“Aborting baby girls proves Britain’s multiculturalism experiment has failed”, writes ex-Guardian writer Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:
“…there are those who so value sons over daughters that they pressurise the women in their communities to abort female foetuses. This grim practice is called sex-selective abortion, and while most might assume that it only happens in the likes of China and India, it is in fact taking place in Britain too, among both first and second-generation immigrants whose roots lie in the Indian subcontinent.
It is rarely spoken about, but has come to light of late after the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which provides abortions to more than 100,000 women across the UK annually, was criticised for suggesting that termination on the grounds of “foetal sex” was not illegal.
Official advice, however, begs to differ. “This Government’s position is unequivocal: sex-selective abortion is illegal in England and Wales and will not be tolerated,” the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said this week. “Sex is not a lawful ground for termination of pregnancy, and it is a criminal offence for any practitioner to carry out an abortion for that reason alone.”
Later in the article she gives her own view:
I may believe in a woman’s right to choose but this is not about choice. This is about maintaining “traditions” which dictate that sons are prized breadwinners and girls are to be married off.
I do not see any good reason for the scare quotes Suzanne Moore put around the word “tradition”. A tradition of which Suzanne Moore disapproves is still a tradition. Nor do I see any good reason for her saying “this is not about choice”. It quite obviously is about choice. Unlike Ms Moore, I am closer to being “pro-life” than “pro-choice”. Here’s an old post of mine that talks about that. I do not agree with the view that the question is simply one of a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body; there is another life involved. The exact weight to give the competing rights of the foetus depend on a lot of factors, primarily how developed – how far from being a clump of cells and how near to being unquestionably a baby – the foetus is, but also including other factors such as the risk to the mother and whether the foetus is developing normally. However if one grants that a woman’s right to choose abortion does override the foetus’s right to life in particular circumstances, then the nature of a right to do something is that the person with that right does not need the approval of others to do that thing.
Putting it another way, how can it be justified that a female foetus that is solemnly decreed not to have a right to life suddenly gains that right if the woman wants to abort because of sexist tradition? Does that still work if the foetus is male and the woman wants to abort it because she’s a radical feminist?
However if one grants that a woman’s right to choose abortion does override the foetus’s right to life in particular circumstances, then the nature of a right to do something is that the person with that right does not need the approval of others to do that thing.
I was with Natalie, logically, until the last sentence.
I don’t see why a right can’t be conditional on all sorts of things. It’s a conditional right. Maybe the condition is that the wee bairn is less than six months old (measuring from conception.) Maybe the condition is a payment of five thou to the doc. Maybe it’s consent from hubby. You can have a stock option giving you the right to buy some shares in your employer at such and such a price ….. so long as you’re still employed by the company.
Lee Moore, the factors such as age, consent of husband/partner and many other possible factors is what the part about “particular circumstances” was meant to say. Perhaps I did not phrase it well. I meant that it is absurd that the difference between a particular abortion in particular circumstances being justified and not being justified should hang on whether the woman is doing it out of a traditional preference for boys.
Aborting mainly female fetuses is just plain dumb. It gives an uneven divide between the sexes — too many men, not enough women. That means a lot of frustrated males, and who knows what frustrated males might do. It can make them awfully mean.
Of course for some populations, a surfeit of mean, frustrated males isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
Allow me to drone on a bit about the preference for sons.
Yer basic biological theory says that sexually differentiated creatures will evolve to make equal investments in male and female offspring (which is not necessarily quite the same as equal numbers of male and female offspring – eg if one type is cheaper to make than the other type.)
But with humans it pretty much does mean equal numbers.
However because male humans have greater variability in mating success than female humans, and because a male human’s mating chances are helped by his social status, whereas a female human’s are not, it would be rational to prefer sons if you are a parent of high social status, and daughters if you are of low social status. The equality between the sexes would therefore be an aggregate thing.
The abortion math would be tricky though, because aborting offspring writes off the investment to date; while saving the investment yet to come. The latter is probably more important as human offspring take a very long time to get through the production line and are very costly to produce as finished goods.
PS moral considerations contributed not a thing to this comment.
Although it’s framed as “a woman’s right to choose”, it’s a hell of a lot more common for men to pressure
women into getting abortions they don’t want than to keep babies they don’t want.
Moore is asserting that in most of these cases the women aren’t choosing to abort girls, they’re more or less forced to.
Ellen, I agree that the results of a surplus of males will probably be as you say. It’s a bad tradition and I’d be quite happy with it being opposed by such means as a campaign of public services adverts on TV and posters in doctors’ waiting rooms. What I cannot explain is why those who passionately support a woman’s right to abortion as her individual human right then say it can be overridden by social engineering considerations.
Yes – logically if it is O.K. to get rid of babies, then it is O.K. to get rid of babies because-they-are-girls. Either before or AFTER birth (remember the American Democrats are quite happy with getting rid of babies after birth – not “just” before).
However it is NOT O.K. to get rid of babies.
The Soviet Union was the first power in modern times to legalize abortion – but Stalin decided it was going too far.
The policy was too extreme even for Joseph Stalin. Someone tell the pathetic Mr Putin that – as abortion proceeds apace in his “Holy Mother Russia”.
By the way – this is nothing much to do with religion, as the Scholastic philosophers pointed out – natural law (moral good and moral evil) is the law of God, BUT if God did not exist the moral law would be EXACTLY THE SAME.
In my youth the most famous atheist was Christopher Hitchens – he was also pro life.
As for the British state – during the Covid lockdowns it did not bother with cancer (it still does not bother – when I went for my prostrate exam I was told “don’t you know there is a strike on?”) – but abortion was declared “essential medical care” and this chopping up of babies was to continue regardless of the Covid lockdown.
This shows all that needs to be known about the British state.