls.

The increase in the boy to girl ratio comes from an increase in the use of ultrasound to determine the gender and using abortion to select males over females.

As disgusting as this is, there is one, so-called "bioethicist" who is OK with this. In an Opposing Views article, Jacob Appel writes,
"If abortion is not a moral wrong, and I am among those who believe that it is not, then aborting an unwanted child for any reason—even to produce an infant of the opposite gender—is desirable" and "Gender selection, if used wisely, offers yet another opportunity to increase individual autonomy and familial happiness."

Although Appel is in favor of a woman's right to abort for gender-selection, he finds a problem with the fact that in many cultures and nations the process still favors males. He doesn't explain why that is a problem for him. He goes on to suggest that, rather than outlaw gender-selection abortions, countries should pay “girl-subsidies” in annual installments to counteract the economic advantage of having boys. It seems logical to me that the result of this sort of "girl-subsidy" might be the increase of using gender-selection abortions to abort more boys. There are probably some who would be fine with that.

This is the logical conclusion of the "pro-choice" abortion-on-demand point of view. The idea that abortions should be "safe, legal and rare” is a lie from the start. Pro-abortion advocates, like Appel, believe "abortions should be as frequent or as infrequent as are unwanted pregnancies". ( In one article, Appel writes that women should be proud of their decision to have an abortion - "I dream of the day when women are not afraid to walk the streets with pins reading, 'I had an abortion and it was the right decision,' and when station wagons bear bumper-stickers announcing, 'Thank me for having an abortion when I wasn’t ready to be a parent.'")

Abortion harms women. The idea that abortion empowers women and gives them more freedom is a lie. Now we see that abortion harms unborn females even more than it harms unborn males.